“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Long pause.) At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality—the world of his dreams—but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now.

The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [But] more and more man began to identify himself with his exterior environment. He began to think of his inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself. It became his version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality—a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spiritlike soul that acted in an immaterial world.

The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery—or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.

(Long pause, then very intently:) We will return to the subject of war later on. I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics.” He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival—but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experiences with it, in that fashion.

(Long pause.) You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well—but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.

In the same fashion man is born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his dreams. In a fashion (underlined), you could almost say that he used language before he consciously understood it (quietly). It is not just that he learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about how the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his drawing was in the same way automatic. You might almost say—almost—that he used the language (pause) “despite himself.” Therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the “word” was seen as coming directly from God.

1. In a simplified account: When I was a youngster my mother took me to see our family optometrist. My parents had known him for years. With the best of intentions, that kindly gentleman put bifocals on me. They weren’t very strong—but once the habit was set I wore glasses without protest for the next 40 years or so. It wasn’t until Jane began coming through with the ideas embodied in the Seth material that I began to question my “need” for glasses. Without being concerned about what I was doing, I began to stop wearing them constantly. The glasses got in the way when I wrote and painted. I had to wear them when driving, though, because my driver’s licence bore an “x” opposite “corrective lenses.” Other than that, I usually put them on only when I felt tired. At the same time, I avoided giving myself the negative suggestion that my eyes still weren’t perfect, even with my improving beliefs.

“You wanted some affirmation of your body’s vitality, of its resilience and recuperative energies. You also wanted some reassurance that you could operate as an artist as long as you chose in this life. You used the incident of the optometrist’s notice to give yourself a very fine lesson, for in the back of your mind you did indeed worry and wonder that your eyes were becoming tired. Under usual circumstances, those “symptoms” would be interpreted as signs of difficulty. You discovered instead that the so-called symptoms are signs that your glasses have become too strong because your eyesight has not simply held its own, but most remarkably improved, and in a way this is medically demonstrable.

“They [your eyes] have improved because you are indeed learning to relax about yourself more, and the improvement occurs first of all in that area of your main interest—your work—but it represents what is an overall time of regeneration. Your eyes do not exist alone in your head.”