“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With some humor:) Ruburt and Joseph have recently purchased a color television set, so now their television world is no longer in black and white. I have used television as an analogy at various times, and I would like to do so again, to show the ways in which physical events are formed, and to try to describe the many methods used by individuals in choosing those particular events that will be personally encountered.

Not only does television actually serve as a mass means of communal meditation, but it also presents you with highly detailed, manufactured dreams, in which each viewer shares to some extent. We will use some distinctions here, and so I am going to introduce the terms “Framework 1” and “Framework 2,” to make my discussion clear.

We will call the world as you physically experience it, Framework 1. In Framework 1, you watch television programs, for example. You have your choice of many channels. You have favorite programs. You follow certain scenes or actors. You watch all of these dramas, hardly understanding how it is that they appear on your screen to begin with. You are certain, however, that if you do buy a television set it will perform in an adequate fashion, whether or not you are familiar with electronics. Period.

You switch from channel to channel with predictable results. The programming for Channel 9, for example, does not suddenly intrude on Channel 6. Even the actors themselves, taking part in such sagas, have but the remotest idea of events that are involved in order that their own images will appear on your television screen. Their jobs are to act, taking it for granted that the technicians are following through.

(9:40.) Now for a moment let us imagine that physical events occur in the same fashion — that you choose those which flash upon the screen of your experience. You are quite familiar with the events of your own life, for you are of course your own main hero or heroine, villain or victim, or whatever. As you do not know what happens in the television studio before you observe a program, however, so you do not know what happens in the creative framework of reality before you experience physical events. We will call that vast “unconscious” mental and universal studio Framework 2.

In this book I will try to tell you what goes on behind the scenes — to show you the ways in which you choose your daily physical programs, and to describe how those personal choices mix and merge to form a mass reality. For now, we will go back to television again. You can turn off a program that offends you. You can choose to buy or not buy a product whose virtues are being praised. Television presents you with a mirror of your society. It reflects and rereflects through millions of homes the giant dreams and fears, the hopes and terrors of events in the most private individual.

Television interacts with your lives, but it does not cause your lives. It does not cause the events that it depicts. With your great belief in technology, it often seems to many people that television causes violence, for example, or that it causes a love of overmaterialism, or that it causes “loose morals.” Television reflects. In a manner of speaking it does not even distort, though it may reflect distortions. The writers and actors of television dramas are attuned to the “mass mind.” They are not leaders or followers. They are creative reflectors, acutely aware of the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the age.

In that regard, certainly, everything works to your advantage. Indeed, often the more concerned you become with your body the less smoothly it functions. In the spontaneity of your body’s operation there is obviously a fine sense of order. When you turn on a television set the picture seems to come out of nowhere onto the screen — yet that picture is the result of order precisely focused.

Actors visit casting agencies so that they know what plays need their services. In your dreams you visit “casting agencies.” You are aware of the various plays being considered for physical production. In the dream state, then, often you familiarize yourself with dramas that are of a probable nature. If enough interest is shown, if enough actors apply, if enough resources are accumulated, the play will go on. When you are in other than your normally conscious state, you visit that creative inner agency in which all physical productions must have their beginning. You meet with others, who for their own reasons are interested in the same kind of drama. Following our analogy, the technicians, the actors, the writers all assemble — only in this case the result will be a live event rather than a televised one. There are disaster films being planned, educational programs, religious dramas. All of these will be encountered in full-blown physical reality.