Physical Reality is Illusion and We Are More Than Consciousness

Seth Speaks, Session 519

Physical Space Is An Illusion

Now your ideas of space are highly erroneous.  So in my contacts with your sphere of activity, I do not sweep through bright golden skies like some spiritual superman into your physical domain.

I will go into this in a later chapter, but in a very real manner, 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 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.

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.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and 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.

When I enter your system, I move through a series of mental and psychic events.  You would interpret these events as space and time, and so often I must use the terms, for I must use your language rather than my own.

Root Assumptions

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke – those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence.  Space and time, for example, are root assumptions.  Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements.  When I communicate within your system, I must use and understand the root assumptions upon which it is based.  As a teacher it is part of my job to understand and use these, and I have had existences in many such systems as a part of what you may call my basic training; though in your terms my associates and I had other names for them.

Soul/Entity Is More Than Consciousness

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.  Now in my level of existence I am simply aware of the fact, strange as it may seem, that I am not my consciousness.  My consciousness is an attribute to be used by me.  This applies to each of the readers of this book, even though the knowledge may be hidden.  Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

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.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, and you must interpret what happens in the light of your own root assumptions.  Now whether or not you realize it, each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states without the full participation of your normally conscious self.  In subjective experience you leave behind physical existence and act, at times, with strong purpose and creative validity within dreams that you forget the instant you awaken.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.

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.

Your earth was very dear to me.  I can now turn the focus of my consciousness toward it, and if I choose, experience it as you do; but I can also perceive it in many ways that you cannot in your time.

Now some of you who read this book 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.

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.

Now I will begin, there, on our book at our next session.