“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Those realities however which appear only in certain stages of consciousness, are secondaries. This is perhaps one of the most important bits of information I have given you; for if you are bright enough, and I think that you are, then you have a yardstick by which to measure the nature of primary reality, from which all other manifestations are spun.

Incidentally, if it is not now known by your scientists, it will be shortly discovered that the physical organism does not age in sleep at the same rate at which it ages in the waking state. Aging, therefore, is not a primary. Again, this does not mean that secondary conditions such as aging and gravity and clock time, do not have effects within your system, obviously. It is only that these must be recognized as secondary conditions that do not therefore basically (underlined) affect the inner self, which is to a large degree independent of your system.

A recognition of the differences between primary and secondary conditions can however allow you to minimize the effect of the secondary conditions to some considerable degree.

Here now once more, let me repeat that thoughts are definite electromagnetic realities. Therefore, being actions, they affect all other actions, and if I repeat this in session after session, I do so, so that it will never be forgotten. Therefore these secondary conditions are strengthened through the very act, or misact, of thinking that they are primary rather than secondary elements in action.

You will find it a most rewarding experience, once these experiments have been begun, for you will yourselves discover the difference between primary and secondary conditions. Obviously the secondary conditions are to some extent necessary for your survival as a physical organism, but you are more than a physical organism now, and you shall be other than a physical organism in your future.

As you know therefore we have differentiated between an outer ego, who manipulates within physical reality, and an inner ego who directs the activities of the inner self. Now then, the next step should indeed be clear. In the main, the ego deals with secondary realities, and in the main, the inner ego deals with primaries.

Nevertheless primaries also exist within the physical universe, and secondaries appear often as props within the dream world.

Again, none of these issues are clear-cut, and the distinctions, many of them, are for simplicity’s sake. Many primaries will show secondary characteristics. For example, within your clock time there are definite primary characteristics of time as it exists in a primary condition.

Once more, even the word time is misleading, but within the boundaries of your clock reality every individual feels at times—but you see that the use of the word itself binds us—but every individual feels now and then the primary sense of existence that is not arbitrarily divided into moments and hours; and he therefore escapes from a secondary condition into the realization of a primary reality behind it.

There is a secondary mention of money, though I do not believe it is directly connected with the main matter. (Pause.) I also believe that Dr. Instream had a drink of a liquor which he is not accustomed to drinking as a rule. (Pause.) That he would not ordinarily choose, for example.