Allow me to voice my perspective on what you wrote.
I'll begin with the conclusion you reach in your last statement. To paraphrase, the answers are all within us. A truer statement has never been made. But what, then, is the purpose of the reality which seems to be outside of ourselves? In my humble opinion that can't be ignored or sidestepped in favour of strictly going within.
For the truth is that this seemingly outsidedness is in fact who we are expressed in terms of a physical reality. What lies 'outside' is us. It's a projection of our subjective reality into a three dimensional medium. But for what purpose then? Why would we go through the 'trouble' of doing so? Is this endeavour the height of silliness or is it a question of lack of understanding on our part? I'm willing to bet it's the latter.
Now I've said it before so let me say it again, and hopefully folks will ponder this statement as to whether it conveys real truth before simply dismissing it because they may at first not know what to do with the information, or how to fit it into their current world view. It is near impossible, or at least highly unlikely, that anyone can understand the miraculousness of all that is life without first understanding who and what we are. Let that statement sink in.
For if it is true that everything which appears to be outside of our skin is actually an extension of ourselves then it stands to reason it is all us in the first and final analysis. And so, it stands to reason that if we are unaware that the 'outside' is us, due to an ignorance of knowing who we are, and the outside is then mistakenly believed to be apart and separate from us, then is it any small wonder that any explanations we attempt to define that outsidedness as something that is not us would, in the end, make little sense?
I'll submit here a rather comprehensive and detailed explanation of who and what we are, although I will caution that it is not complete. This explanation comes from one who has experienced our world yet is no longer engaged in it on the same level as we are. He offers his perspective of earthly reality from the perspective of one who, by his own admission, resides in a more expansive environment in which he is able to view our reality as easily as we are able to view a painting.
But quickly, before I submit his explanation I would like to comment on some of your other perspectives in your post. "I do also realise the futility of such endeavors and speculations. Because that's all they are at this point: pointless speculations that keep our minds busy and entertained...and distracted."
Is your conclusion drawn only from the fact that you feel you have not been able to reach any definitive and conclusive answers? And so the belief arises that after so much effort with little to no results the efforts have all been in vain and useless? Correct me if I'm wrong, Sunmaster, but that seems to be the gist of the sentiment you express. Of course I beg to differ. And I ask also, to keep our minds busy and entertained...and distracted from what else? Is there something else we should be doing? And if so what might that be? "What do they [speculations] offer us in terms of personal fulfillment and perhaps development?" I would answer with "a whole lot." "Will they increase our happiness, compassion and self worth?" Absolutely. "Will they uncover the shadows that have plagued us since childhood?" There's no need to muddle through dirty waters to get to clean waters. If one desired health would it better to attempt to understand what makes healthy people healthy or to understand what makes sick people sick? Are the healthy in a better position to teach health or is it the sick? Given this analogy does it then make sense to look for solutions by dredging through unpleasant past episodes?
So, without further ado, here's food for thought that should keep one chewing for a long time to come. Note that all of my smilies are my personal symbolism for the impish playfulness that is me.
Seth on The Environment of the Psyche.
You come into the condition you call life, and pass out of it. In between you encounter a lifetime. Suspended - or so it certainly seems - between birth and death, you wonder at the nature of your own being. You search your experience and study official histories of the past, hoping to find there clues as to the nature of your own reality.
Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness. Therefore it appears that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually, as your self-consciousness develops from your birth. It appears, furthermore, that your consciousness will meet a death beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive. You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of your childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality. Yet most of you, my readers, yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that your own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death.
Each person knows intuitively that his or her own experiences somehow matter, and that there is a meaning, however obscured, that connects the individual with a greater creative pattern. Each person senses now and then a private purpose, and yet many are filled with frustration because that inner goal is not consciously known or clearly apprehended.
When you were a child you knew you were growing toward an adulthood. You were sustained by the belief in projected abilities - that is, you took it for granted that you were in the process of learning and growing. No matter what happened to you, you lived in a kind of rarefied psychic air, in which your being was charged and glowing. You knew you were in a state of becoming. The world, in those terms, is also in a state of becoming.
In private life and on the world stage, action is occurring all the time. It is easy to look at yourselves or at the world, coma, to see yourself and become so hypnotized by your present state that all change or growth seems impossible, or to see the world in the same manner. You do not remember your birth, as a rule. Certainly it seems that you do not remember the birth of the world. You had a history, however, before your birth - even as it seems to you that the world had a history before you were born.
The sciences still keep secrets from each other. The physical sciences pretend that the centuries exist one after the other, while the physicists realize that time is not only relative to the perceiver, but that all events are simultaneous. The archaeologists merrily continue to date the remains of "past" civilizations, never asking themselves what the past means - or saying: "This is the past relative to my point of perception."
Astronomers speak of outer space and of galaxies that would dwarf your own. In the world that you recognize there are also wars and rumors of wars, prophets of destruction. Yet in spite of all, the private man or the private woman, unknown, anonymous to the world at large, stubbornly feels within a rousing, determined affirmation that says: "I am important. I have a purpose, even though I do not understand what it is. My life that seems so insignificant and inefficient, is nevertheless of prime importance in some way that I do not recognize." Period.
Though caught up in a life of seeming frustration, obsessed with family problems, uneasy in sickess, defeated it seems for all practical purposes, some portion of each individual rouses against all disasters, all discouragements, and now and then at least glimpses a sense of enduring validity that cannot be denied. It is to that knowing portion of each individual that I address myself. Period.
I am not, on the one hand, an easy author to deal with, because I speak from a different level of consciousness than the one with which you are familiar. On the other hand, my voice is as natural as oak leaves blowing in the wind, for I speak from a level of awareness that is as native to your psyche as now the seasons seem to be to your soul.
I am writing this book through a personality known as Jane Roberts. That is the name given to her birth. She shares with you the triumphs and travails of physical existence. Like you, she is presented with a life that seems to begin at her birth, and that is suspended from that point of emergence until the moment of death's departure. She has asked the same questions that you ask in your quiet moments.
Her questions were asked with such a vehemence, however, that she broke through the barriers that most of you erect, and so began a journey that is undertaken for herself and for you also - for each of your experiences, however minute or seemingly insignificant, becomes part of the knowledge of your species. Where did you come from and where are you going. What are you? What is the nature of the psyche?
I can only write a portion of this book. You must complete it. For "The Psyche" is meaningless except as it relates to the individual psyche. I speak to you from levels of yourself that you have forgotten, and yet not forgotten. I speak to you through the printed page, and yet my words will re-arouse within you the voices that spoke to you in your childhood, and before your birth.
This will not be a dry treatise, studiously informing you about some hypothetical structure called the psyche, but will instead evoke from the depths of your being experiences that you have forgotten, and bring together from the vast reaches of time and space the miraculous identity that is yourself.
Now: The earth has a structure. In those terms, so does the psyche. You live in one particular area on the face of your planet, and you can only see so much of it at any given time - yet you take it for granted that the ocean exists even when you cannot feel its spray, or see the tides.
And even if you live in a desert, you take it on faith that there are indeed great cultivated fields and torrents of rain. It is true that some of your faith is based on knowledge. Others have traveled where you have not, and television provides you with images. Despite this, however, your senses present you with only a picture of your immediate environment, unless they are cultivated in certain particular manners that are relatively unusual.
You take it for granted that the earth has a history. In those terms, your own psyche has a history also. You have taught yourselves to look outward into physical reality, but the inward validity of your being cannot be found there - only its effects. You can turn on television and see a drama, but the inward mobility and experience of your psyche is mysteriously enfolded within all of those exterior gestures that allow you to turn on the television switch to begin with, and to make sense of the images presented. So the motion of your own psyche usually escapes you.
Where is the television drama before it appears on your channel - and where does it go afterwards? How can it exist one moment and be finished the next, and yet be replayed when the conditions are correct? If you understood the mechanics, you would know that the program obviously does not go anywhere. It simply is, while the proper conditions activate it for your attention. In the same way, you are alive whether or not you are playing on an earth "program." You are, whether you are in time or out of it.
Hopefully in this book we will put you in touch with your own being as it exists outside of the context in which you are used to viewing it.
As you dwell in one particular city or town or village, you presently "live" in one small area of the psyche's inner planet. You identify that area as your home, as your "I." Mankind has learned to explore the physical environment, but has barely begun the greater inner journeys that will be embarked upon as the inner lands of the psyche are joyously and bravely explored. In those terms, there is a land of the psyche. However, this virgin territory is the heritage of each individual, and no domain is quite like any other. Yet there is indeed an inner commerce that occurs, and as the exterior continents rise from the inner structure of the earth, so the lands of the psyche emerge from an even greater invisible source. That is the end of dictation for the evening.
Now: Dictation (on The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression): As the earth is composed of many environments, so is the psyche. As there are different continents, islands, mountains, seas, and peninsulas, so the psyche takes various shapes. If you live in one country, you often consider natives in other areas of the world as foreigners, while of course they see you in the same light. In those terms, the psyche contains many other levels of reality. From your point of view these might appear alien, and yet they are as much a part of your psyche as your motherland is a portion of the earth.
Different countries follow different kinds of constitutions, and even within any geographical area there may be various local laws followed by the populace. For example, if you are driving a car you may discover to your chagrin that the local speed limit in one small town is miles slower than in another, In the same manner, different portions of the psyche exist with their own local "laws," their different kinds of "government." They each possess their own characteristic geography.
If you are traveling around the world, you have to make frequent time adjustments. When you travel through the psyche, you will also discover that your own time is automatically squeezed out of shape. If for a moment you try to imagine that you were able to carry your own time with you on such a journey, all packaged neatly in a wristwatch, then you would be quite amazed at what would happen.
As you approached the boundaries of certain psychic lands, the wristwatch would run backwards. As you entered other kingdoms of the psyche your watch would go faster or slower. Now, if time suddenly ran backward you would notice it. If it ran faster or slower enough, you would also notice the differences. If time ran backward very slowly, and according to the conditions, you might not be aware of the difference, because it would take so much "time" to get from the present moment to the one "before" it that you might be struck, instead, simply with the feeling that something was familiar, as if it had happened before.
In other lands of the psyche, however, even stranger events might occur. The watch itself might change shape, or turn heavy as a rock, or as light as a gas, so that you could not read the time at all. Or the hands might never move. Different portions of the psyche are familiar with all of these mentioned occurrences-because the psyche straddles any of the local laws that you recognize as "official," and has within itself the capacity to deal with an infinite number of reality-hyphen-experiences.
Now: Obviously your physical body has capacities that few of you use to full advantage. But beyond this, the species itself possesses the possibilities for adaptations that allow it to exist and persist in the physical environment under drastically varying circumstances. Hidden within the corporal biological structure there are latent specializations that would allow the species to continue, and that take into consideration any of the planetary changes that might occur for whatever reasons.
The psyche, however, while being earth-tuned in your experience, also has many other systems of reality "to contend with." Each psyche, then, contains within it the potentials, abilities, and powers that are possible, or capable of actualization under any conditions.
The psyche, your psyche, can record and experience time backward, forward, dash - or sideways through systems of alternate presents - or it can maintain its own integrity in a no-time environment. The psyche is the creator of time complexes. Theoretically, the most fleeting moment of your day can be prolonged endlessly. This would not be a static elongation, however, but a vivid delving into that moment, from which all time as you think of it, past and future and all its probabilities, might emerge.
If you are reading this book, you have already become weary with official concepts. You have already begun to sense those greater dimensions of your being. You are ready to step aside from all conventionalized doctrines, and to some extent or another you are impatient to examine and experience the natural flowing nature that is your birthright. That birthright has long been clothed in symbols and mythologies.
Consciousness forms symbols. It is not the other way around. Symbols are great exuberant playthings. You can build with them as you can with children's blocks. You can learn from them, as once you piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school. Symbols are as natural to your minds as trees are to the earth. There is a difference, however, between a story told to children about forests, and a real child in a real woods. Both the story and the woods are "real." But in your terms the child entering the real woods becomes involved in its life cycle, treads upon leaves that fell yesterday, rests beneath trees far older than his or her memory, and looks up at night to see a moon that will soon disappear. Looking at an illustration of the woods may give a child some excellent imaginative experiences, but they will be of a different kind, and the child knows the difference.
If you mistake the symbols for the reality, however, you will program your experience, and you will insist that each forest look like the pictures in your book. In other words, you will expect your own experiences with various portions of your psyche to be more or less the same. You will take your local laws with you, and you will try to tell psychic time with a wristwatch.
We will have to use some of your terms, however, particularly in the beginning. Other terms with which you are familiar, we will squeeze out of all recognition. The reality of your own being cannot be defined by anyone but you, and then your own definition must be understood as a reference point at best. The psychologist, the priest, the physicist, the philosopher or the guru, can explain your own psyche to you only insofar as those specialists can forget that they are specialists, and deal directly with the private psyche from which all specializations come.
When I use the term "psyche," many of you will immediately wonder about my definition.
Any word, simply by being thought, written or spoken, immediately implies a specification. In your daily reality it is very handy to distinguish one thing from another by giving each item a name. When you are dealing with subjective experience, however, definitions can often serve to limit rather than express a given experience. Obviously the psyche is not a thing. It does not have a beginning or ending. It cannot be seen or touched in normal terms. It is useless, therefore, to attempt any description of it through usual vocabulary, for your language primarily allows you to identify physical rather than nonphysical experience.
I am not saying that words cannot be used to describe the psyche, but they cannot define it. It is futile to question: "What is the difference between my psyche and my soul, my entity and my greater being?" for all of these are terms used in an effort to express the greater portions of your own experience that you sense within yourself. Your use of language may make you impatient for definitions, however. Hopefully this book will allow you some intimate awareness, some definite experience, that will acquaint you with the nature of your own psyche, and then you will see that its reality escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.
When you begin a physical journey, you feel yourself distinct from the land through which you travel. No matter how far you journey - on a motorcycle, in a car or plane, or on foot - by bicycle or camel, or truck or vessel, still you are the wanderer, and the land or ocean or desert is the environment through which you roam. When you begin your travels into your own psyche, however, everything changes. You are still the wanderer, the journeyman or journeywoman, but you are also the vehicle and the environment. You form the roads, your method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as you go along.
When in colonial times men and women traveled westward across the continent of North America, many of them took it on faith that the land did indeed continue beyond - for example - towering mountains. When you travel as pioneers through your own reality, you create each blade of grass, each inch of land, each sunset and sunrise, each oasis, friendly cabin or enemy encounter as you go along.
Now if you are looking for simple definitions to explain the psyche, I will be of no help. If you want to experience the splendid creativity of your own being, however, then I will use methods that will arouse your greatest adventuresomeness, your boldest faith in yourself, and I will paint pictures of your psyche that will lead you to experience even its broadest reaches, if you so desire. The psyche, then, is not a known land. It is not simply an alien land, to which or through which you can travel. It is not a completed or nearly complete subjective universe already there for you to explore. It is, instead, an ever-forming state of being, in which your present sense of existence resides. You create it and it creates you.
It creates in physical terms that you recognize. On the other hand, you create physical time for your psyche, for without you there would be no experience of the seasons, their coming and their passing. There would be no experience of what Ruburt (Seth's "entity" name for Jane) calls "the dear privacy of the moment," so if one portion of your being wants to rise above the solitary march of the moments, other parts of your psyche rush, delighted, into that particular time focus that is your own. As you now desire to understand the timeless, infinite dimensions of your own greater existence, so "even now" multitudinous elements of that non-earthly identity just as eagerly explore the dimensions of earth-being and creaturehood.
Earlier I mentioned some odd effects that might occur if you tried to take your watch or other timepiece into other levels of reality. Now, when you try to interpret your selfhood in other kinds of existence, the same surprises or distortions or alterations can seem to occur. When you attempt to understand your psyche, and define it in terms of time, then it seems that the idea of reincarnation makes sense. You think: "Of course. My psyche lives many lives physically, one after the other. If my present experience is dictated by that in my childhood, then surely my current life is a result of earlier ones. And so you try to define the psyche in terms of time, and in so doing you limit your understanding and even your experience of it.
Let us try another analogy: You are an artist in the throes of inspiration. There is before you a canvas, and you are working in all areas of it at once. In your terms each part of the canvas could be a time period - say, a given century. You are trying to keep some kind of overall balance and purpose in mind, so when you make one brushstroke in any particular portion of this canvas, all the relationships within the entire area can change. No brushstroke is ever really wiped out, however, in this mysterious canvas of our analogy, but remains, further altering all the relationships at its particular level.
These magical brushstrokes, however, are not simple representations on a flat surface, but alive, carrying within themselves all of the artist's intent, but focused through the characteristics of each individual stroke.
If the artist paints a doorway, all of the sensed perspectives within it open, and add further dimensions of reality. Since this is our analogy, we can stretch it as far as we like-far further than any artist could stretch his canvas. Therefore, there is no need to limit ourselves. The canvas itself can change size and shape as the artist works. The people in the artist's painting are not simple representations either - to stare back at him with forever-fixed glassy eyes, or ostentatious smiles, dressed in their best Sunday clothes. Instead, they can confront the artist and talk back. They can turn sideways in the painting and look at their companions, observe their environment, and even look out of the dimensions of the painting itself and question the artist.
Now the psyche in our analogy is both the painting and the artist, for the artist finds that all of the elements within the painting are portions of himself. More, as he looks about, our artist discovers that he is literally surrounded by other paintings that he is also producing. As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.
Our artist then realizes that all of the people he painted are also painting their own pictures, and moving about in their own realities in a way that even he cannot perceive.
In a flash of insight it occurs to him that he also has been painted - that there is another artist behind him from whom his own creativity springs, and he also begins to look out of the frame.
Now: If you are confused, that is fine-for it means that already we have broken through conventional ideas. Anything that I say following this analogy will seem comparatively simple, for by now it must appear at least that you have little hope of discovering your own greater dimensions.
Again, rather than trying to define the psyche, I will try to incite your imagination so that you can leap beyond what you have been told you are, to some kind of direct experience. To some extent this book itself provides its own demonstration. I call Jane Roberts "Ruburt" (and, hence, "he" and "him") simply because the name designates another portion of her reality, while she identifies herself as Jane. She writes her own books and carries on as each of you do in life's ordinary context. She has her own unique likes and dislikes, characteristics and abilities; her own time and space slot as each of you do. She is one living portrait of the psyche, independent in her own context, and in the environment as given.
Now I come from another portion of reality's picture, from another dimension of the psyche in which your existence can be observed, as you might look upon a normal painting.
In those terms, I am outside of your "frame" of reference. My perspective cannot be contained in your own painting of reality. I write my books, but because my primary focus is in a reality that "is larger than your own," I cannot appear as myself fully within your reference.
So Ruburt's subective perspective opens up because of his desire and interest, and discloses my own. He opens up a door in himself that leads to other levels of his being, but a being that cannot be completely expressed in your world. That existence is mine, expressed in my experience at another level of reality, so I must write my books through Ruburt. Doors in the psyche are different from simple openings that lead from one room to another, so my books only show a glimpse of my own existence. You all have such psychological doors however, that lead into dimensionally greater areas of the psyche, so to some extent or another I speak for those other aspects of yourselves that do not appear in your
daily context.
Beyond what I recognize as my own existence, there are others. To some extent I share in their experience - to a far greater extent, for example, than Ruburt shares in mine.
On some relatively few occasions, for example, Ruburt has been able to contact what he calls "Seth Two." That level of reality, however, is even further divorced from your own. It represents an even greater extension of the psyche, in your terms. There is a much closer relationship, in that I recognize my own identity as a distinct portion of Seth Two's existence, where Ruburt feels little correspondence. In a manner of speaking, Seth Two's reality includes my own, yet I am aware of my contribution to "his" experience.
In the same way, each of my readers has a connection with the same level of psychic reality. In greater terms, all of this is happening at once. Ruburt is contributing and forming a certain portion of my experience, even as I am contributing to his. Your identities are not something already completed. Your most minute action, thought, and dream adds to the reality of your psyche, no matter how grand or austere the psyche may appear to you when you think of it as a hypothetical term.
Ruburt has specialized in a study of consciousness and the psyche. Most of my readers are very interested, yet they have other pressing concerns that prevent them from embarking upon such an extended study.
You all have physical reality to deal with. This applies equally to Ruburt and Joseph (Seth's entity name for me.) Thus far, my books have included Joseph's extended notes. They have set the scene, so to speak. My books have gone beyond those boundaries, however. In your terms, only so much can be done in time. Joseph is even now involved in typing my previous manuscript (The "Unknown" Reality.) It was written in such a way that it tied the personal experience of Ruburt and Joseph in with a greater theoretical framework, so that one could not be separated from the other.
In this new book, therefore, I will sometimes provide my own "scene setting." The psyche's production, in other words, has escaped practical, physical bounds, so that from my level of reality I can no longer expect Joseph to do more than record the sessions. I will ask you, my readers, to bear with me then. In my own way, I will try to provide suitable references so that you know what is going on physically in your time, as this book is written.
Largely, the writing of this book occurs in a "no-time, or out-of-time context." Physically, however, Ruburt and Joseph take many hours in its production. They have moved to a new house. Ruburt, as usual, is smoking as I speak. His foot rests upon a coffee table, as he moves back and forth in his rocking chair. It is nearing midnight as I speak (at 11:42). Earlier, a great thunderstorm raged, its reverberations seeming to crack the sky. Now it is quiet, with only the drone of Ruburt's new refrigerator sounding like the deep purr of some mechanical animal.
As you read this book, you are also immersed in such intimate physical experiences. Do not consider them as separated from the greater reality of your being, but as a part of it. You do not exist outside of your psyche's being, but within it. Some of you may have just put children to bed as you read these lines. Some of you may be sitting at a table. Some of you may have just gone to the bathroom. These mundane activities may seem quite divorced from what I am telling you, yet in each simple gesture, and in the most necessary of physical acts, there is the great magical unknowing elegance in which you reside-and in the most ordinary of your motions, there are clues and hints as to the nature of the psyche and its human expression.
The Nature of the Psyche: It's Human Expression - Jane Roberts
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