“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The thoughts may rather faithfully, though never completely, translate such data, or they may considerably distort it. Behind thoughts are images, which are more basic but still physically oriented. Because they are more basic, they have a stronger effect. They are more emotionally charged, more concise than thoughts, and they are directly connected with the mechanics involved in translating inner data to physical reality.

Behind these, so to speak, exist what you may term temperature pictures, in which delicate gradations of heat form ever-shifting emotional patterns that do have a semiphysical outline. From these, you see, normal images are built up, and from the images thoughts are formed.

In for example the worm, the process ends here. In so-called higher forms, the chemical process itself allows for the creation of an ordinary image. This brings about further thermal responses and chemical alterations, that allow the thought processes to proceed.

All of these procedures are unnecessary to consciousness itself, however. They are necessary to develop communication between nonphysical consciousness and the physical form which it has adopted. Consciousness, in forming an image, or creating it, then responds to it creatively, setting up frameworks for further creative actions. Consciousness experiences reality directly, but having formed physical matter into a personal image, it must then creatively translate data to that physical brain. It must keep it informed.

The brain looks out upon the physical universe, and consciousness then reacts, again creatively, to that environment. Information is now carried in reverse fashion back to the inner self, in an instantaneous and automatic procedure. Thus thought becomes an inner image which is translated into a thermal image, and then into intuitional form, into highly condensed and codified data, and then into a pure and direct sort of experience which you cannot understand as physical creatures.

This automatic procedure works both ways, then, constantly. Various portions of the self retain memory of the information, still in the form in which they have interpreted it. The thoughts and images, while being condensed, are nevertheless then retained in their particular levels of the personality in their own form.

Now, the process does not cease at the physical boundaries of the self however. The data thus far has been seen as traveling from the inner self outward, as being translated from pure knowledge into thermal pictures, inner images and thoughts. Obviously words and action follow.

Now, you arbitrarily decide on the personal physical image as the exterior boundary of the self. As you know, in actuality, no such physical boundary exists. It is the result of your perception. Even physically, you see, no such boundary exists. You can see this for example in epidemics.

Physically you are a part of your environment, and you form it as you form your image. There is much more to be said here, and we shall go into it more deeply soon. For this is not a symbolic relationship but a practical one.