“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Thank you. The same to you,” I said, knowing that Seth’s understanding of “time” was certainly much different than ours.)

For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity.Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

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.

(Long pause.) There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice versa. Each form of life is created along with each other form—environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other.

Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness (long pause), each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time [had to be] impeccable.

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.

(9:30.) Now (underlined): When he dreamed—when he dreamed (underlined)—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. “They remembered how it was.” They remembered that they formed each other.

(“I was thinking about that.”)

(9:52 P.M. Jane said she’d been pretty far out during the session—then added later while we talked that she was picking up from Seth information on the beginning of our own world, species and civilizations that he intended to give in the next session. Seth, then, was capable of coming through with that material right now. Only Jane’s and my own conventions of time and habit, even concerning a phenomenon as unusual as the sessions, stopped him from doing so. Inevitably, the session Jane delivers for Seth next Monday evening will be somewhat different from the one she could produce tonight. There are many interesting implications here.)

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.