“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Basically, the physical body has the potentiality for perceiving stimuli on a generalized basis. I mean by this that although the eyes are for seeing, the ears for hearing and so forth, the potentials of the physical body include the capacity to hear, for example, through any given portion of the bodily expanse.

In other species within your field, however, some of these various methods have been chosen and utilized. Many animals for example literally see through the sense of smell. They quite literally perceive what you would call the sight of another animal, through the use of the sense of smell.

The sight of our imaginary automobile, therefore, is perceived by you as a visual stimulus, because you are conditioned to perceiving it in such a fashion. But it is also possible to perceive our automobile in entirely different fashions within different realities, and from various perspectives.

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.

Within your field the automobile is perceived mainly as a physical object. Within some systems the same automobile would appear to be no more than a shadow. Within some systems the automobile would not be perceived at all, unless it were in motion. In other systems it would not be perceived at all, unless it were not in motion.

These various conceptions of the automobile would also apply of course to the perception of any physical beings within the car; that is, their reality would also be perceived differently, according to the perspective systems which viewed them.

You must indeed for practical reasons pretend as if the automobile had no reality except the reality with which you are familiar, but this is not the case. I mentioned feeling sound because this is a capability that lies latent within your own physical system, but this same sort of a juggling of perspective data is what happens, generally speaking, when inhabitants of a different system perceive realities that also have an existence within your own system.

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.

They may also be tasted, as well as sniffed, and these experiences are actually to some fair degree carried on continually beneath awareness, all adding up to the individual’s perception of a given color. Colors may even be perceived through an inner sense of balance. Their stability or instability is, therefore, subconsciously appreciated.

The inner senses, by being free of camouflage information, are more or less (in quotes) “pure” perceptors, perceiving with but little prejudice of many realities while being imprisoned by none.

Any perception instantly changes the perceiver. It also changes the thing perceived, and this we will discuss at a later session, for it involves the other side of the coin, so to speak.