“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You may see an automobile for example with your eyes, and hear its sound through your ears, but it is also within the human capacity, ideally speaking, to hear the sight of the car, and to see the sound of the car. Practically speaking these capacities have been overlooked in human development simply because the ego hit upon the present method of perception, and clung to it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reality is indeed not necessarily that which is constant within the various appearances of reality through all systems, as it is the perception of the whole picture of reality, or the sum of all reality as seen within the various systems. This involves quite a complicated point, and implies a complicated position; for true reality would not be completely either the reality of an automobile, say, as it appears within the physical system, or as it appears within the electrical system. It would not be that which appears identical to the two systems, but it would be indeed the sum of the realities of all systems, as applied to our weary automobile.

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.