“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth didn’t come through last Monday evening, New Year’s Eve. Instead, Jane and I gave a party for a change. The next day we were ready to get back to our writing and painting, but first I cleared the house of holiday paraphernalia—including our beautiful Christmas tree. I carefully propped up the tree, a balsam fir, in the woods at the back of the hill house. I told myself that next summer the tree’s skeleton would remind me of the days that had passed since 1980 began, in our terms; I knew I’d be grateful for having physically experienced every one of them. [And as an artist, I’d be as much intrigued by the tree’s naked structure as I had been when it bore its dense greenery.]

You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now—but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance (underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

(A one-minute pause at 9:13.) Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always.

In the beginning, man’s dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man information—a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man’s dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh.

This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance—and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” Each portion has its own identity and validity—and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.

(All with a rolling intensity:) I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions—so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole.

(9:47.) You “timed” yourselves—but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know (louder).

1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I’d taken early in this life—one that perhaps I’d felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground I’d been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania. (Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, New York, where Jane and I live now.) Even though it was wintertime, the tree carried a sparse cover of leaves. Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree. My interpretation is that I saw the tree as the tree of life even then, and that I’d chosen to remain close to the world of nature and art instead of immersing myself in the safer industrial one. Jane was inspired by the dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.