This page has Book Excerpts from The Nature of Personal Reality written by Jane Roberts and dictated by energy personality Seth.
Some more famous teachers and coaches talking about this book:
“Seth was one of my first metaphysical teachers. He remains a constant
source of knowledge and inspiration in my life.”
— Marianne Williamson
author of A Return to Love
“The Seth books present an alternate map of reality with a new diagram
of the psyche . . . useful to all explorers of consciousness.”
— Deepak Chopra, M.D.
author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
“I would like to see the Seth books as required reading for anyone on
their spiritual pathway. The amazing in-depth information in the Seth
books is as relevant today as it was in the early ’70s when Jane Roberts
first channeled this material.”
— Louise Hay author of You Can
Heal Your Life
“The Nature of Personal Reality had an important influence on my life
and work. Seth’s teachings provided one of the initial inspirations for
writing Creative Visualization.”
— Shakti Gawain
author of Creative Visualization
“Quite simply one of the best books I’ve ever read!”
— Richard Bach
author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Now the Book Excerpts Chapter wise
Chapter 1
The Living Picture of the World
The living picture of the world grows within the mind. The world as it appears to you is like a three-dimensional painting in which each individual takes a hand. Each color, each line that appears within it has first been painted within a mind, and only then does it materialize without. In this case, however, the artists themselves are a portion of the painting, and appear within it. There is no effect in the exterior world that does not spring from an inner source. There is no motion that does not first occur within the mind.
The body of the earth can be said to have its own soul, or mind (whichever term you prefer). Using this analogy the
mountains and oceans, the valleys and rivers and all natural phenomena spring from the earth’s soul, as all events and all manufactured objects appear from the inner mind or soul of mankind.
You always know what you are doing, even when you do not realize it. Your eye knows it sees, though it cannot see itself except through the use of reflection. In the same way the world as you see it is a reflection of what you are, a reflection not in glass but in three dimensional reality. You project your thoughts, feelings, and expectations outward, then you
perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections.
It is not as easy, however, to realize that your feelings and thoughts form your exterior experience in the same way, or that the events that appear to happen to you are initiated by you within your mental or psychic inner environment.
Your body does not just happen to be thin or fat, tall or short, healthy or ill. These characteristics are mental, and are thrust outward by you upon your image.
Your soul was not born yesterday, in those terms, but before the annals of time as you think of time.
The characteristics that were yours at birth were yours for a reason. The inner self chose them. To a large extent, the inner self can even now alter many of them. You did not arrive at birth without a history. Your individuality was always latent within your soul, and the “history” that is a part of you is written within unconscious memory that resides not only
within your psyche, but is faithfully decoded in your genes and chromosomes, and fulfilled in the blood that rushes through your veins.
You are aware, alert, and participating in many more realities than you know as your soul expresses itself through you
You do not have the same ego now that you had five years ago, but you are not aware of the change. Ego rises out of what you are, in other words. It is a part of the action of your being and consciousness, but as the eye cannot see its own shifting colors and expressions, as it is not aware that it lives and dies constantly as its atomic structure changes, so you are not aware that the ego continually changes, dies, and is reborn.
The eye rises out of the physical structure. The ego rises out of the structure of the psyche. It cannot see itself, as the eye cannot. Both look outward — in one case away from the physical body, and in the other case away from the inner psyche to the environment.
Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances. There is no other valid way of changing physical events.
Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.
Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions.
In this existence you are learning to handle the inexhaustible energy that is available to you.
Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations. Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.
Everything that you experience has consciousness, and each consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone. There is great cooperation involved in the formation of the earth as you think of it, and so the individual living structures of the planet rise up from the feeling-tone within each atom and molecule.
This energy comes from the core of BEING (in capital letters), from All That Is (with our usual capitals), and represents the source of neverending vitality. It is Being, Being in You. As such, all of the energy and power of Being is focused and reflected through you in the direction of your three dimensional existence.
While your feeling-tone is uniquely yours, still it is expressed in a certain fashion that is shared by all consciousnesses focused in physical reality.
You are confined only to the extent that you have chosen physical reality, and so placed yourself within its context of experience.
You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.
The ego and the conscious mind are not the same thing. The ego is composed of various portions of the personality — it is a combination of characteristics, ever-changing, that act in unitary fashion — the portion of the personality that deals
most directly with the world.
The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but in this case is turned outward toward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward. Left alone, it perceives clearly.
In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality. But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life. The ego, while appearing the same to itself, ever changes.
End of Excerpts of Chapter 1 of The Nature of Personal Reality written by Jane Roberts and dictated by energy personality Seth.
