“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your consciousness then takes many forms, and these forms need not be alike any more, say, than a caterpillar is like a butterfly. The soul or entity has complete freedom of expression. It changes its form to suit its expression, and it forms environments like stage settings, and worlds to suit its purposes. Each setting brings forth new developments.

There are those who appear within these plays fully aware. These personalities willingly take roles, knowing that they are roles, in order to lead the others toward the necessary realization and development. They lead the actors to see beyond the selves and settings they have created. These personalities from other levels of existence oversee the play, so to speak, and appear among the actors. Their purpose is to open up within the three-dimensional selves those psychological doorways that will release the three-dimensional self for further development in another system of reality.

The settings in your physical environment, the sometimes lovely paraphernalia, the physical aspects of life as you know it, are all camouflages, and so I call your physical reality a camouflage. Yet these camouflages are composed of the vitality of the universe. The rocks and stones and mountains and earth are living camouflage, interlocking psychic webs formed by minute consciousnesses that you cannot perceive as such. The atoms and molecules within them have their own consciousness, as do the atoms and molecules with your body.

(10:07.) Since you all have a hand in forming this physical setting, and since you are ensconced yourself in a physical form, then using the physical senses you will only perceive this fantastic setting. The reality that exists both within it and beyond it will elude you. Even the actor is not entirely three-dimensional, however. He is a part of a multidimensional self.

Within him there are methods of perception that allow him to see through the camouflage settings, to see beyond the stage. He uses these inner senses constantly, though the actor part of himself is so intent upon the play that this escapes him. In a large manner, the physical senses actually form the physical reality they seem to only perceive. They are themselves part of the camouflage, but they are like lenses over your natural inner perceptions that force you to “see” an available field of activity as physical matter; and so they can be relied upon only to tell you what is happening in a superficial manner. You can tell the position of the other actors for example, or time by clock, but these physical senses will not tell you that time is itself a camouflage, or that consciousness forms the other actors, or that realities that you cannot see exist over and beyond the physical matter that is so apparent.

(10:20.) Highly simplified indeed, the effect would be something like changing one set of glasses for another, for the physical senses are as artificial, basically speaking, to the inner self, as a set of glasses or a hearing aid is to the physical self. The inner senses, therefore, are but rarely used completely consciously.

You would be more than disoriented, for example, but quite terrified, if between one moment and the next your familiar environment as you knew it disappeared to be replaced by other sets of data that you were not ready to understand, so much information from the inner senses must be translated in terms that you can comprehend. Such information must somehow make sense to you as three-dimensional selves, in other words.

Your particular set of camouflages is not the only set, you see. Other realities have entirely different systems, but all personalities have inner senses that are attributes of consciousness, and through these inner senses communications are maintained about which the normally conscious self knows little. Part of my purpose is to make some of these communications known.

Now, pretend that you are on a lighted stage, the stage being the room in which you now sit. Close your eyes and pretend that the lights have gone out, the setting has disappeared and you are alone.