“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I were both tired by session time. Jane had no idea of what Seth might discuss in the session. She began speaking in an average voice, with pauses and with her eyes closed, while sitting down.)

Individually, you move in a very limited area of this vast universe, and yet inner reality is more (long pause) massive in size, if you speak in terms of size. It is far more extensive even in physical terms, and its reality exists in dimensions which do not exist within the physical system. You take for granted the existence of this largely unknown physical world. You gloss over what you do not understand.

The nonphysical systems are frightening to the ego-centered personality; but the bulk of the individual’s reality does not lie within the physical universe, but in those unknown areas. As you know the ego is the topmost portion, so to speak. Were it not for the dreaming self the ego would not exist. Were it not for past existences the personality as you know it would not exist.

Remember that reincarnation does not contradict the theory of the spacious present, for such lives within the spacious present are simultaneous. In dreams you journey through inner realities as actually as you walk physically through the matter of the physical world. It is true that the experiences you encounter may not be encountered by another in precisely (underline precisely) the same way, but physical experience is never the same for any two given individuals either.

In your journeys into inner reality you cannot proceed with the same root agreements, you see. Reality, per se, changes completely according to the basic root agreements from which you proceed. One of the root agreements upon which physical existence is based is that physical objects have a reality that is entirely independent of any subjective cause; and that these objects, within definitely specified limitations, are permanent.

Now these root agreements will only confuse you in your inner explorations. Objects may appear and disappear in these other systems. Using the root agreements just mentioned as a basis for reality, an observer would insist that the objects were not real, for they do not behave as he knows objects must behave.

Eight: The only barriers within inner reality are mental barriers, or psychic barriers.

Now. If another individual under the same circumstances comes across the same potential object, he can also perceive it as you did. He may however, because of his own makeup, perceive and translate another portion of allied pattern. He may see the form of the man who originated the thought of the building. (Pause.) To a large extent your habit of perceiving time as a sequence forms the type of experience, and also limits the experience that you will have in physical reality.

It also unites experience. The unifying and the limiting aspects of consecutive moments are absent in inner reality. Time cannot be counted upon to unify action. The series you see does not exist basically. The unifying elements will be those of your own understanding, your own abilities. You are not forced to perceive action as a series of moments within inner reality, therefore.

Episodes will therefore be related one to another by entirely different methods, and the methods will be intuitional and highly selective and psychological. You will find your own way through complicated mazes of reality according to your own intuitional nature. You will find what you expect to find. You will seek out what you want from the available reality data.

You have completely forgotten the chaos and unpredictable nature it presented to you before learning processes were channeled into specific directions. You learned to perceive reality in a highly specialized fashion.

The unity, you see, is different. Basically perception of the spacious present is naturally available. It is your nervous and physical mechanism which acts as a limiting device, and also as a focusing device. By limiting many otherwise available perceptions it forces you to focus upon what you can perceive with greater intensity.

You are basically capable of seeing this particular location as it existed a thousand years in your past, or as it will exist a thousand years in your future. (Jane indicated the living room in which we sat.) The senses serve to blot out many more aspects of reality than they allow you to perceive. They are actually rather rigid limiting devices, yet in many inner explorations you will automatically translate experience into terms that the senses can use.

This facility, the translation of data to the ego, who would otherwise distrust it, any such translation is nevertheless a secondhanded version of the original reality; and that is an important point.