“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, I told you that I would discuss two dreams in which you were interested. However, since we are going to devote some time to our cat lover, in Washington, I will not begin the discussion of those dreams now. I could not do them justice in a short period, and would like to devote most of one session to them; and so we shall very shortly. Instead let us speak briefly on time and action.

As I have told you, all action is basically spontaneous. Only your perception of it adds the illusion of time to action. You think, for example, that any given action consumes or devours or takes up a certain amount of time. Therefore you think of time as something that contains action.

(Seth has given so much material on action that it cannot be assigned to a few sessions. It was mentioned by name before the 15th session or thereabouts. It has been especially stressed since the 120th session, and so continues.)

The dimensions of action itself have nothing to do, basically, with your conception of time. Instead the dimensions of action have to do with intensities; not only the intensities of the electromagnetic components that compose them, but with intensities as they are translated into psychological terms. Therefore the psychological experience of a particular event or action has little to do with clock time.

It is instead composed of the intensity with which it is felt by a given individual. When you speak in terms of the depth of a river, you speak in terms of distance, physical distance. When you speak in terms of the depth of a psychological experience or action, you mean something else entirely, for this is a depth of intensity. And you travel through an experience only so far as your own experience of intensity will allow you.

The psychological feeling of intensity has its own electromagnetic reality. An action is an experienced intensity, and need not involve motion in physical terms. As I have said, every action is a part of every other action, and affects every other action, and is also so affected itself. This is not however your cause and effect theory at all.

For the actions are spontaneous basically, again, and the effects exist so swiftly that it is impossible to say that one occurs before or after the other, or causes another. This could be likened to some gigantic, spontaneous motion that happens very swiftly. When you viewed such a gigantic motion with a slow camera, then you would get the effect that you receive within your system, of a continuous time. Where actually perhaps a sudden explosion had taken place, you would see a slow progression of light and motion.

Your concept of time does not of course change time itself, but it does force you to perceive actions in a certain manner. Much of this is the result of the limitations of the physical organism, but much more is the effect of the development of the ego, which attempts to set itself up and apart from action.

The inner self and the deeper layers of the subconscious are relatively free however from the ego’s false gods, and it is for this reason that precognitions are at all possible. For these layers of the self are simply able to perceive a larger portion of action than the ego is able or willing to perceive. As a rule, the ego will not even accept the information that is derived in such a manner, for to do so would be to deny those artificial precepts of continuity upon which it feels its dominance rests.

Your physicists know that time does not exist, basically, as a series of moments, one following the other. Therefore my earlier remark that physical reality was not dependent upon time as a series of moments should be obvious. Physical reality is dependent upon your sensual perception of action, and that is all.