“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let us look more clearly, however, at the ways in which your private world causes your daily experience, and how it merges with the experience of others.