“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:25.) 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.

(9:30.) Now, there is a purpose in all this that will also be discussed later. 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.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate. There is no space between my environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that separate us. In a very real way of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts — and the facts are difficult to explain.

When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction, therefore. In one way, I translate what I am into an event that you can understand to some extent. In a much more limited manner, any artist does the same thing when he translates what he is, or a portion of it, into a painting. There is at least an evocative analogy there.

(10:17.) When I contact your reality, therefore, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams. I can be aware of myself as I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, and yet also be aware of myself in my own environment; for I send only a portion of myself here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you write a letter to a friend, and yet are aware of the room in which you sit. I send out much more than you do in a letter, for a portion of my consciousness is now within the entranced woman as I dictate, but the analogy is close enough.

My environment, as I mentioned earlier, is not one of a personality recently dead in your terms, but later I will describe what you can expect under those conditions. One large difference between your environment and mine is that you must physically materialize mental acts as physical matter. We understand the reality of mental acts and recognize their brilliant validity. We accept them for what they are, and therefore we are beyond the necessity to materialize them and interpret them in such a rigid manner.

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.

I will tell you exactly how you form your environment. I form mine following the same rules, though you end up with physical objects and I do not.