“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The soul perceives all experience directly. Most experiences of which you are aware come packaged in physical wrapping, and you take the wrapping for the experience itself, and do not think of looking inside. The world that you know is one of the infinite materializations taken by consciousness, and as such it is valid.

The soul, however, does not need to follow the laws and principles that are a part of the physical reality, and it does not depend upon physical perception. The soul’s perceptions are of acts and events that are mental, that lie, so to speak, beneath physical events as you know them. The soul’s perceptions are not dependent upon time, because time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality.

Now it is difficult to explain to you how direct experience actually works, for it exists — a total field of perception, innocent of the physical clues such as color, size, weight, and sense, with which your physical perceptions are clothed.

(9:19.) Words are used to tell of an experience, but they obviously are not the experience that they attempt to describe. Your physical subjective experience is so involved with word thinking, however, that it is almost impossible for you to conceive of an experience that is not thought-word oriented.

Now, each event of which you are aware is already a translation of an inner event, a psychic or mental event that is perceived by the soul directly, but translated by the physically oriented portions of the self into physical sense terms.

It goes without saying then that the soul does not require a physical body for purposes of perception; that perception is not dependent upon physical senses; that experience continues whether or not you are in this life or another; and also that the soul’s basic methods of perception are also operating within you now even as you read this book. It also follows that your experience within the physical system is dependent upon a physical form and physical senses — again, because these interpret reality and translate it into physical data. It also follows that some hints of the soul’s direct experience can be gained by momentarily switching the physical senses off — by refusing to use them as perceptors, and falling back upon other methods. Now you do this to some extent in the dream state, but even then in many dreams you still tend to translate experience into hallucinatory physical terms. Most of the dreams that you recall are of this nature.

At certain depths of sleep, however, the soul’s perception operates relatively unhampered. You drink, so to speak, from the pure well of perception. You communicate with the depths of your own being, and the source of your creativity. These experiences, not being translated physically, do not remain in the morning. You do not remember them as dreams. Dreams, however, may later the same evening be formed from the information gained during what I will call the “depth experience.” These will not be exact or near translations of the experience, but rather of the nature of dream parables — an entirely different thing, you see.

(9:35.) Now this particular level of consciousness, occurring in the sleep state, has not been pinpointed by your scientists. During it, energy is generated that makes the dream state itself possible. It is true that dreams allow the physically oriented self to digest current experience, but it is also true that the experience is then returned to its initial components. It breaks apart, so to speak. Portions of it are retained as “past” physical sense data, but the whole experience returns to its initial direct state.

It exists then, “eternally,” separated from the physical clothing that you need in order to understand it. Physical existence is one way in which the soul chooses to experience its own actuality. The soul, in other words, has created a world for you to inhabit, to change — a complete sphere of activity in which new developments and indeed new forms of consciousness can emerge.

Now your physical body is a field of energy with a certain form, however, and when someone asks you your name, your lips speak it — and yet the name does not belong to the atoms and molecules in the lips that utter the syllables. The name has meaning only to you. Within your body you cannot put your finger upon your own identity. If you could travel within your body, you could not find where your identity resides, yet you say, “This is my body,” and, “This is my name.”

(10:14.) If you cannot be found, even by yourself, within your body, then where is this identity of yours that claims to hold the cells and organs as its own? Your identity obviously has some connection with your body, since you have no trouble distinguishing your body from someone else’s, and you certainly have no trouble distinguishing between your body and the chair, say, upon which you may sit.

In a larger manner, the identity of the soul can be seen from the same viewpoint. It knows who it is, and is far more certain of its identity, indeed, than your physical self is of its identity. And yet now where in this electromagnetic energy field can the identity of the soul as such be found?

(Pause at 10:20.) Now in terms of psychology as you understand it, the soul could be considered as a prime identity that is in itself a gestalt of many other individual consciousnesses — an unlimited self that is yet able to express itself in many ways and forms and yet maintain its own identity, its own “I am-ness,” even while it is aware that its I am-ness may be part of another I am-ness. Now I am sure it may seem inconceivable to you, but the fact is that this I am-ness is retained even though it may, figuratively speaking, now merge with and travel through other such energy fields. There is, in other words, a give and take between souls or entities, and no end of possibilities, both of development and expansion. Again, the soul is not a closed system.

It is only because your present existence is so highly focused in one narrow area that you put such stern limits upon your definitions and the self, and then project these upon your concepts of the soul. You worry for your physical identity and limit the extent of your perceptions for fear you cannot handle more and retain your selfhood.

Now: I want to emphasize again that while all this sounds difficult in the telling, it becomes much more clear intuitively when you learn to experience what you are, for if you cannot travel inside your physical body to find your identity, you can travel through your psychological self.