“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Artists use perspective on a flat surface to try to capture there the feelings and experiences of depth that are, in themselves, alien to the flat canvas, or paper or board. The artist may vividly evoke the image of a disappearing road that appears to be broad in the picture’s foreground, only to turn smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish in some distant hidden point. No physical person will walk that road, however. An ant crawling upon such a canvas would hasten across just another flat surface, and be quite unaware of the inviting avenue and any painted fields or mountains.

In a strange manner I am telling you that your “life” is simply the only portion of your existence of which you are presently aware. In greater terms, you are alive and dead at the same time, even as I am. My focus, however, is in an area that you do not perceive. Again: Existences are like notes played along certain frequencies. You are tuned in to an earth song, following this analogy, but you are only following your own melody, and usually you are unaware of the greater orchestration in which you also take part.

If, however, you learn to know yourself better in daily life to become more fully aware even of your earthly life, then you will indeed receive other information that hints of a deeper, more supportive reality, in which physical existence rests. You will find yourself having experiences that do not fit recognized facts. These can add up to an alternate set of facts, pointing toward a different kind of reality, and give evidence for an inner existence that takes precedence over the physical assumptions. A certain kind of discretion and understanding is necessary, however. Basically the inner reality is the creative source of the physical one. Yet to some extent, the physical rules are also inviolate — at their level.

2. I see correlations between the “flat view of reality” given to us by our physical senses, as Seth maintains, and the “flat” view of the universe that cosmologists perceive when they look way out into space. [...] Yet when scientists examine our universe of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, they see space as essentially flat, instead of curving in upon itself as it should over those enormous distances. Nor can the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe account for the homogeneity of a flat universe. The inflationary model can explain both the appearance of flatness and homogeneity—but, like all theories, it poses other problems that have yet to be resolved.

[...] In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.

[...] She was standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out at the dreary flat landscape. [...]

[...] Here they were after death, and at least on her plane it was nothing like they had said it would be while living on earth. [...]

[...] She likes it where she is much better than on earth. [...]

[...] She can visit different places on earth, but she couldn’t name another place, or other people. [...]

Now, the image of the god was to be put into the earth, flat upon it. And by the pressure of the ivory image upon the earth, the months were also told and it sank into the ground, little by little. [...]

Now these eyes were actually means of telling not only the time but also the circumference of the earth. [...]

2. Seth has told us almost from the beginning of the sessions that in our terms the earth we know is but the latest in a series of earths that have existed in the same “space,” or “value climate of psychological reality.” [...] From Session 29, for February 26, 1964 (just 16 years ago): “There are endless planes upon your earth, or rather endless planes occurring simultaneously with your earth. Your solid earth is not a solid to inhabitants that would seem to take up the same space as your earth. [...]

When you ask: “When did the world begin?” or “What really happened?” or “Was there a Garden of Eden?”, you are referring to the world as you understand it, but in those terms there were earths in the same space before the earth you recognize existed,² and they began in the manner that I have given you in the early chapters of this book. [...]

(10:03.) In the case of earth the grid of perception is simply used differently, certain areas becoming prominent in some eras, and less prominent in others. Using your idea of time, I can only say that when the entire gestalt of consciousnesses that formed a particular earth have formed its reality to the best of their abilities, fulfilling their individual and mass capacities as far as possible, then they lovingly turn over that grid to others, and continue to take part in existences that are not physical in your terms. [...]

[...] Here’s the note Jane wrote this morning and inserted in Volume 77, where I’m keeping a few sheets of paper to record the next session: “Something from Seth over the weekend—only got a little—something about earth’s grid of perception being so constructed that…. [...]

[...] If you were thinking in terms of physical reality, then this area could be likened to one immediately above the atmosphere of your earth. [...]

[...] Your environment is creative in that trees bear fruit, that there is a self-sustaining principle, that the earth feeds its own, for example. [...]

[...] If you paint a picture within three-dimensional existence, then the painting must be on a flat surface, merely hinting at the complete three-dimensional experience that you cannot insert into it. [...]

(“Oh… What do you think of the remark Jane made the other day—that the earth represents our subconscious?)

[...] For the basic earth that gives you sustenance is formed from your own vitality. [...]

[...] Seth had been very animated and amusing—funny, with a good voice, eyes open often and looking toward me as Jane lay flat on the couch.

(Jane made the remark about the earth representing our unconscious last weekend while we were driving through the countryside.

“In my darker moods I find myself thinking that I love the earth and everything upon it except the increasingly destructive activities of human beings — and sometimes I wonder about the human beings themselves! I love the deserts and forests, the oceans and rivers and lakes of the earth, the plains and the poles, the marshes and the mountains. [...]

“So what about acid rain, say, to name but one human creation that’s having a strong effect upon the earth’s surface and aerial environments? We’re told that it’s now evident in a number of places on earth — often downwind from certain kinds of industrial activity. [...]

[...] I saw my art for the first page, perhaps half again as large as the printed version would be, lying on a flat drawing table. It was in black ‘line’, but also with flat washes of color. [...]

“‘Have you ever noticed,’ I said to Jane the other day, ‘that everything on earth remains the same except human activity?’ Jane has heard it all before. [...]

[...] For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes⁴ of the Roman army. [...]

You have heard terms like “The Brotherhood of Man,” or, as Ruburt might say, “The Brother-Womanhood of Women” (humorously). But at any given time, in your terms — at any given time — the population of the earth is made up of counterparts … and so when you kill an enemy, you are killing a version of yourself … For as you are members of a physical species, you are also members of a psychic kind of counterpart reality; and this membership straddles races or countries, or states or politics.

[...] You have comrades, and you come to this earth at a given time and place of your choice, and so do you reap and form the great challenges of your age.

4. A literal interpretation of “flat ground” and “hordes” would be very questionable, however. [...]

[...] He knew that in the physical world the puddle was flat, but that he was perceiving another just-as-solid reality; a larger one, in fact, in which that rain creature had its being.

[...] Biologically and spiritually, new life relies upon these innumerable changes and transformations, deaths and births that occur naturally both in the seasons of the earth and those of the psyche.

like a sudden flat sunflower,

and in this world flat,

[...] Then while his two helpers stood guard to keep the raccoon in the tree, Floyd lugged a very heavy flat stone up the ladder and planted it across the chimney; he’s going to cement a wire mesh in place as a permanent seal against animals and birds.

[...] I don’t want to be simplistic here, but for some years I’ve been concerned that those living in large metropolitan centers miss a certain daily, vital participation in the very environment within which by far most of the life forms on earth exist. [...]

[...] Not only that, but when the predictors fall flat on their faces it does not help “The Cause.” [...]

[...] The methods have been known for centuries; not only centuries as you think of them, but for the lifetime of this earth as you know it, and even before — when the poles were reversed and when there were other stars in the sky and when the planets were not the planets that you know.

[...] You are as natural as an animal, and as “tuned in” to the deep rhythms of the earth — those that you consciously perceive and those that are perceived by your body consciousness, but are screened out by the “official mind.”

[...] Not only that, but when the predictors fall flat on their faces it does not help ‘The Cause.’ Reality does not exist in that fashion. [...]

(“The time you and Seth were friends here on earth.”)

[...] Not on earth.

(At times during this experiment my legs felt bent and somewhat drawn up at the knees, although intellectually I was quite aware that they were still flat upon the bed. [...]

[...] Once I seemed to be lying flat and looking straight up at a series of American flags, peeling down off a great [...]

[...] She was standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out at the ‘dreary’ flat landscape and at their pickup truck parked there. [...]

[...] She didn’t know how she ‘got about,’ but knew that she could travel to other places on earth. [...]

You are forced to transform this creative energy into another camouflage pattern because of your earthly situation. [...]

Scientists realize that the atmosphere of the earth has a distorting effect upon their instruments. [...]

The flying saucer appearances come from a plane that is much more advanced in technological sciences than earth at this time. [...] It is caught between transforming itself completely into earth’s particular camouflage pattern, and retaining its original pattern. The earthly viewer attempts to correlate what he sees with what he supposedly knows or imagines possible, in the little he knows of the universe.

Nevertheless, when you think in terms of the entity and its various personality manifestations throughout your earth time then you realize that the basic self, the entity, cannot be destroyed in any particular earth life. [...]

[...] Mirror is a help to me, see perspective on a flat plane. [...]

[...] Your idea of space travel would be to send a ship from one planet, earth, outward into the rest of space that you perceive on that “flat” screen. [...]

[...] There in program two the table might be a flat natural plain, and the hat an oddly shaped structure upon it — a natural rather than a manufactured one. [...]

[...] Not only that, but when the predictors fall flat on their faces it does not help “the Cause.” [...]

[...] The methods have been known for centuries, not only for centuries as you know them, but for centuries as this earth existed, as you now know it. [...]

[...] They are far from flat. [...]

[...] One note of interest; technically speaking the oil colors I use contain no color named sepia, specifically, though, of course, a range of earth reds and browns are included. [...]

[...] Some of the ingredients come from the hillsides—scooped earth. [...]

[...] (In Italy.) The master wants to get the same feeling of bulk and three-dimensional weight and size from flat painting—molding color rather than rock. [...]