“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mental activity does demand more energy of one kind than does physical activity, and the reason here is a rather strange one, in that in many respects creative work demands the extra energy used in a sort of repression. The ideas, for example, are not directly carried out or fully constructed in a material way.

Now that you know something about the nature of matter, you will see that all matter is objectified mental action, and that basically such action happens simultaneously in the spacious present, formed by individualized energy through the formation of mental enclosures.

A tree reflected in the water is still the same tree, and unchanged as the mental act is unchanged. As the reflection of the tree, however, gives a waving and distorted appearance, so as the idea is projected into another field it also is seen in a distorted fashion.

The distorted reflection of the tree in no way changes the actual tree. The distortions that occur as a mental act appears in another field in no way changes the mental act.

This would happen as follows. The action, the mental action, constantly attempts to recreate itself. It recreates itself in the moment of its birth, with multitudinous slight variations and differentiations; and in so doing automatically plunges into, or projects itself into, those fields which attract the particular range of those differentials.

Yet these projections or reflections do not alter the fact, or change the basic nature of the so-called original mental act, and it remains as untouched by its own reflections as does the stationary tree remain independent from its reflections in the water.

I wanted to give you this material because it is basic for any comprehension of mental acts as they occur in the dream universe and the universe of matter. There will also be additional information concerning the concept of time, as the experience of time is strongly connected with the motion of mental acts, as they are projected outward from their center into the fields of various camouflage systems.

Time is merely the effect caused within a given system by the system itself, operating upon a mental action as the action enters within its framework.

Now. In much the same manner as these atoms behaved, so also do other units behave, including large ones such as various field universes. Remember, no systems are really closed, but only appear so. There is however a resistance about or around such units, large or small; and it is this resistance through which a mental action must appear, and within which the characteristics or camouflages of the units operate.

For all systems, so-called time is measured with the entrance or projection of any given mental action through this resistance barrier. The mental action projected must continue to project. When it passes completely through a system, then within the system it appears that the mental action has ceased to be, and again time is marked.