“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Though this thought-image usually is not seen by others, it is quite possible that in the future scientific instruments may perceive it. As it is, such an image may be perceived by those who have developed use of the inner senses. Any intense mental act — thought or emotion — will not only be constructed in some physical or pseudophysical manner, but will also bear to some extent the imprint of the personality who originally conceived it.

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.

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.

These projections, then, actually are sent out constantly. Some more sophisticated scientific instruments than you now have would clearly show not only the existence of these forms, but also vibrations in varying waves of intensity surrounding those physical objects that you do perceive.

(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.

(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.)

I mention this again in the middle of our present discussion so that you do not feel lost, or negated, or insignificant. There are obviously an infinite number of gradations in the types and kinds of forms of which we have been speaking. That energy which is projected from our “superself,” that spark of intense identity that resulted in your physical birth, that unique impetus, in the one way has many similarities to the old concept of the soul — except that it contains only a part of the story.

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.