“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:25.) Even the mortal self, you see, is far more miraculous and wondrous than you perceive, and possesses far more abilities than you ascribe to it. You do not understand as yet the true nature of perception, even as far as the mortal self is concerned, and therefore you can hardly understand the perceptions of the soul. For the soul, above all, perceives and creates. Remember again that you are a soul now. The soul within you, therefore, is now perceiving. Its methods of perception are the same now as they were before your physical birth, and as they will be after your physical death. So basically the inner portion of you, the soul-stuff, will not suddenly change its methods of perception nor its characteristics after physical death.

There is however an inner communication, and the knowledge of one is available to any — not after physical death, but now in your present moment. Now the soul itself, as mentioned earlier, is not static. It grows and develops even through the experience of those personalities that compose it, and it is, to put it as simply as possible, more than the sum of its parts.

There are many matters here very difficult to express in words, for you are so afraid for your sense of identity that you resist the idea that the soul, for example, is an open spiritual system, a powerhouse of creativity that shoots out in all directions — and yet this is indeed the case.

(10:02.) For now, here is one quite effective but simple exercise. Close your eyes after having read this chapter to this point, and try to sense within yourself the source of power from which your own breathing and life forces come. Some of you will do this successfully at your first try. Others may take longer. When you feel within yourself this source, then try to sense this power flow outward through your entire physical being, through the fingertips and toes, through the pores of your body, all directions, with yourself as center. Imagine the rays undiminished, reaching then through the foliage and clouds above, through the center of the earth below, extending even to the farthest reaches of the universe.

(10:10. Jane had been in a deep trance; her pace had been fast, with few pauses. Seth, she said, could have cheerfully continued unabated. He called a break only because I deliberately let my weary right hand flop down on the couch. Jane felt well. She had no sense of an hour’s having passed. Note the amount of material delivered.

Now these abilities operate whether you know it or not, but often they operate in spite of you rather than with your conscious cooperation; and often when you do find yourself using them, you become frightened, disoriented, or confused. No matter what you have been taught, you must understand, for example, that basically speaking, perceptions are not physical in the way the term is usually used. If you catch yourself perceiving information through other than your physical senses, then you must accept the fact that this is the way perception works.

What often happens is that your conception of reality is so limited that you take fright whenever you perceive any experience that does not fit into your conception. Now I am not speaking merely of abilities loosely called “extrasensory perception.” These experiences seem extraordinary to you only because you have for so long denied the existence of any perception that did not come through the physical senses.

So-called extrasensory perception gives you but a crude and distorted idea of the basic ways in which the inner self receives information, but the concepts built around extrasensory perception are at least nearer the truth, and as such represent an improvement over the idea that all perception is basically physical.

Now it is nearly impossible to separate a discussion of the nature of the soul from a discussion of the nature of perception. Very briefly let us review a few points: You form physical matter and the physical world that you know. The physical senses actually can be said to create the physical world, in that they force you to perceive an available field of energy in physical terms, and impose a highly specialized pattern upon this field of reality. Using the physical senses, you can perceive reality in no other way.

(10:44.) This physical perception in no way alters the native, basic, unfettered perception that is characteristic of the inner self, the inner self being the portion of the soul that is within you. The inner self knows its relationship with the soul. It is a portion of the self that acts, you might say, as a messenger between the soul and the present personality. You must also realize that while I use terms like “soul” or “entity,” “inner self,” and “present personality,” I do so only for the sake of convenience, for one is a part of the other; there is no point where one begins and another ends.

You seem to perceive exclusively through your physical senses, and yet you have only to extend your egotistical idea of reality, and you will find even your egotistical self accepting quite readily the existence of nonphysical information.