“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Tension is infinite. Your time system is indeed the result of tension as it is distorted within your own system, yet the distortion itself, as you see, creates a new reality. And that reality then continues to operate, forming like realities of the sort that can exist within the given conditions already set up by the original distortion.

Distortion, in this respect, has a different meaning than the sort of distortion arising from a misreading of information. Yet in some respects it is similar. An original action can never repeat itself in an identical fashion. Its attempts to do so, never successful, result in a kind of distortion, and this distortion then becomes the basis for a new reality.

The reality then tries to recreate itself in identical fashion, fails, and is again distorted into a further facet of basic reality. This holds true under all circumstances and under all conditions. Recall here the material concerning identities in general.

A very simple analogy will arise as an artist attempts faithfully to reproduce a landscape. The attempt is obviously doomed to failure, since the necessary actual perspectives in which the landscape exists are denied to him as working materials. He cannot create an actual reproduction of a living landscape.

Such a landscape would have to be composed of the actual elements that compose the original landscape. The artist would have to assemble mountains of rocks, an infinity, that is infinity of molecules, all equally impossible. The best he can do is create a distortion of the original landscape—a creation of an approximation that can comfortably exist within the limited perspectives with which he can work, and using the materials that are at his own command.

The painting that results is a new reality, but it is also a distortion of the original landscape. The artist may hint at time within his painting, but he cannot capture the physical eons that might be contained in the mountains themselves, which he wishes to reproduce.

However his painting contains new realities, and distinctive ones, that would be alien to the original landscape. The actual trees, had he really been able to reproduce them, would then undergo their seasonal changes. The trees in his painting, being artificial reproductions, do not undergo the same physical changes, even while the atoms and molecules that compose the canvas itself, and all the pigments, constantly themselves change.

The painting, therefore, is both a distortion of reality, and the creation of a new reality. Likewise all realities are formed.

Mankind is to some intimate degree acquainted with this attempt of action to recreate itself, for human reproduction is here a case in point, each individual attempting to create a replica, the attempt doomed to failure, but the attempt itself resulting in a distortion of the original action; that is, a distortion of the original individuals, and in the creation of a new reality, this process then being repeated indefinitely.

The thought received in telepathic communications will not, therefore, be the exact thought that was transmitted, but a close approximation, a creative distortion, actually created by the receiver. There are, as I mentioned, no duplication of identities.

Say for example that our individual “A” wanted to transmit this thought to “B”. The thought is as much a reality as the landscape. It is as much a part of individual “A” as the landscape is part of the physical earth. Our imaginary artist could not rip the landscape out of the earth, or bring it to his studio. He could not create an identical landscape because he did not have at his command the perspectives or materials necessary.

Likewise, our individual “A” cannot rip the thought out of the context of his own inner electrical system. He cannot send it to individual “B”. He can send an approximation of it, for the attempt to transmit the thought automatically changes the thought itself. He sends an approximation of the original thought, and this approximation is further changed by “B’s” action as he attempts to receive it. Have we this clear now?

In a like manner for example, the act of dreaming itself changes both the dreamer and the dream. The act of doing anything at all automatically changes the doer. The reality of any action automatically determines that the action will change.

The creative dilemma, the creative distortion, is of course itself an action that is resolved in further acts. These are basic principles concerning the nature of action, principles that are carried through within any system. They are valid therefore within your own system, within the electrical system, within the dream system, and among all others.

The action involved in these sessions, for example, changes us all, yet truly none of us perceive the nature of the entire action of which we are a part. I, for example, cannot perceive the entire future consequences of any one action. I may perceive the entire consequences of any given action within your system or my own, but it is impossible for me to perceive a given action’s consequences as it is felt within all systems, for each action occurs within all systems simultaneously.