“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Good evening.

(Pause.) Briefly, remember analogies I have made in the past, comparing the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape — which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art. In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color — a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action. Those of you now living, say, are in the same life class. You look about to see how your contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and you find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits. And all of these portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of your world.

These portraits obviously have a biological reality. In a manner of speaking, now, each person dips into the same supplies of paint, and so forth — which are the elements out of which your likenesses emerge. There must be great creative leeway allowed for such portraits. Each one interacting with each other one helps form the psychological and physical reality of the species, so you are somehow involved in the formation of a multitudinous number of portraits. I simply want you to keep that analogy in the background.

(10:20.) Give us a moment… Now many of the characteristics you consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species. It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species. (Intently:) You learned to dream differently than other creatures. I thought you would like that quotation.

(10:42 P.M. I’ve indicated but a few of the many long pauses Jane took while speaking for Seth; in fact, the session had been her slowest one in many months. “Now I see why I felt so puzzled before the session,” she said, “even with the company. I just had to sit there and wait for things to be put together in a new way. It was really funny.”

(Now, however, when I remarked that I like tonight’s material on dreaming and language, Jane replied: “I wish you hadn’t said that. As soon as you did, I felt a circle of information open up — a lot of it — about when ancient man had a series of mass dreams in which he learned how to speak. The dreams were like glossolalia — you know, speaking in unintelligible speech sounds — yet they made sense, and man began to speak….”