“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. Any time structure is an aid, organizing experience along certain lines. To a large extent it limits perception, and is a protective device. You are learning to handle perception and experience, and time gives it to you in slow and small doses.

You understand the basic reality of subjective life. You will then still organize experience (underline organize), but you will not need artificial aids such as time to lean upon. You will not need to see thoughts materialized in physical matter, for you will have long since learned that the thoughts and not the matter are the basic reality. You will be able therefore to dispense with many seemingly permanent mass images, but when you form them you will realize why and how.

It is important that you understand that time puts limitations and barriers in the way of perception. This does not mean that each individual at such a stage is isolated, nor that he dwells in some universe of his own, for interactions always exist. (Long pause.)

In nontime these portions of the entity exist quite freely, without any time barriers to separate them. Many such relationships have been established, as indeed I speak with you because we get on so well. (Amused.) I am also familiar with your particular system, and found it emotionally satisfying.

There are no barriers as far as development and experience are concerned, nor to creativity. A personality then, starting out with one main purpose, may find itself involved in experience that opens new areas, and it may pursue them. In nontime there is full recognition and sometimes use of time systems, but the personality realizes that it dwells in nontime, and it forms a time schedule or system to get where it wants to go in the same way that you would make a road or path.

Sometimes the road or path may be used by others, and sometimes not. Now, many personalities may work together to form a time system, as many men may labor to form a national highway. One personality may also form for his own purposes a time system of his own, as a man might make a path to his own garden.

Sooner or later the man will cease walking merely from his house to his garden, and use other roads or forge new paths. Sooner or later the personality will use or form other time systems in which to achieve developments, but nothing forces him to do so.

Now. Time then is an aid in one way, and it is used by multidimensional personalities for their own benefit. Use again the analogy of a road. Other dimensional personalities realize that they are perfectly free to leave the road, and that much more exists on all sides.

In your theory of time however you believe yourselves bound to the road, do not realize that you have made it, and are unable to perceive other realities. You have chosen to do this however. Since you are learning and can only handle so many perceptions, you have forgotten that you have created the road. Multidimensional personalities do not need to forget. They are also aware of different such devices formed by others. (One minute pause; eyes closed.)

They don particular types of clothing to travel these roads, or they use certain vehicles. They do not believe that they are bound to those vehicles. There are certain time structures that are used by many. Well traveled. There are certain systems of reality that are well traveled. In these to some extent mass perceptions predominate.

There are others, far less numerous, where highly venturesome personalities chose to set up new trails and strike out in new ways. There are ruined time structures as well as ruined physical structures.

There are realities that are used no longer. The purpose for which they were constructed, in your terms, no longer exists. In your terms again there are incipient time structures and realities, probable systems that may or may not become a part of any mass venture.

Time therefore is formed out of and from nontime. (Long pause.) Non-time is psychological experience, psychological reality, and time is always at its service. (Long pause.) Entities then form the time in which they seem to dwell. (Long pause.) Experience itself is always plastic, and again, form is not dependent upon mass. Mass belongs to your camouflage system. Form does not.

Form adopts mass within the physical system, but form is not dependent upon it. Form can exist and does exist without mass and without physical matter. Form, like time, is an aid, an organization of experience. Form is used as time structures may be used, but multidimensional personalities know that they construct form as they may construct various time systems as an aid toward organizing perception.

There are in other words many other kinds of time systems that are constructed, beside the one you know dealing with continuity of moments. The probable systems could be called time systems, only their experience is highly organized in a different fashion, and continual moments do not exist in your terms.

Now, there are some systems that do deal with a serial time unit, but in these the personalities are well aware that the serial time is of their own construction. Certain types of personalities will construct or be attracted to certain time systems. They will find certain patterns of development, particular perceptive mechanisms, that go with it more to their liking.

(10:16. Jane kept on speaking as Seth.) You could say that various time systems are like games, and there are many of them; and in each one the rules and the goals are different. In your system one of the rules is that you forget you are playing a game in order to concentrate better on the affairs at hand.

(Humorously:) How you do in the game will affect your score elsewhere, in other words. Time then is superimposed upon nontime, as mass within your system is superimposed upon form. (Long pause.)

Now to some extent, to some large extent, time as you know it with its continual moments is a highly specialized illusion, even within your physical system.

Your own race is the only one who plays with any facility. Other myriad life forms have nothing to do with it at all. You merely transpose your values upon them. They do not experience time as you do.

This does not mean that they are not advanced enough to understand the reality of your time. They do not share the illusion. Almost all animals, plants, birds, insects, rocks and trees perceive according to intensities. (Long pause.) The intensity of an experience is their present; but in many ways that I will not explain to you at this point, their present is of wider duration than yours. This does not necessarily mean that they perceive more of the past and future within their present than you do, for they do not in those (underlined) terms. But in terms of quality and value fulfillment there is greater duration and the “moment,” in quotes, is more intensely perceived.

(“Our perception of time is limited and we only focus on a fairly small portion of reality. The cat’s is even more limited, but for that reason they experience each event with greater vividness. But our next stage is to have a more expanded time value along with the intense perception or reaction the animals have now. We’ve given up some of that intensity because we’ve taken on more reality, but next we’ll get both more intensity and reality together.”)