“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session, regular or deleted, was held last Wednesday evening, February 13. On that day Tam Mossman of Prentice-Hall called Sue Watkins to ask her permission to publish Conversations With Seth in two volumes; Sue’s account of Jane’s ESP classes is now too long for a single book. Actually, then, Sue finished Volume 1 while in Florida last month. Tam plans to have the first volume in the stores this October, and is scheduling Volume 2 for publication in January 1981.

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.

This early man (and early woman) regarded the snake as the most sacred and basic, most secretive and most knowledgeable of all creatures. In that early experience it seemed, surely, that the snake was a living portion of the earth, rising from the bowels of the earth, rising from the hidden source of all earth gods. Men watched snakes emerge from their holes with wonder. The snake was then—in your terms, now (underlined)—both a feminine and masculine symbol. It seemed to come from the womb of the earth, and to possess the earth’s secret wisdom. Yet also, in its extended form particularly, it was the symbol of the penis. It was important also in that it shed its skin, as man innately knew he shed his own bodies.

You are aware of such activities now as automatic speaking and automatic writing, and of sleepwalking. These all give signs in modern times of some very important evidence in man’s early relationship with the world and with himself.

Sleepwalking was once, in that beginning, a very common experience—far more so than now—in which the inner self actually taught the physical body to walk, and hence presented the newly emerged physically oriented intellect from getting in its own way, asking too many questions that might otherwise impede the body’s smooth spontaneous motion.

Last week I received from our current optometrist (whom I’ll call John Smith) his standard notice that two years have passed since my glasses were changed. I told myself to ignore it, yet began to feel a sense of strain whether or not I wore the glasses. I thought the power of suggestion was operating. Because of a cancellation I got a quick appointment to see John this afternoon—and received a very pleasant surprise, for his examination revealed that my vision has improved since the last prescription. The glasses I now have are getting to be too strong. Out of habit, I’d thought the opposite was the case. John too was surprised; he double-checked his figures to make sure he was right before ordering the weaker lenses. Once John had assembled his pheropter, or lens unit, the test lenses making up the new prescription, my vision checked out at 20/15—better than the so-called normal 20/20. That score is a considerable improvement over anything I’d ever achieved before, with or without glasses.