“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Since Jane began dictating Mass Events 11 months ago, I’ve mentioned our checking the printer’s page proofs for two of her other books: Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, and Cézanne. Now I can add a third book, James, to the list. The uncorrected proofs, typeset in the actual page format in which the book will be published, arrived last Thursday. So now we’re spending much of our working time checking — and double-checking — the proofs against our carbon copy of the copyedited James manuscript. Our scrutiny will include spelling, punctuation, and all of the other indicia that people take for granted when they read the finished work. We must also make sure that no words, sentences, or paragraphs have been inadvertently duplicated or omitted. We estimate that we should have the whole job finished and in the mail to Prentice-Hall in about 10 days.

Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then. You have been taught to focus all of your attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for you. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective — or somehow not real — and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rockbed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality. Forget what you have learned about reactions and stimuli. Ignore for a time everything you have believed and see your thoughts as the real events. Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs. For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

In titling this chapter I used the word “mechanics,” because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. Again, your interpretations of identity teach you to focus awareness in such a way that you cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect you with all portions of nature. In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom — a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.

Even those of you who intellectually agree that you form your own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas. You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events. Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive. Secondarily, you do of course then react to those events.

(9:45.) You have been taught that your feelings must necessarily be tied to specific physical happenings. You may be sad because a relative has died, for example, or because you have lost a job, or because you have been rebuffed by a lover, or for any number of other accepted reasons. You are told that your feelings must be in response to events that are happening, or have happened. Often, of course, your feelings “happen ahead of time,” because those feelings are the initial realities from which events flow.

It is somewhat of a psychological trick, in your day and age, to come to the realization that you do in fact form your experience and your world, simply because the weight of evidence seems (underlined twice) to be so loaded at the other end, because of your habits of perception. The realization is like one that comes at one time or another to many people in the dream state, when suddenly they “awaken” while still in the dream, realizing first of all that they are dreaming, and secondarily that they are themselves creating the experienced drama.

To understand that you create your own reality requires that same kind of “awakening” from the normal awake state — at least for many people. Some of course have this knack more than others. The realization itself does indeed change “the rules of the game” as far as you are concerned (louder) to a rather considerable degree. There are reasons why I am mentioning this now rather than in earlier books. Indeed, our books follow their own rhythms, and this one is in a way a further elaboration upon The Nature of Personal Reality.¹

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. You will instead live in a world where events happen to you, in which you must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see yourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as you understand them, [each of] you must alter the focus of your attention to some extent, so that you begin to perceive the connections between your subjective reality at any given time, and those events that you perceive at any given time. You are the initiator of those events.

This recognition does indeed involve a new performance on the part of your own consciousness, a mental and imaginative leap that gives you control and direction over achievements that you have always performed, though without your conscious awareness.

As mentioned before (in Session 828), early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities. As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds. Now, however, it is highly important that you realize your position, and accomplish the manipulation of consciousness that will allow you to take true conscious responsibility for your actions and your experience.

(His delivery just above, about accepting the responsibility for one’s actions, reminded us of the personal challenges that have accompanied the roles we’ve chosen in our own physical lives. Jane and I try to keep in mind these passages of Seth’s from the private session for June 25, 1977:

(“Because of your individual and joint intuitive understanding and intellectual discrimination, you were able from an early age to clearly perceive the difficulties of your fellows. This helped incite stimuli that made you question the entire framework of your civilization. You were able to do something few people can: leap intuitively and mentally above your own period — to discard intellectually and mentally, and sometimes emotionally, the shortsighted, unfortunate religious, scientific, and social beliefs of your fellows.

1. Jane and I have also been thinking of Mass Events as an extension of Seth’s second book, Personal Reality. It seems incredible to us, so fast has the time passed, but counting Mass Events Seth produced Personal Reality five books ago — and some five to six years ago from this moment; he dictated it during 1972–73.