“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.

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?

Now in the same way, I am telling you that objects are also symbols that stand for a reality whose meaning the objects, like the letters, transmit. The true information is not in the objects any more than the thought is in the letters or in words. Words are methods of expression. So are physical objects in a different kind of medium. You are used to the idea that you express yourselves directly through words. You can hear yourself speak them. You can feel the muscles in your throat move, and if you are aware, you can perceive multitudinous reactions within your own body — actions that all accompany your speech.

The familiarity of speech begins to vanish when you realize that you, yourself, when you begin a sentence do not know precisely how you will end it, or even how you form the words. You do not consciously know how you manipulate a staggering pyramid of symbols, picking from them precisely those you need to express a given thought. For that matter, you do not know how you think.