Seth through Jane Roberts
Using your free will, you have made physical reality into something quite different than what was intended. You have allowed the ego to become overly developed and specialized. You were here to work out problems and challenges, but you were always to be aware of your own inner reality, and of your nonphysical existence. To a large extent you have lost contact with this. You have focused so strongly upon physical reality that it [has] become the only reality that you know.

What should you believe? In this discussion we’re going to give you our perspective on the truth of who you are and why you exist. It’s our Model of Reality. Whether you believe us is a choice you will make, but in support of our model, we would say that (a) it’s simple, (b) it explains everything (by which we mean it leaves no question unanswered), and (c) you will not find another model which is both simple and complete. In order to get to a place of very fundamental understanding, it’s helpful if you can allow yourself to explore the territory outside of your normal thinking boundaries, so we suggest you get ready to stretch yourself a little here. Here we go.

Let’s start from a very fundamental place where there is no time and space, no shapes or forms and no beginnings and ends. Let’s go back beyond anything you could describe as a beginning to the Source of everything. This Source is described by some as All That Is, or as the Universe, or as God. It is existence in its most elemental form. It is pure energy. It is the collective consciousness from which everything emerges. Each individuated part of that collective consciousness is created by a desire, which then has an experience which leads to new desires and new creations. These individuations are Source experiencing itself.

We are one of those individuations, and you are one of those individuations. All of us conscious entities are extensions of Source, and although you could think of us as being closer to Source on the evolutionary scale than you are, we are much more alike than we are different. Although we exist in different realms, we are all of us at our essence, a time-less and space-less thought-form. How we choose to think creates who we are, and the realm in which perceive ourselves to be is a context which matches those choices.

So into our unique individual contexts, we attract everything that matches the thoughts that create us. In your case, the thoughts you choose, which is to say the beliefs you choose, create the physical and non-physical aspects of you. If the choice is X or Y, both versions exist simultaneously with equal validity, it’s just that your evolutionary choice has been to be conscious of only one version at a time, which allows you to experience this game of Life On Earth with unique focus and intensity. Let’s say you are aware of, and experiencing only Version X. Everything you attract into this X version of your virtual reality matches the X version of you. That’s what you call the Law Of Attraction.

So what should you believe? Well you cannot change the essential nature of who you are as we’ve described above, but are you beginning to see what the very nature of a belief is? It is not some opinion you form about what-is. It is a choice that CREATES what-is. What you choose as beliefs become the building blocks of your so-called reality. A choice to believe this or that about your world, creates a matching world around you. If you choose to believe this or that about that other conscious being in your life, then that is the version of them you will attract. If you declare they are sometimes this way, and sometimes that way, and sometimes easy to understand and sometimes enigmatic, then they will show up within those boundaries.

Let’s repeat some of that. Your beliefs are not some opinion you’ve formed about what-is. They are the choices you’ve made that CREATE what-is. Now we know that this is very upside-down from the way you may have normally thought about reality, and we’ve observed that many of you when first confronted by this idea get a bit mind-boggled. Because it’s unfamiliar, you brand it as complex. Well we encourage you to see that it’s not. Think about this. Did you expect that at the foundation of all truth, a Model Of Reality that explains who you are would be complex? It’s like gravity in your world. Everything that has mass attracts everything else that has mass. It’s simple, and so is the truth of who you are.

You could say that the physical-only model of reality is also simple. You exist on planet earth, a physical space/time world that you’re sharing with everybody else. It was here before you got here and it will be here after you’re gone. The atheist assumes that the physical world is all there is and unless something can be verified experimentally in the physical world, it doesn’t exist. We would say yes, that’s a fairly simple concept. The problem with this physical-only model is that Quantum Physics has raised some thorny questions about the true nature of physicalness, and, even more significantly, it does not attempt to explain consciousness which we would say is the very essence of who you are.

Then there are the religious philosophies which declare that a powerful non-physical loving God, created the world. In effect, they superimpose a deity on top of the physical-only model. Others believe that you and those that are here made a prior decision about it, that you’re here sharing it, and practically speaking, you’re stuck with it. Either way, you’re now in a world of major complexity trying to explain how and why things happen.

Think of the way you experience the world. (Let’s call it Option 1.) Through your physical senses you translate light and sound for example into electrical impulses which are interpreted by your brain. Things can be red or green, but there’s nothing absolute about, for example, greenness. You have no way of knowing that what you see as “green” is the same green anybody else sees. Think about that for a minute here. What you know as reality, is a mental interpretation. Of course most people seem to interpret reality in ways that are similar to you – sufficiently similar that you ignore that it’s a mental construct, and just treat it as a physical fact that you all know about. You describe it, and you tell stories about it, and you are understood.

But what if instead of there being a world “out there” you’re mentally interpreting, what if your mind is actually creating the image from within? Once again it’s a mental construct. It’s just that it’s an internal creation, and the sensations you perceive as interaction with something physical, are just the byproduct of that creation. Let’s call this Option #2, and as with Option 1, it’s a mental construct. It‘s just that the source is different. In Option 1 world, you bump your knee against some physical object and it hurts. In the Option 2 movie in your mind, you bump your knee and you experience the same interpretation of pain.

Both options exist as valid belief choices, and there is no way, scientifically or otherwise, of proving one more valid than the other. It’s just a choice you make, but we submit that there’s a good reason why you might choose Option #2. And that is, it provides simple answers to questions that Option #1 cannot answer. We submit that it’s the Theory Of Everything that your scientists have been striving to find. In an Option 1 world, answers about life are either non-existent, or convoluted and complex. By contrast, in Option 2 world, the answers are (as you might expect Source answers to be) elegantly simple. For example, let’s look at the Law Of Attraction.

In an Option 1 shared world, if you can harness the power of the Law Of Attraction to create whatever you want (and you can), then so can those other people in your life, so it’s obvious that you are up against their potentially different desires of how this shared world should be. So now the promise of the law becomes .. there’s nothing you cannot be, do or have .. EXCEPT of course there’s those prior-agreements to play in this space/time world and so maybe changing any of that stuff isn’t so easy .. and IF .. those others in your world want different things, because your desires are in competition with theirs, your task is now to somehow create harder (or better) than they are doing, or persuade them to agree with you. (And good luck with both of those).

And so can you see that once you start down that road, you’ve pretty much dismantled the Law Of Attraction, and opened up the Story to all sorts of other ideas, such as that there are other “ancient” laws. In other words, the Law Of Attraction has an effect but there are many other factors. If you continue down that road, you end up with not much more than the concept that positive thinking (seeing the glass as half full) is generally better than the alternative. (That’s true of course, but that concept by itself is hardly going to inspire you into making some fundamentally new choices is it.) If you want to see what the complexity of Option 1 looks like, try googling “cosmic laws”, but be prepared for some heavy reading!

We understand how it is that your Option 1 world seems so inherently (so self-evidently) real. There’s a reason for that. You and Your World are an exact match to the tapestry of expectations that shapes you and it. That exact match is always going to be the most-real-feeling realm. But the truth is, there is no world “out there”. You’re not a physical being in a physical world with a brain that does all the thinking. You are a thinking being in a thought-created world. You’re a consciousness – an extension of the collective consciousness of All That Is. Everything “out there” is an inside job.

When you change that tapestry of expectations of yours by choosing a new belief, and you practice that belief into a new certainty, you step into a literally new version of you and your world, and everything and everyone you intersect with exactly matches that new tapestry. In our words: You attract into your experience, a version of you and your context, unique to you, wanted or unwanted, instant by instant, which matches the tapestry of your chosen beliefs and expectations.

Whatever you choose to believe creates the world in which you live. It is your personal virtual reality. And there are no right or wrong choices. There are only choices that feel good and choices that don’t. Here’s the upside nature of the way you’re used to thinking. Your beliefs are not some opinion you’ve formed about what-is. They are the choices you’ve made that CREATE what-is. If you will let yourself begin to acclimatize to that idea, you’ll discover that it’s unique in both its simplicity and completeness. And, it opens you up the concept of how powerful you really are, and brings you back to the reason you came here in the first place – to experience things, and awaken new desires, and put your hands into the clay of All That Is, and make something, and make everything, from literally nothing.