“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Your normal waking reality can be compared to a kind of television drama in which you participate directly in all of the dramas presented. You create them to begin with. You form your private and joint adventures, and bring them into experience by using your physical apparatus — your body — in a particular way, tuned in to a large programming area in which, however, there are many different stations. In your terms, these stations come alive. You are the drama that you experience, and all of your activities seem to revolve about you. You are also the perceiver.

In the dream state, it is as if you have a still-different television set that is, however, connected with your own. Using it, you can perceive events not only from your own viewpoint, but from other focuses. Using that set, you can leap from station to station, so to speak — not simply perceiving, but experiencing what is happening in other times and places.

When you are dealing with normal waking reality, you are operating at one level of the many that are native to your psyche. When you are dreaming, from your viewpoint you are entering other levels of reality quite as native to your psyche, but usually you are still experiencing those events through your current “waking station.” The dreams that you remember are colored or altered or even censored to a certain extent. There is no inherent psychological or biological necessity for this. Your ideas and beliefs, however, about the nature of reality, and sanity, have resulted in such a schism.

If you do not like a television program, you can switch to another with a mere flick of the wrist. If you do not like your own physical experience, you can also change to another, more beneficial station — but only if you recognize the fact that you are the producer.

(10:15.) In the dream state, many people have learned to escape from a bad dream by waking up, or altering the focus of consciousness. Ruburt and Joseph do not feel threatened, again, by Star Trek. (Long pause.) The program does not make them feel less safe. When you are in the middle of a frightening physical experience, however, or caught in the throes of a nightmare, then you wish you knew how to “change the station.”

Sometimes you are deliciously frightened by a horror program, for example. You may feel compelled to see how it comes out, and find yourself unable to go to bed until the horrendous situation is resolved. All the time you know that salvation is nearby: You can always switch off the program. If someone watching a gory midnight special suddenly screams or shouts or leaps up from the chair, how comical this seems, because the action is appropriate not to the “real” situation, but geared instead to a pseudodrama. The yelling and screaming will have absolutely no effect upon the program’s actors, and will alter the drama not one whit. The appropriate action would be to turn the station off.

In this case, the frightened perceiver knows full well that the terrible events on the screen will not suddenly explode into the living room. When you become caught in frightening physical events, however, it is equally foolhardy to yell or shout or stamp your feet, because that is not where the action is (smiling). Again, you have only to change your station. But often you become so engrossed in your life situation that you do not realize the inappropriateness of your response.