“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:32.) Your waking life is the result of the most precise kind of organization, held competently and with amazing clarity. While each person views that reality from a slightly different focus, still it occurs within certain ranges or frequencies. You bring it into clear focus in almost the same way that you adjust your television picture, only in this case not only sound and images are synchronized, but phenomena of far greater complexity. Following this analogy, everyone sees a slightly different picture of reality, and follows his or her own program — yet all of the “sets” are the same.

When you dream, however, you are to some extent experiencing reality from a different “set” entirely. Now, when you try to adjust your dreaming set in the same way that you would the waking one, you end up with static and blurred images. The set itself, however, is quite as effective as the one you use when you are awake, and it has a far greater range. It can bring in many programs. When you watch your ordinary television program, perhaps on a Saturday afternoon, you view the program as an observer. Let me give you an example.

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.

Ruburt and Joseph know that Star Trek is not “real.” Planets can explode on the television screen, and Ruburt will not spill one drop of coffee. The cozy living room is quite safe from the imaginary catastrophes that are occurring just a few feet from the couch. Yet in a way the program reflects certain beliefs of your society in general, and so it is like a specialized mass waking dream — real but not real. For a moment, though, let us change the program to your favorite cops-and-robbers show. A woman is shot down in the street. Now this drama becomes “more real,” more immediately probable, less comfortable. So watching such a program, you may feel slightly threatened yourself, yet still largely unconcerned.

You form certain focuses, then. You will blithely ignore certain televised dangers as sheer good adventure, while others may strike you to the heart as “too real.” So in your waking and dreaming experiences, you will make the same kind of distinctions. You will be touched or untouched by waking or dreaming events according to the significance you place upon them.

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.

You can often get carried away by a television drama, so that for a moment you forget that it is “not real,” and in your concentration upon it you can momentarily ignore the greater reality about you.