“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you believe otherwise, then you are limited; your environment then represents the sum total of knowledge and experience. As long as you believe your environment to be objective and independent of yourself, then to a large extent you feel powerless to change it, to see beyond it, or to imagine other alternatives that may be less apparent. Later in the book I will explain various methods that will allow you to change your environment beneficially and drastically.

(9:23. Note the semicolon in the first sentence of the above paragraph. Seth requested that I punctuate the sentence just that way. He made such requests often while dictating this book.)

(9:35.) Like a true absent-minded professor, the conscious self forgets all this, however, so when tragedy appears in the script, difficulty or challenges, the conscious self looks for someone or something to blame. Before this book is done I hope to show you precisely how you create each minute of your experience so that you can begin to exert your true creative responsibility on a conscious level — or nearly so.

As you read this book, now and then look about you at the room in which you sit. Chairs and tables, the ceilings and the floors, may seem very real and solid — quite permanent — while you by contrast may feel yourself to be highly vulnerable, caught in a moment between birth and extinction. You may even feel jealous when you think of it, imagining that the physical universe will continue to exist long after you are gone. By the end of our book, however, I hope you will realize the eternal validity of your own consciousness, and the impermanence of those physical aspects of your environment, and of your universe, that now seem so secure. Do you have that?

(Long pause at 11:01.) You have heard the expression before, I am sure, that the environment expresses a particular individual’s personality. I am telling you that this is a literal and not symbolic truth. The letters upon the page have the reality only of ink and paper. The information they convey is invisible. As an object, this book itself is only paper and ink. It is a carrier of information.

You may perhaps argue that the book was manufactured physically, and did not suddenly erupt through Ruburt’s skull, already printed and bound. You in turn had to borrow or purchase the book, so you may think, “Surely, I did not create the book, as I created my words.” But before we are finished we will see that basically speaking, each of you create the book you hold in your hands, and that your entire physical environment comes as naturally out of your inner mind as words come out of your mouths, and that man forms physical objects as unselfconsciously and as automatically as he forms his own breath.