The following is excerpted from “The Nature of Personal Realty,” a Seth Book by Jane Roberts, copyrighted 1974 by Jane Roberts. It focuses on how we form our personal experience and predates many other popular sources by other authors. As such, we include it here because of it’s unusual level of authority and articulation. It has been a perennial best seller for many years. Jane Roberts is considered to be the receiver of this information, and not its author (Seth).


What is the reality behind reality?


Is physical life a hallucination? Is there some definable concrete reality, of which your own is a mere shadow?

Your reality is the result of a hallucination, if by this you mean that it is only the picture shown by your senses.  Physically, of course, your existence is perceived through the senses.  In that context, corporeal life is an entranced one, with the focus of attention largely concentrated through the senses’  belief in the reality of their sensations. Yet that experience is the image that reality takes you for now, and so in other terms, earthly life is one version of reality — not reality in its entirety, but part of it.  It is in itself an avenue through which you perceive what reality is.  In order to explore that experience, you direct your attention to it and use all of your other (nonphysical) abilities as corollaries, adjuncts, additions. You hypnotize your very nerves, and the cells within your body, for they will react as you expect them to react, and the beliefs of your conscious mind are followed in degree by all portions, of the self down to the smallest atom and molecule.  The large events of your life, your interactions with others, including the habitual workings of the most minute physical events within your body — all of this follows your conscious belief.

Again, if you are ill you may say, “I did not want to be sick.” For if you  are poor, “I did not want to be poor,” or if you are unloved, “I did not want to be lonely.”  Yet for your own reasons you began to believe in illness more than your health, in poverty more than abundance, in loneliness rather that affection.

You may have accepted some of these ideas from your parents.  Their effects may have surrounded you, or you may have switched beliefs in one particular area of your life; but each can be changed if you utilize the power of action in the present.  I am not saying that every one of you must or should be healthy, wealthy or wise. I am only addressing those here now who have effects in their lives with which they are dissatisfied.  In one manner of speaking, then, the suggestions you give yourselves constantly operate overall as beliefs that are reflected in your experience.

Some of you are simply mentally lazy.  You do not consciously examine the data that you receive.  Many who make a practice of “denying” negative suggestions from others, asserting positive affirmations instead, actually do so because they are so fully convinced that the power of negative beliefs is stronger than that of beneficial ones.

Each of you will habitual thought patterns in your own life backed up by resulting action — conditioned behavior as it were — by which you continually reinforce negative aspects, concentrate upon them to the exclusion of conflicting data, and so bring them into experience through natural hypnosis.  Many people assign great power to a hypnotist, yet whenever you have the undivided attention to another, you act as a hypnotist to a large degree.

Whenever you have your own undivided attention you act as hypnotist and subject simultaneously.  You give yourselves post-hypnotic suggestions all the time, particularly when you project present conditions into the future.  I want to impress upon you the fact that all of this simply follows the natural function of the mind, and to dispel any ideas that you have the “magical” aspects of hypnosis.

 

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