by Jane Roberts

Space as you perceive it simply does not exist. Not only is the illusion of space caused by your own physical perceptive mechanisms, but it is also caused by mental patterns that you have accepted – patterns that are adopted by consciousness when it reaches a certain stage of “evolution” within your system.

When you arrive, or emerge, into physical life, not only is your mind not a blank slate, waiting for the scrolls that experience will write upon it, but you are already equipped with a memory bank far surpassing that of any computer. You face your first day upon the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.

You may think of your soul or entity – though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy – as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments. It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed. Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole. I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment – in your case in physical reality – but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

I mention this whole subject here, however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real in the terms that you imagine it to be. When you are born, then, you are already “conditioned” to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but intense range.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and in space. The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you. Basically, however, this is an illusion. Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way. The universe as you know it is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. The events are mental. This does not mean that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to hold books, glasses, and oranges, although the table has no solid qualities of its own.

The entity, or the soul, has a far more creative and complicated nature than even your religions have ever granted it. It utilizes numberless methods of perception, and it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness. Your idea of the soul is indeed limited by your three dimensional concepts. The soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head. Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

Now some of you who will read this will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses. Remember also that if physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality. The illusion itself has a purpose and a meaning.

Perhaps it is better to say that physical reality is one form that reality takes. In your system, however, you are focused much more intensely upon one relatively small aspect of experience.

We can travel freely through varying numbers of such realities. Our experience at this point includes our work in each. I do not mean to minimize the importance of your present personalities, nor of physical existence. To the contrary.

Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable place of training. Your personality as you now know it will indeed persevere, and with its memories, but it is only a part of your entire identity, even as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, though now you are far more than a child.

You will continue to grow and develop, and you will become aware of other environments, even as you left your childhood home. But environments are not objective things, conglomerations of objects that exist independently of you. Instead you form them and they are quite literally extensions of yourself; materialized mental acts that extend outward from your consciousness.

Your scientists are finally learning what philosophers have known for centuries – that mind can influence matter. They still have to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body. It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing. Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth. Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

Quite literally, the “inner self” forms the body by transforming mental matter into physical counterparts. You grow the body. Its condition perfectly mirrors your inner state at any given time. Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.

You are intuitively aware that you form your image, and that you are independent of it. You do not realize that you create your larger environment and the physical world as you know it by propelling your mental being into matter – a breakthrough into three-dimensional life. The inner self, therefore, individually and en masse, sends its psychic energy out, forming tentacles that coalesce into form.

Each emotion and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique. It is highly equipped to combine with certain others, according to the various ranges of intensity that you may include. In a manner of speaking, three-dimensional objects are formed in somewhat the same way that the images you see on your television screen are formed, but with a large difference. And if you are not tuned into that particular frequency, you will not perceive the physical objects at all.

Each of you act as transformers, unconsciously, automatically transforming highly sophisticated electromagnetic units into physical objects. You are in the middle of a “matter-concentrated system,” surrounded, so to speak, by weaker areas in which what you would call “pseudomatter” persists. Each thought and emotion spontaneously exists as a simple or complex electromagnetic unit – unperceived, incidentally, as yet by your scientists.

The intensity determines both the strength and the permanency of the physical image into which the thought self will be materialized. Here, I merely want you to understand that the world that you know is the reflection of an inner reality. You are made basically of the same ingredients as a chair, a stone, a head of lettuce, a bird. In a gigantic cooperative endeavor, all consciousness joins together to make the forms that you perceive.

We also realize that permanency of form is an illusion, since all consciousness must be in a state of change. We can be, in your terms, in several places at once because we realize the true mobility of consciousness. Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form. This form, projecting outward from your own consciousness, completely escapes your egotistical attention.

Environments are primarily mental creations of consciousness thrust out into many forms. I have a fourteenth-century study, my favorite, with which I am very pleased, for example. In your physical terms it does not exist, and I know quite well it is my mental production. Yet I enjoy it, and often take a physical form in order to sit at the desk and look out the window at the countryside.

Now you do the same thing when you sit in your living room, but you do not realize what you are doing; and presently you are somewhat restricted. When my associates and I meet, we often translate each other’s thoughts into various shapes and forms out of pure enjoyment in the practice. We have what you might call a game, demanding some expertise, where for our own amusement we see which of us can translate any given thought into the most numerous forms.

There are such subtle qualities affecting the nature of all thought, such emotional gradations, that no one is ever identical – and incidentally, no physical object in your system is an exact duplicate of any other. The atoms and molecules that compose it – any object – have their own identities that color and qualify any object that they form.

You accept and perceive and focus upon continuities and similarities as you perceive physical objects of any kind, and in a very important manner you shut out and ignore dissimilarities out of a given field of actuality. Therefore you are very highly discriminating, accepting certain qualities and ignoring others. Your bodies not only change completely every seven years, for example. They change constantly with each breath.

Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced. The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration. Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves. The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity. Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self. You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from “past” experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were “characteristic” and now are vanished – ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought. The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent physical and subjective self in order to maintain a relatively constant, relatively permanent environment. So you are always in a position of ignoring such change. Those that you refuse to acknowledge are precisely those that would give you a much better understanding of the true nature of reality, individual subjectivity, and the physical environment that seems to surround you.

What happens to a thought when it leaves your conscious mind? It does not simply disappear. You can learn to follow it, but you are usually frightened of turning your attention away from its intense focus in three-dimensional existence. Therefore, it seems that the thought disappears. It seems also that your subjectivity has a mysterious unknown quality about it, and that even your mental life has a sort of insidious dropping-off point, a subjective cliff over which thoughts and memories fall, to disappear into nothingness. Therefore to protect yourself, to protect your subjectivity from drifting, you erect various psychological barriers at what you suppose to be the danger points. Instead, you see, you can follow these thoughts and emotions simply by realizing that your own reality continues in another direction, beside the one with which you mainly identify. For these thoughts and emotions that have left your conscious mind will lead you into other environments.

These subjective openings through which thoughts seem to disappear are in fact like psychic warps, connecting the self that you know with other universes of experience – realities where symbols come to life and thoughts are not denied their potential.

There is communication between these other realities and your own in your dream states, and a constant interaction between both systems. If there is any point where your own consciousness seems to elude you or escape you, or if there is any point where your consciousness seems to end, then these are the points where you have yourselves set up psychological and psychic barriers, and these are precisely those areas that you should explore. Otherwise you feel as if your consciousness is enclosed within your skull, immobile and constricted, and every lost thought or forgotten memory at least symbolically seems like a small death. And such is not the case.

Excerpt from Seth Speaks

See Part II here.