“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is even possible for the physical individual to train himself to change the nature of his own perception of such objects. It is not a question of the car having certain properties, being real to one perceptive view and therefore necessarily unreal to another. To a very large degree, the portion of any reality that you can perceive is determined largely not by the given, so-called real object itself, but from the perspective, and because of, the senses with which you perceive it.

The scent image built up by the animal is every bit as real as the visual image. Action cannot be caught and held, and the nature of perceiving an action changes the very nature of the action itself. It is indeed, here again, that tension causes such a change.

Since perceiving an action is itself an action, the perceiving must because of its nature to some extent distort the object of perception.

Again, in this distortion we see the creation, however minute, of a new reality. The universe is cohesive, but it is also more various than you know even now. The nature of our object, our automobile for example, is indeed largely determined by those who perceive it, for it is different things in reality, and not one thing. Electrically it has an identity, and would be perceived as an entirely different phenomena from within an electrical system, where there would be no perceptors of physical data.

It is really a building up of idea into a whole pattern that can be perceived by the camouflage senses. Any reality therefore will be variously perceived, and the nature of the reality will necessarily be distorted in the very attempt to perceive it. Here again we have our creative tension, whereby a new reality is formed as a result of the distortion itself. Within your system colors may be perceived as sound. Their connections with human moods is only too apparent.

I am not going to hold a very long session this evening. Rather than give you fairly frequent short vacations, I may at times close a session early. We still come out ahead in terms of time. We are heading here indeed, slowly but surely, toward a thorough discussion of the inner senses, which could not be given until you had a good background in the nature of action itself. For you should be able to see now that the inner senses allow a more faithful perception of basic reality than the outer senses could ever give.