“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was held last Monday evening, Christmas Eve. Instead, we had a few close friends in; all of us exchanged gifts. After the party was over Jane and I gave each other our own presents. My high point was receiving the little book of poems and sketches she’d made for me. [I hadn’t created anything like that for her, though.] When Jane read her poetry to me I strongly felt once again her innocence and perception: “The universe keeps turning into us….” We had a quiet but very enjoyable Christmas day.

Tonight’s session may not be formal book dictation, but it contains many connections to Dreams. “I don’t care whether we have a book session or one on something else,” Jane said as we sat for the session at 8:50. “I’m just waiting. I don’t even feel him around….” She thought this was strange, since during the last couple of days she’d picked up quite a few insights from Seth on various subjects. We’d discussed all of them, but without making any notes.

Now: The year 1980 exists in all of its potential versions, now in this moment. Because mass events are concerned there is not a completely different year, of course, for each individual on the face of the planet—but there are literally an endless number of mass-shared worlds of 1980 “in the wings,” so to speak.

In like manner, England in all probability next year will not suddenly turn into a Mohammedan nation. But within the range of workable probabilities, private and mass choices, the people of the world are choosing their probable 1980s.

Your conscious mind can only accept a certain sequence of probabilities as recognized experience. As I have said, the choices among probabilities go on constantly, both on conscious and unconscious levels. Events that you do not perceive as conscious experience are (pause) a part of your unconscious experience, however, to some extent. This applies to the individual, and of course en masse the same applies to world events. Each action seeks all of its own possible fulfillments. All That Is seeks all possible experience, but in such a larger framework in this case that questions of, say, pain or death simply do not apply, though [certainly] they do on the physical level (all quite forcefully).

(9:25.) Great expectations, basically, have nothing to do with degree, for a grass blade is filled with great expectations. Great expectations are built upon a faith in the nature of reality, a faith in nature itself, a faith in the life you are given, whatever its degree—and all children, for example, are born with those expectations. Fairy tales are indeed often—though not always—carriers of a kind of underground knowledge, as per your discussion about Cinderella (also see the 824th session for Mass Events), and the greatest fairy tales are always those in which the greatest expectations win out: The elements of the physical world that are unfortunate can be changed in the twinkling of an eye through great expectations.

Your education tells you that all of that is nonsense, that the world is defined by its physical aspects alone. When you think of power you think of, say, nuclear energy, or solar energy—but power is the creative energy within men’s minds that allows them to use such powers, such energies, such forces.

The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet (intently). The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities. All of the possible versions of 1980 will happen. Except for those you settle upon, all of the others will remain psychologically peripheral, in the background of your conscious experience—but all of those possible versions will be connected in one way or another.

In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes into your universe is as new as if (in your terms) the world were created yesterday—a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980 was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning of the world.

Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes. The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream, meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. Everyone involved was consciously and unconsciously a willing participant at the most basic levels of human behavior, and it is of course no coincidence that 1980 is immediately foreshadowed by that event. What will the world do with it?

2. Here Seth referred to the striking way in which my mother, Stella Butts, had recreated for the better her “memories” of her husband (my father). Robert Butts, Sr., died in February 1971, 34 months before she did. All of the members of the Butts family observed the pronounced changes in Stella’s thinking about her husband, although Jane and I were the only ones who ascribed those changes to her moving into another probable reality.