“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When children dream, they utilize these inner senses as adults do, and then through dreaming they learn to translate such material into the precise framework of the exterior senses. Children’s games are always “in the present” — that is, they are immediately experienced, though the play events may involve the future or the past. The phrase “once upon a time” is strongly evocative and moving, even to adults, because children play with time in a way that adults have forgotten. If you want to sense the motion of your psyche, it is perhaps easiest to imagine a situation either in the past or the future, for this automatically moves your mental sense-perceptions in a new way.

Children’s dreams are more intense than those of adults because the brain is practicing its event-forming activities. These must be developed before certain physical faculties can be activated. Infants play in their dreams, performing physical actions beyond their present physical capacities. While external stimuli are highly important, the inner stimuli of dream play are even more so.

In play, particularly, children try on any conceivable situation for size. In the dream state adults and children alike do the same thing, and many dreams are indeed a kind of play. The brain itself is never satisfied with one version of an event, but will always use the imagination to form other versions in an activity quite as spontaneous as play. It also practices forming events as the muscles practice motion.

Children try to imagine what the world was like before they entered it. Do the same thing. The way you follow these directions can be illuminating, for the areas of activity you choose will tell you something about the unique qualities of your own consciousness. Adult games deal largely with manipulations in space, while children’s play, again, often involves variations in time. Look at a natural object, say a tree; if it is spring now, then imagine that you see it in the fall.

[...] Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious adult discussion concerning anything so profound as the creation of the known world. [...]

[...] Fairy godmothers are definitely a thing of the storyteller’s imagination, and many serious, earnest adults will tell you that daydreaming or wishing will get you nowhere.

[...] By the time you are adults, it certainly seems that you are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of your lives.³

[...] To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adult behavior.

[...] However simple those ideas may sound to the adult, still they carry within them the needed power and impetus that fill all of life’s parts. Later, conflicting beliefs often smother such earlier attitudes, so that by the time children have grown into adults they actually hold almost an opposite set of hypotheses. [...]

[...] It is much better if you can imagine this endeavor more in the light of children’s play, in fact, rather than think of it as a deadly serious adult pursuit.

The child plays at being an adult long before he is one, and so you can play with more desirable beliefs while you are still growing into that more beneficial picture.

It is important that adults (pause) uncover such instances from their own childhood. As adults they can form a kind of understanding parent in their own mind, until they learn how to be sympathetic to their own behavior, and until they realize that life itself is an expression—not a repression. [...]

Such negative patterns in childhood cause adults to be frightened of freedom—because freedom seems to imply a threat to life and to health. [...]

[...] It is back toward their dimly remembered exuberance that many adults look with a sense of loss and nostalgia. [...]

You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have been taught to believe you are. [...]

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

[...] They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. [...]

They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again.

[...] You have physical adult bodies. The pattern for each adult body existed in the fetus — which again, “luckily,” impulsively, followed its own direction.

(With gentle irony:) No one told it that it was impossible to grow from a tiny cell — change that to a tiny organism instead of a cell — to a complicated adult structure. [...]

[...] Later we will discuss some special cases of reincarnational influence connected with suicide, but for now we will be concerned with the increasing numbers of suicides by young adults.

[...] Young adult suicides are not necessarily from the poorest or the lowest stratas of society at all. [...]

[...] Yet many such youngsters literally see no future for themselves as adults.

For a while the new adults often feel themselves to be invincible, beyond the boundaries of creaturehood, even; this belief, again, endows them with the strength and energy they need to begin a life for themselves and to form their own mass world. [...]

A young adult gifted in a particular area may hold a belief that this ability makes him or her superior to all others. [...]

[...] A woman’s entire adult life can be structured according to such an idea if she does not learn to examine the contents of her mind. [...]

[...] It is up to you as an adult to get on top of your beliefs, to realize that a mother who hates her child is already in difficulties, and that such a hate says far more about the mother than it does about her offspring. [...]

It is very unfortunate, therefore, when adults inadvertently undermine a child’s sense of self-approval. A small boy might be caught in a lie, for example, and therefore labeled by an adult in the angriest of terms as a liar. [...]

An adult under the same circumstances might become injured to avoid a dreaded event at the office — but the adult may well feel ashamed of such a reaction, and so hide it from himself or herself in order to save feelings of self-esteem. In such cases, however, the adults will feel that they are victims of events over which they have little or no control.

[...] This playful activity is, in fact, the basis for their organized behavior, and they “play” at adult behavior before they assume their own duties.

Creatures play because the activity is joyful, and spontaneous and beneficial, because it activates all portions of the organism — and again, in play youngsters imitate adult patterns of operation that lead finally to their own mature activity.

True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. [...]

True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth, and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. [...]

Pretend for a moment that you are a child, and I am trying to undertake the particular chore of explaining to you what your most developed, adult self will be like — and in my explanation, I say that this adult self is to some extent already a part of you, an outgrowth or projection of what you are. [...] How can I ever be this adult self when it is not what I am now, without dying as what I am?”

[...] He does not wish to possess his mother sexually in the way that adults currently suppose. [...] The psychological connotations, however, are not those assigned to them by adults.

[...] It cannot be confined to sexual expression only, nor can rules be given as to how often normal adults should sexually express themselves.

[...] The child therefore within the adult personality is not dead, nor are his reactions considered, basically, as reactions which are part of a past behavior pattern; but these reactions exist side by side with adult reactions.

[...] Any adults?”)

(Nor, evidently, is Seth referring to the two adults sitting in on the class the day the tape was played. [...]

[...] That dislike was to serve as an impetus, as it did, but the adult should see—the adult Ruburt—that there is no authority in those terms. [...]

[...] In any society, as young people come to maturity, they begin to weigh their individualistic version of reality against the adult authoritative one, and in one way or another, as they attain adulthood, they change the system to whatever degree.

In a new crisis situation, in facing a present crisis squarely and dealing with it in adult terms, he may indeed free himself largely; for the present situation through association brings up highly charged emotional energies that have been stopped up and causing difficulty.

This is the adult’s chance to understand and emotionally exorcise parental ghosts from the child’s past. [...]

[...] Then any old fears become present, and are subject to solutions that the adult finds.

[...] It is unfortunate that so many adults still behave as if they were children, to be scolded—

—at any moment by adults, and warned to be cautious of their activities. [...]