“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It seems to you that you have only one form, the physical one that you perceive, and no other. It also seems that your form can only be in one place at one time. You have indeed other forms that you do not perceive, and you also create various kinds of forms for various purposes, although you do not perceive these physically either.

Your main sense of identity is involved with your physical body, so that it is, for example, extremely difficult for you to imagine yourself without it, or outside it, or in any way disconnected from it. Form is the result of concentrated energy, the pattern for it caused by vividly directed emotional or psychic idea images. The intensity is all important. If you have, for example, a highly vivid desire to be somewhere else, then without realizing it consciously a pseudophysical form, identical with your own, may appear in that very spot. The desire will carry the imprint of your personality and image, even though you remain unaware of the image or its appearance in the other location.

(9:30.) There are many such incipient or latent forms. To help you imagine what I am speaking of, you might think of them as ghost images, or shadow images, though this is only for the sake of analogy — forms, for example, just beneath, that have not emerged completely into physical reality as you know it, but are nevertheless vivid enough to be constructed. You would think them quite real indeed, if you could see them.

You may suddenly strongly wish that you were standing by a beloved but distant, familiar seashore, for example. This intense desire would then act something like a core of energy projected outward from your own mind, given a form, your form. The place that you had envisioned would then attract the form, and it would instantaneously stand there. This happens with great frequency.

It would not be seen under usual circumstances. On the other hand, if the desire were still more intense, the energy core would be greater, and a portion of your own flow of consciousness would be imparted to the form, so that for a moment you in your room might suddenly smell the salt air, or in some other way perceive the environment in which this pseudoimage stands.

(9:44.) The extent of perception will vary here to a great degree. To begin with, your physical form is the result of great emotional focus. The fantastic energy of your psyche not only created your physical body, but maintains it. It is not one continuous thing, although to you it seems permanent enough while it lasts. It is nevertheless in a constant state of pulsation, and because of the nature of energy and its construction, the body is actually blinking off and on.

Now: This is difficult to explain, and for our present purposes it is not entirely necessary that you understand the reasons for this pulsing; but even physically, you are “not here” as often as you are. Your emotional intensity and focus create forms beside your physical body, however their duration and degree are dependent upon the intensity of any given emotional origin.

Now anything that appears in physical terms also exists in other terms that you do not perceive. You only perceive realities when they achieve a certain “pitch,” when they seem to coalesce into matter. But they actually exist, and quite validly at other levels.

(10:02 to 10:20.) There are also realities (pause), that are “relatively more valid” than your own; in comparison, strictly for an analogy, for example, your physical table would appear as shadowy in contrast, as [like] those very shadowy tables we imagine. You would have a sort of “supertable” in those terms. Yours is not a system of reality formed by the most intense concentration of energy, therefore. It is simply the one you are tuned into, part and parcel of. You perceive it simply for this reason.

Other portions of yourself, therefore, of which you are not consciously aware, do inhabit what you could call a supersystem of reality in which consciousness learns to handle and perceive much stronger concentrations of energy, and to construct “forms” of a different nature indeed.

Your idea of space is then highly distorted, since space to you is simply where nothing is perceived. It is obviously filled with all kinds of phenomena (pause), that make no impression at all upon your perceptive mechanisms. Now in various ways and on occasion, you can tune into these other realities to some degree — and you do so spasmodically, though in many cases the experience is lost because it does not register physically.

(Pause at 10:30.) Think again about this form that you sent to the oceanside. Though it was not equipped with your own physical senses, it was of itself to some extent able to perceive. You projected it unknowingly, but through quite natural laws. The form built up from intense emotional desire. (Pause.) The image then follows its own laws of reality, and to some extent, and to a lesser degree than you, has a consciousness. (Pause.)

Now: You are, using an analogy again, sent out by a superself who strongly desired existence in physical form. You are no puppet of this superself. You will follow your own lines of development, and through means far too difficult to explain here, you add to the experience of the superself and also then extend the nature of its reality. You also insure your own development, and you are able to draw upon the abilities of the superself.

Nor will you ever be swallowed by the self that in these terms seems so superior. Because you exist, you send out like projections of your own, as mentioned earlier. There is no end to the reality of consciousness, nor the means of its materialization. Nor is there any end to the developments possible for each identity.

Now, through very intense emotional focus you can create a form, and project it to another person who may then perceive it. This may be done consciously or unconsciously; and that is rather important. This discussion does not concern the so-called astral form, which is something entirely different. The physical body is the materialization of the astral form.

(Long pause at 11:11.) In other levels of reality, the rules of the game change. After death in your terms, you are quite free perceptively. The future appears as clearly as the past. Even this is highly complicated, however, for there is not just one past. You accept as real only certain classifications of events and ignore others. We have mentioned events. There are also probable pasts therefore, that exist quite outside your comprehension. You choose one particular group of these, and latch upon this group of events as the only ones possible, not realizing that you have selected from an infinite variety of past events.