“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. Root assumptions represent the basic premises upon which a given existence-system is formed.

These are the ground rules, so to speak. Your physical mechanisms are equipped to function in such a way that reality is perceived through the lens of particular root assumptions. Using the physical senses alone, it is almost literally impossible for you to perceive reality in any other manner.

A strong part of your personalities is therefore a product of the physical system in which you have physical existence. All ideas of reality must be glimpsed through the physical net which is the materialized form of these assumptions. You are, in other words, physically able to observe reality in a highly specialized fashion. You must, physically speaking, interpret existence in terms of these very definite assumptions.

Again physically speaking, you will find nothing to contradict these assumptions, since physically to you they are all that you can experience or perceive. These root assumptions are the framework of your camouflage system. As you attempt to explore other realities you almost automatically interpret such data in terms of the root assumptions of your own system.

This of course highly falsifies such data. The inner senses are not bound by those root assumptions however. This is why many psychic or subjective experiences seem to contradict physical laws. Inner experience often seems chaotic or meaningless because you attempt to interpret it according to the root assumptions of physical reality. You must learn the laws that apply to other systems.

The root assumptions that govern physical reality are indeed valid, but within physical reality alone. They do not apply elsewhere. There is a natural tendency to continue judging inner experience against these root assumptions however. The tendency, with further experience, will fade. This interpretation of inner reality into physical terms is at first automatic, and far beneath conscious levels. Inner experience, you see, must to some extent be colored by the physical system while you exist within it.

In order for such information to rise to conscious levels, it must of necessity be translated into terms that the ego can handle, and the translation must to some extent distort the original experience. The whole physical organism of the body has been trained from infancy to react to certain patterns, these patterns based on physical root assumptions.

The nervous system itself must, you see, be so constituted, and the nervous system reacts definitely to visual block images. Such images are received through the skin as well as through the eyes. The whole system is highly complicated and organized, and organized to react to specific patterns that are formed from these basic root assumptions.

These root assumptions are so a part of your own existence that they appear and cloud your dreams.

Beneath these root assumptions however portions of the self perceive physical reality in an entirely different fashion, free of the tyranny of objects and material form. Here you experience concepts directly, without the need for symbolisms. Here you experience the spacious present directly. Here you have knowledge of your past personalities, and know that they exist simultaneously with your own.

The root assumptions upon which physical reality is formed represent secure ground to the ego. We always operate with the ego’s consent. It consents to step aside momentarily. It interprets the inner knowledge gained in its own way, true, but it is immeasurably enriched by so doing. Other layers of the self interpret the same inner experiences quite differently.

The ego can exist only within the context of these root assumptions. The primary dream experience is finally woven into a structure composed of these root assumptions, and it is these that you remember. These serve you as basic information, but the information is then put into symbolic form. Objects, you see, are symbols. These objects in dreams are symbols of realities that the ego could not otherwise perceive.