“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Every thought therefore has this kind of reality, which is the only reality, basically speaking. (Long pause.) Sense data itself has a reality independent of any given object. This sense data has its own intensity. If you can tune into that intensity, so to speak, you will automatically translate it into physical data, and you will perceive a physical object.

Now you can translate inner data into the terms of the outer senses, but always some distortion is absolutely necessary, for the very method of perception you see colors that which is perceived.

The objects that you will see and the places that you will visit, in dream or out-of-body experiences, are basically as real as any physical object or location, because neither are basically real. Nor of course are they unreal. As soon as you begin to translate an idea you are distorting it. The inner senses you see do not distort the data, but when you attempt to make such data available to the ego, then distortion to some extent must enter in.

I spoke briefly of the form that appeared in the mirror. Now that appearance was something else again, and was somewhat in the nature of the experience you had much later. (See the 219th session.) You see you pick up the idea even with that form, then you attempt to translate that data into physical terms. The attempt is bound to bring distortions, but without the distortions you could not consciously perceive the data. The distortions in all cases form your physical camouflage patterns.

(See the tracing of the object on page 217, and the notes concerning it on page 218. As usual at break Jane and I went over the data to make what connections we could with the object. Without Seth’s help, in some detail after break, we were greatly puzzled by the data. That is, we could speculate on the reasons for what seemed to be many distortions, but had little idea of the causes. Since we could pick out a few items in the data that seemed to apply to the object, we took it that Seth had correctly tuned in on the object itself, and that Jane’s translation of the data had been distorted most of the time. For this reason, immediately below will be listed only those parts of the data we think apply. The rest is cleared up by Seth after break. Actually we found the experiment most interesting, and unique in the series so far.