“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation. (With many pauses:) When I speak of the dream world, I am not referring to some imaginary realm, but to the kind of world of ideas, of thoughts, of mental actions, out of which all form as you think of it emerges. In actuality this is an inner universe rather than an inner world. Your physical reality is but one materialization of that inner organization. All possible civilizations exist first in that realm of inner mind.

(Long pause.) In the beginning, then, the species did not have the kinds of forms they do now. They had pseudoforms—dream bodies, if you prefer—and they could not physically reproduce themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. In your terms, this meant that time could be quickened, or lengthened. It was a kind of psychological time.

Again, forms appeared and disappeared. (Pause.) In your terms of time, however, the dream bodies took on physical forms. Physical reproduction was impossible. That did not happen to all of the species at once, however. For a while, then, the earth had a mixed population of species who had completely taken on physical forms, and species who had not. The forms, however, whether physical or not, were complete in themselves. Birds were birds, and fish fish.

(9:30.) In the beginning there were also species of various other kinds: combinations of man-animal and animal-man, and many other “crossbreed” species, some of fairly long duration in your terms. This applies to all areas. There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that gradually became aware within that dream (with gentle emphasis), turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees.

There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more advantageous than the term, “the dream world.” I am emphasizing this dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless, precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality that dreams appear to be staticky objective background noise, left over from when you sleep. But that is how physical experience would seem to someone not focused in it, or inexperienced with its organization.

Later in the book I will discuss some of these, but they represent intuitive leaps of new understandings. The pattern of animal behavior, for example, is not at all as set and finished as you suppose. Your physical experience is a combination of dream events interlaced with what you call objective acts.

The collection will include our family trees; my father’s journals and photographs; Jane’s and my own grade-school, high-school, college, and family data; our youthful creative efforts in writing and painting; the comic books and other commercial artwork I produced; our early published and unpublished short stories; my original notes for the sessions; session transcripts, whether published or unpublished, “regular,” private, or from ESP class; tapes, including those made in class of Jane speaking for Seth and/or singing in Sumari; our notes, dream records, journals, and manuscripts; our sketches and paintings; Jane’s extensive poetry; our business correspondence; books, contracts, and files; newsletters about the Seth material, published in the United States and abroad (independently of Jane and me); the greater number of letters from readers—in short, a mass of material showing how our separate beginnings flowed together and resulted in the production of a joint lifework.