“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.

(Five weeks ago [in the notes leading off Session 821], I wrote that Jane could resume work on The Further Education of Oversoul Seven — or Seven Two — at any time. She finished her first novel about Seven in July 1972, and within a month, long before it was published, she wrote the first five chapters for Seven Two. Then we became involved in so many other projects that she laid it aside until August 1976, when she wrote two more chapters. The book has hovered in the back of her consciousness ever since, waiting until she focused her attention upon it once again. “Seven’s got all the time in the world,” she laughed more than once. But now that her editor, Tam Mossman, has scheduled a visit to us at the hill house in a couple of weeks [on April 10, to be exact], Jane feels that she wants to study what she’s done on Seven Two, go over it with Tam, and perhaps take up work on it again.)

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.

You usually think, for example, that your feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the event itself. It seldom occurs to you that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of your focus is largely responsible for your interpretation of any event.

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.

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.