“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence, you must look where you have not before — into the reality of your own minds and emotions. You must look to the natural universe that you know. You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time. In ordinary life during the day consciousness often takes a recess, so to speak — it daydreams, or otherwise experiences itself as somewhat apart from the body’s reality. At night, in sleep, the self’s consciousness takes longer, freer recesses from physical reality, and does this as spontaneously as the body itself walks. [...]

You must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of your own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche. The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientists’, for more of nature is comprehended.

Now: The last two sessions, more or less on evolution, can be included in this book, and serve as the opening sessions of a new chapter, entitled: “The Universe and the Psyche.”

Seth’s material in those early sessions, given well over a decade ago for the most part, reflected of course his reactions to current astronomical theory about the state — and fate — of our physical (camouflage) universe. The idea of an infinitely expanding universe, with all of its stars ultimately burned out and all life extinct, is still the view largely accepted today; it’s based on the red shift measurements of some of the supposedly receding galaxies, their apparent brightnesses, the “missing mass” of the universe, and other very technical data. Yet I find it most interesting to note that now some astrophysicists and mathematicians believe our universe may be destined to contract — indeed, to collapse in upon itself — after all. But again, these ideas aren’t based on the kind of thinking Seth espouses (that consciousness comes first, that its creations are continuous), but upon other quite complicated camouflage observations and measurements. One of these is the discovery of at least some of that missing mass, thus indicating that gravitational fields may exist among the galaxies, and galactic clusters, strong enough not only to halt the expansion of the universe but to pull all matter back together again.

[...] The closest probability satellite to any given reality may, for example, be in an entirely different universe altogether. (Pause.) In that regard, you may find brethren more or less like yourselves outside of your own universe — as you think of it — rather than inside it. You imagine your universe as extending outward in space (and backwards in time). [...]

[...] Such activity automatically alters the nature of time in your experience, and is indicative of intersections of your consciousness with another kind of consciousness. That particular type of consciousness operates “at different speeds” than your own. [...]

“Their time measurements, based on camouflage [physical information] to begin with, are almost riotously inadequate and bound to give distortive data, since the universe simply cannot be measured in those terms. The universe was not created at any particular time, but neither is it expanding into nowhere like an inflated balloon that grows forever larger — at least not along the lines now being considered. The expansion is an illusion, based among other things upon inadequate time measurements, and cause-and-effect theories; and yet in some manners the universe could be said to be expanding, but with entirely different connotations than are usually used.”

[...] Since the identity-consciousness is composed of the combined and cooperating generalized consciousness of all the body’s atoms and molecules, and the consciousness of the inner ego, these molecular consciousnesses that once or initially found expression in forming their physical construction, no longer do so; but are competent to do so again when the self-consciousness so demands.

Since the conscious ego is composed of the gestalt molecular consciousness, then when it leaves the physical body it takes the molecular consciousness with it, and this molecular consciousness is therefore present to aid in future construction. However, since you must deal with physical laws while dwelling upon the physical plane, you cannot dispense entirely with the physical constructions, but in such extensions of consciousness you must utilize other physical molecules and atoms.

[...] Because the cells and molecules in general have consciousness, because they contain within themselves a capsule comprehension of the universe as a whole, and because they contain the ability to form into an almost infinite variety of form, there is a kinship between every atom and molecule, a basic enduring connection, regardless of the separate appearance which is seen using the outer senses.

[...] Any particular self theoretically could expand his consciousness to contain the universe and everything in it. [...]

“The ways in which dream material becomes real, the processes involved, are the same ones by which the universe itself becomes objectified to our views and experience. The universe is the result of a certain kind of focus of consciousness; the stuff of it, the matter, rises out of inner wonderworks — of which the private wonderworks of each of us is a part.

“If we really understand how dreams worked and allowed ourselves to explore dream levels, we’d see how the universe is formed. It is the … creative product, en masse, of our individual and joint dreams … Our world is a dream level for some other types of consciousness; it’s shared to some extent, then, and can serve as a meeting point.

“Other species of consciousness gain their experience at different ‘levels’; often we encounter such consciousnesses in the dream state, then interpret their actions in the wrong order of events … according to our own camouflage³ system … Our bodies are the focuses for only the physical part of our consciousnesses … My latest dreams are giving me a picture of the nonphysical inner wonderworks …”

[...] She was in “a slightly altered state of consciousness” while transcribing the data. [...]

(Pause.) Now: While you believe that consciousness somehow emerges from dead matter, you will never understand yourselves, and you will always be looking for the point at which life took on form. You will always have to wonder about a kind of mechanical birth of the universe—and it will indeed seem as if your own world was made up of the spare parts that somehow fell together in just such a fashion so that life later emerged.

[...] In this book, then, we will look at the origin of the universe, the origin of the species, the origin of life from another viewpoint. This viewpoint will, I hope, provide another framework through which you can understand and study physical reality, your part in it, and sense the immense creative complexity that unites each individual with the source of consciousness itself.

[...] Very briefly: The creationists believe that God created the universe (including the earth, obviously) around 10,000 years ago. [...] On the other hand, evolutionary science believes that the universe came into being between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago; that the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old, and that according to the fossil record and other evidence, its living organisms first arose and began evolving at least 3.5 billion years ago. [...] For instance, why did the universe we think we know so well come into existence at all, and what was the cause of that beginning?

[...] I hope to show how the nature of dreams has helped shape man’s consciousness. I hope to show that consciousness forms the environment, and not the other way around (with many gestures).

Your stated universe emerged out of that kind of interval, emerging from a master event whose true nature remains uncaptured by your definitions—so there will be places in our book where I may say that an event known to you is true and untrue at the same time, or that it is both myth and fact. [...] The units of consciousness that I have mentioned are (underlined) that, and they do behave as I have said. They are also in other terms entities, fragments of All That Is, if you prefer—divine fragments of power and majesty, containing (pause) all of the powers of consciousness as you think of it, concentrations without substance in your terms.

(Long pause at 9:28.) There are phases of relatedness, rhythms and harmonies of consciousness from whose infinite swells the molecular “music” of your universe is sounded. [...]

I do not mean by such a description to minimize the importance of physical life, for All That Is endows each portion of its own transformed reality with a unique existence that is duplicated nowhere else, and each spark of consciousness is endowed with a divine heritage that is never extinguished—a spark that is apparent in all other corners of the universe.

You think of your universe as having certain dimensions, and you want an explanation based more or less upon the proposition that those dimensions themselves made possible the origin—which must, however, have emerged from other larger dimensions of actuality than those contained in your universe itself. The terms of reality within your universe cannot hold or contain that vaster context in which such master events happen. [...]

Energy as it comes through your plane is individualized; and indeed, irregardless of any other theories, all energy contains some consciousness, in simple or more complicated gestalt fashion, as I have mentioned that atoms and molecules so possess a limited consciousness, and a generalized subconsciousness which contains within it a capsule comprehension of the universe as a whole.

I have explained somewhat earlier how the gestalt ego consciousness was formed, and to some degree explained its psychic composition, but there is much more to be said here. There is a steady and unwavering cooperation that exists, and it is the basis of your physical universe. [...] Your senses are rather more equipped to notice difference and divergence than sameness; but nevertheless the cooperation of all conscious entities provides physical objects with whatever appearance of permanence they have.

You may not be aware of the conscious nature of each atom in your body, or of the gestalt consciousness formed by those atoms as they build into cells, but it is not necessary for them, or for their own awareness of themselves, that you give them that recognition. The consciousness in the cells exists whether or not you recognize it.

[...] It goes without saying then, that there is consciousness of a kind, conscious energy, behind and to some extent within all material.

If you choose a safe universe then you may indeed find some old habitual ideas, thoughts or beliefs, coming to haunt you. Those belonged to the unsafe universe, and made perfect sense there—and there they still do. When you change your affiliation and find yourself now and then encountering such feelings; and they are always one way or another feelings of insecurity—then admit to yourself that while they made sense in the unsafe universe, they do not belong in the safe one. Literally, such feelings make no sense in a safe universe. [...]

Ruburt’s symptoms made sense in an unsafe universe. [...] Your feelings about Prentice made sense in an unsafe universe, where you had to protect the excellence of your vision from incompetence. You can make that leap into the safe universe—just as Ruburt is. [...]

[...] Ruburt is aware of many of these sensations, so that he consciously will have some knowledge of how his own body works, and will be able from now on to have a greater conscious knowledge of its condition. [...]

[...] At the risk of repeating myself, you live in a safe universe (loudly). [...] You cannot live in a safe universe and an unsafe one at the same time. [...]

The gradations of intensities are so minute that it would be impossible to measure them, and yet each field contains in coded form the actual living reality of endless eons; contains what you would call the past, present, and future of unnumbered universes; contains the coded data of any and every consciousness that has been or will be, in any universe; those that have appeared to vanish, and those which, seemingly, do not yet exist. [...]

And in the same way that the dream world has no beginning or end, neither does the physical universe with which you are familiar. [...] It is the product of your own existence, and yet you can neither consciously call it into existence nor destroy it.

[...] You simply are not aware of these selves on a conscious level any more than you are aware of ‘past’ lives. [...] As there is usually no contact between the entity and the ordinary conscious ego, there is usually no contact on a conscious level between the self who dreams and the dream world which has its own independent existence.

[...] What you do not know is that all consciousness dreams. Atoms and molecules have consciousness, and this minute consciousness forms its own dreams even as, on the other hand, it forms its own physical image. [...]

(Pause at 9:23.) The physical world as you know it is unique, vital to the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part of that universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. [...] It is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression from that divine gestalt of being—and that divine gestalt of being is of such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear within any one of its own realities, its own worlds.

(Last Saturday evening we were visited by Dr. LeRoy Guy [I’ll call him], a professor of psychology at a well-known nearby university. [...] When Jane called Dr. Guy in return, he told her that he’d contacted her at the behest of a Dr. Camper [another pseudonym].¹ Dr. Camper, a professor of sociology at a midwestern university, had asked Dr. Guy to ask Jane to be tested for her psychic ability. [...]

You cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe—for (suddenly louder) that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be contained in any of your specifications. [...] (Pause.) When you ask how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then you are taking it for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute qualities. [...]

[...] I want to deal briefly with such ideas, so that later we can discuss the location of the universe.

Concentrating upon your own camouflage universe, you are able to distinguish only the distortive pattern, and from this pattern you deduce your ideas of cause and effect, past, present and future, and ideas of an expanding universe that bloats. Consciousness takes up no space nor is it enclosed by time, as you know time. The camouflage patterns that seem to enclose consciousness are temporary, for short term only, and for limited but necessary purpose.

However, when it is enabled to let go its preoccupation with the camouflage universe, it can receive and be aware of data received by the inner senses. [...] The conscious personality can be trained to receive, interpret and retain such knowledge. Otherwise such knowledge would be relatively without value in your camouflage universe.

Any investigation of the basic inner universe, which is the only real universe, must be done as much as possible from a point outside your own distortions, but the only way open for you to escape the distortions of your own physical universe is to journey inward. To get outside your own universe, you must travel inward, and this represents the only perspective free of distortive elements, from which valid experimentation can be carried on. Your so-called scientific, so-called objective experiments can continue for an eternity, but they only probe further and further with camouflage instruments into a camouflage universe.

Hypnotism then is one tool to enable the conscious personality to divest itself of its concentrated focus upon outer camouflage, and to enable it to focus instead upon the inner self. [...] Knowledge of the basic universe can be achieved, interpreted and retained by your scientists in ways that I will at first outline, and then cover more completely.

[...] At the same time he forged a new kind of consciousness. [...] In your private lives you see many of the results of the unsafe universe. [...]

[...] Your suggestions about a safe universe are finally taking effect. As mentioned, however, the idea of an unsafe universe automatically initiates a certain kind of thinking. [...]

The knowledge of the last few days, however, is bringing about a further alteration of consciousness that allows him to progress, and in all cases the alterations of consciousness happen first. [...]

[...] In an unsafe universe as given protection is necessary, and certain attitudes are accepted, coloring many areas of life, spreading out to assure that protection.

With his intellectual appreciation of the benefits of fire that followed his physical mastery of it, then his dream universe became enriched with a new freedom. [...] While development of the two universes overall is parallel, no exact evenness in all respects is achieved. That is, a concept may be brilliantly alive in the dream universe but unexpressed physically, or for one reason or another an intellectual comprehension in the physical universe may not find expression in the dream universe. [...]

The energy is then transformed in the dream universe, and again regenerated and used in the formation of the universe of negative matter, into which it seeps from the dream universe. Our discussions will have to thoroughly discuss the nature of the dream universe before we can hope to consider the universe of negative matter, but it will not hurt if you keep the above mentioned facts in mind.

[...] However, those who ask concerning the time of the origin of consciousness within your universe, are those who do not understand that the most minute physical particle, the most microscopic, is a materialization of inner, aware energy.

There are breakthroughs in the dream universe from the physical universe, as well as from the dream universe into your own. The dream universe, for the purposes of our explanation, is a specific one. [...]

[...] You construct realities, and you are indeed familiar with the dream universe that consciously you ignore. And your experience within the dream universe is as vivid and as valid and as real, in every respect, as your waking experience.

[...] You construct the dream universe in the same manner that you construct the physical universe. For various reasons that have been discussed there is no need, in the dream universe, for the permanence of image, or the apparent permanence of image that occurs in the physical universe.

You construct the dream universe, again, on a subconscious basis. The dream universe is as permanent in its way as the physical universe. [...]

[...] In sleep the self becomes conscious of its dreams, but this does not mean that the dreams have not existed while you were not conscious of them. Nor does it mean that they cease to exist when you are no longer conscious of them, for they have their own sort of molecular and electrical construction. [...]

Since those notes were born so directly from that event, and since they represent the first strong intrusions from the interior universe into my own life, I still find them intriguing. [...] They seemed charged with a fierce vitality that leads me to consider the ambiguous nature of creativity, for if those ideas and the experience itself initiated a new kind of consciousness in me, they also possessed an explosive force powerful enough to considerably dismantle the previous frameworks of my thoughts and ideas. [...]

Evolution is energy’s movement toward conscious expression in the physical universe, but it is basically nonphysical. [...]

Excerpts from “The Physical Universe
as Idea Construction”
My First Glimpse into the Interior Universe

Intrusions from the Interior Universe

Pure energy, or any “portion” of it, contains within itself the creative propensity toward individuation, so that within any given portion all individually conscious life is implied, created, sustained. [...] Your physical universe and laws give you little evidence of this kind of activity, for at that level the evidence shows you the appearance of time or decay. [...] For that matter, despite all appearances, the physical universe was not born through some explosion of energy which is being dispersed, but is everywhere being created at all of its points “at each moment.”

(10:02.) I can say precisely that pure energy is everywhere within itself conscious, but the very words themselves somewhat distort my meaning, for I am speaking of a consciousness most difficult to describe.

[...] As you live in an obvious physical universe, sharing in its reality, so each of you exists in a far vaster psychological or psychic universe — surrounded by, supported by, and part of psychic or psychological entities (long pause) infinite in their variety. [...]

[...] In the same way, it does not help to compare your own consciousness to one of starlike psychological or psychic properties. The psychological mobility of consciousness, however, allows for an inner kind of communication impossible to verbalize, an interlocking spiritual and biological language by which experience is directly transmuted. [...]

“Nothing in the universe is ever lost, or mislaid, or wasted, so the energy of your own thoughts, while they are still your own thoughts, helps to form the natural attributes of physical realities that you do not perceive. So is your own world formed by units of consciousness. Its natural elements are the glistening remnants of other units of consciousness that you do not see.”

(Pause at 9:04, one of many.) Each “particleized” unit, however, rides the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave and particle both belong. Each particleized unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles—for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. [...] Ethically, the CU’s represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man’s relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with them.

In the beginning CU’s, then, units of consciousness, existing within a divine psychological gestalt, endowed with the unimaginable creativity of that sublime identity, began themselves to create, to explore, and to fulfill those innate values by which they were characterized. Operating both as waves and particles, directed in part by their own creative restlessness, and directed in part by the unquenchable creativity of All That Is, they embarked upon the project that brought time and space and your entire [universe] into being. [...]

[...] As physical creatures, they focused upon what you think of as physical identities: separate, individual differences, endowing each physical consciousness with its own original variations and creative potentials, its own opportunity for completely original experience, and a viewpoint or platform from which to participate in reality—one that at that level could not be experienced in the same way by any other individual (all very intently). This is [the] privileged, always new, private and immediate, direct experience of any individual of any species, or of any degree, as it encounters the objective universe.

Remember, again, the manifest [universe] emerges from a subjective reality, one that is implied in the very nature of your world itself. I would like you, then, to think of those units of consciousness from an entirely different scale of events.

[...] It is, itself, the invisible universe that is everywhere implied within your world, but that becomes manifest to your perception only through historic time. [...] It is, in all meanings of the word, divine, yet it disperses even that divinity so that in your terms (long pause), each unit of consciousness contains within itself those properties of divinity. [...]

[...] That is, again, because the basic units of consciousness that build up matter—that form matter—are themselves endowed with a subjective acuteness. [...] (Long pause.) Your position on the scale of awareness inclines you to categorize consciousnesses so that only your own familiar brand seems to fit the definition—so again here I remind you that consciousness is everywhere in the deepest terms, because All That Is disperses itself throughout physical reality. [...]

(9:55.) Your imaginations help you bring elements of that inner implied universe into actuality. [...] Your imaginations have always helped you form your civilizations, your arts and your sciences, and when they are united with your reasoning processes they can bring you knowledge about the universe and your places in it that you can receive in no other fashion.

When your friend Philip innocently asked at what point human consciousness entered the picture, his question was not pertinent. Human consciousness involves entity consciousness, and entity consciousness asserted itself at the very first phase of physical materialization.

[...] The strong self-conscious self of which I have spoken, the self-conscious self of which your own personality is not aware, this self that faces into the inner world of reality, quite consciously draws upon the vitality and stuff of what is.

The conscious ego then manipulates this material for the purposes of camouflage constructions. The transformation of vitality into physical properties is done by this self-conscious self that faces the inner world. The subconscious is the link between these two self-consciousnesses, and here you find an acceptance by the camouflage personality of the materials at hand.

The question has to do with the so-called creation of your universe, the introduction of entities upon it, and of course with the cause or causes behind such creation. You know by now that you create your own camouflage-patterned universe, and I have tried to cover some of the mechanisms involved in this continuous, seemingly automatic creation.

Yet even these camouflage patterns must follow the basic rules of the inner universe, and reflect them, even if in a distortive manner. [...] So are all the other basic laws of the inner universe followed on every plane, and reflected from the most minute to the most gigantic spectrum.

Concentrating upon your own camouflage universe, you are able to distinguish only the distortive pattern, and from this pattern you deduce your ideas of cause and effect, past, present and future, and ideas of an expanding universe that floats …

The value climate of psychological reality can be likened to an ocean in which all consciousness has its being. [...]

[...] Your camouflage and your world are created by conscious focusing and unconscious concentration. [...]