“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The evening was very humid but cool after a late-afternoon thunderstorm. Jane felt the humidity as we sat for the session at 9:15. She had no questions for Seth, but expected him to continue his material of last Wednesday night, when he’d started an answer to my question about the relationship between the host organism and disease. This idea had come to her “pretty strongly” after supper: “It won’t be dictation. I think there’s a whole lot there — but you know, it’s not quite here yet,” she said.

(Neighbors stopped in at 8:45, however, and Jane explained afterward that because of the visit, brief as it was, the material had “retreated away” from her internal perception somewhat. “So I’m just waiting for it to come forward again,” she said. When it did, Seth followed the nonbook portion of the last session so well that we want to include it in Mass Events. Finally:)

I can be perplexed (wryly), and it was my perplexity that Ruburt felt, for there is indeed much information that I want to give you along certain lines. And yet I must contend with modes of thought that are habitual to you, and those modes make it difficult for you to combine various elements of speculation.

It “sings” with the quality of its own life. It cooperates with other cells. It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in a way it lends itself to that formation. (Pause.) The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. In the old terms of evolution. I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

(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.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact. You would not have had (pause) any way (pause) of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations. You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

(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.”

(Then a minute later: “Another thing I just got was that when man was with other men in the physical world, he could point to stuff to share descriptions with others, but that he learned to really speak when he tried to describe dreams. It was the only way — speech — by which he could share data that couldn’t be seen. He could point to a tree and grunt, but there wasn’t anything in a dream he could point to. He had to have a method of expression to describe invisible things. Inventions could have come about when he tried to tell others what he saw in his dreams, too.”)