“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

After supper Jane reread my accounts of my dream of last Saturday morning. February 9, and of my waking experience the next evening.¹ Both events had involved intense perceptions of color and/or light, and I’d told Jane that anything Seth cared to say about them would be most welcome. I’m especially intrigued by any similarities between my two adventures and the near-death experiences we’ve been reading about lately. In those NDE’s, as they’re called, people have often reported encounters with intense white light. I hadn’t been near death during my own experiences, certainly, but I do feel that through them I’d glimpsed ever so slightly that “light of the universe” that’s been so eagerly sought for—and sometimes reported—throughout history.

There is, as I have told you, an inner (pause) “psychological” universe, from which your own emerges, and that inner universe is also the source of Framework 2 as well. It is responsible for all physical effects, and is behind all physical “laws.”

It is not just that such an inner universe is different from your own, but that any real or practical explanation of its reality would require the birth of an entirely new physics—and such a development would first of all necessitate the birth of an entirely new philosophy. The physics cannot come first, you see.

The light of your questions (pause) is, in its way (underlined), an apport from that other inner universe. In your world light has certain properties and limits. It is physically perceived by the eyes, and to a far lesser degree by the skin itself. In your world light comes from the sun. It has been an exterior source, and in your world light and dark certainly appear to be opposites.

Ruburt glimpsed some of the principles involved when you were at [your downtown apartments] on several occasions—once when he tried to write a poem about the comprehensions that simply would not be verbalized.² I do not know how to explain some of this, but in your terms there is (underlined) light within (underlined) darkness. Light has more manifestations than its physical version (intently), so that even when it may not be physically manifested there is light everywhere, and that light is the source of your physical version and its physical laws. In a manner of speaking, light itself forms darkness. Each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree, is, again, composed of energy—and that energy manifests itself with a kind of light that is not physically perceived: a light that is basically, now, far more intense than any physical variety, and a light from which all colors emerge.

(Pause at 9:06.) So-called empty spaces, either in your living room between objects, or the seemingly empty spaces between stars, are physical representations—or misrepresentations—for all of space is filled with the units of consciousness, alive with a light from which the very fires of life are lit.

Now: On certain occasions, sometimes near the point of death, but often simply in conscious states outside of the body, man is able to perceive that kind of light. In some out-of-body experiences Ruburt, for example, saw colors more dazzling than any physical ones, and you saw the same kind of colors in your dream. They are a part of your inner senses’ larger spectrum of perception, and in the dream state you were not relying upon your physical senses at all.

Now: The lamplight episode. Here you did as you supposed. You viewed that inner light, but the lampshades had two purposes: one, as you surmised, to give you a comforting image, literally to shade your eyes. Ruburt was correct, however, in seeing the connection between the lampshades and the Nazi experiments (in World War II) with human skin. The movie (on television last night), about cloning and Nazi atrocities, had made you wonder about the nature of life once again, and man’s immortality. The connection with cloning came out in the lampshades made of (human) skins, in the old news stories—though your lampshades merely stood for those, and were of fabric. The connection was beneath, however, and also represented your feeling that even those people tortured to death did live again. They were not extinguished. Their consciousnesses were indeed like bulbs, say, turned on in new lamps. The lights connected life and death, then. The lights also represented pure knowing.

(9:26.) When I speak of an inner psychological universe, it is very difficult to explain what I mean. (Pause.) In that reality, however, psychological activity is not limited by any of the physical laws that you know. Thought, for example, has properties that you do not perceive—properties that not only affect matter, but that form their own greater patterns outside of your reality. These follow their own, say, laws of physics. You add on to, or build up your own reality, in other dimensions throughout your physical life.

The inner senses, though I have in the past described them by separating their functions and characteristics, basically operate together in such a way that in your terms it would be highly difficult to separate one from the others. They function with a perfect spontaneous order, aware of all synchronicities. In that psychological universe, then, it is possible for entities “to be everywhere at once,” aware of everything at once. Your world is composed of such “entities”—the units of consciousness that form your body. The kinds of conscious minds that you have cannot hold that kind of information.

(9:44.) Give us a moment. … (A one-minute pause.) These units of consciousness, however, add themselves up to form psychological beings far greater in number than, say, the number of stars in [your] galaxy (over 400 billion of them), and each of those psychological formations has its own identity—its own soul if you prefer—its own purpose in the entire fabric of being.

That is as far as we can carry that for this evening. We need some new carriers for the concepts. But the light itself represents that inner universe, and the source of all comprehension.

A note: I can add that I didn’t give up on my dream painting after all. The morning after this session was held I repainted that still-wet wall of colors I’d struggled with the day before. I managed to carry off the painting this time—merely giving impressions of the colors and foregoing their fantastic intensities and patterns. Next, I painted a small oil of the lights emitted by the two table lamps in my waking experience. The practice on the dream painting helped: This time I was able to hint more easily at the great combined radiance of those lights. However, I’ve learned that contending with the light of the universe can be a humbling task indeed….)

4. It took me a while to realize that Seth had made a most interesting statement here—implying that somehow I’d picked up Floyd’s worries about his age and virility. Floyd, Jane, and I are good friends, and he’s well acquainted with our work. He’s a few years younger than I am (I’m 60), but as far as I can remember the two of us haven’t discussed such matters, even jokingly. Consciously. I enjoy and appreciate my age and virility each day without being concerned about them, yet my dream certainly revealed that on other levels I’m at least speculating about such issues. It’s easy to say those cares represent negative beliefs, but I think much more than that is involved—universal questions, actually, that all men and women have chosen to contend with in physical life.