“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Last month, in the opening notes for Session 931, in Chapter 9, I recorded that on July 8 Jane spontaneously wrote “a complete outline for a book on Seth’s magical approach to reality.” Actually, we’ve been quite aware of the potential of such an idea ever since Seth began that material a year ago.³ After supper this evening we went over the loose-leaf notebook of information Jane has accumulated for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book, and discussed how she could follow her outline in putting all of that material—on our dreams, psychic events and insights, her poetry and our essays—together with Seth’s private sessions on the magical approach. She’d had trouble doing that at various times in the past year. Such a book would involve the publication of much Seth material that could either lie in our files for a long time, or never be published. I now feel that many of those sessions aren’t so private after all, and can help others. The more I talked about the idea the better I liked it. Jane seemed to pick up on my own enthusiasm.

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

(Pause at 8:43.) Their dreams would then be shared by the tribe in the morning, or at special meetings, when each dreamer would give a rendition of the dream or dreams that seemed to be involved. In the same way, other dreamers would simply check with the dreamers of other villages or tribes—perhaps a hundred or even more miles distant. Some such dreams were extremely direct, others were clothed in symbolism according to the style of the dreamer, but in any case the dream was understood to have a public significance as well as a private one.