“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dreams deal with associations and with emotional validities that often do not seem to make sense in the usual world. I said before that no one can really give you a definition of the psyche. It must be experienced. Since its activities, wisdom and perception rise largely from another kind of reference, then you must often learn to interpret your encounter with the psyche to your usual self. One of the largest difficulties here is the issue of organization. In regular life, you organize your experience very neatly and push it into accepted patterns or channels, into preconceived ideas and beliefs. You tailor it to fit time sequences. Again: The psyche’s organization follows no such learned predisposition. Its products can often appear chaotic simply because they splash over your accepted ideas about what experience is.

(9:25.) In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand. In The Nature of Personal Reality I tried to extend the practical boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced. I tried to give the reader hints that would increase practical, spiritual, and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. Those books were dictated by me in a more or less straight narrative style. In “Unknown” Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak. Hopefully in that book, through my dictation and through Ruburt’s and Joseph’s experiences, the reader could see the greater dimensions that touch ordinary living, and sense the psyche’s magic. That book required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time.

Seemingly its action goes out in all directions. It may be easier to say, for example: “This or that event began at such a time, and ended later at such-and-such a time.” As Joseph did his notes, however, it became apparent that some events could hardly be so pinpointed, and indeed seemed to have no beginning or end.

Because you tie your experience so directly to time, you rarely allow yourselves any experiences, except in dreams, that seem to defy it. Your ideas about the psyche therefore limit your experience of it. Ruburt is far more lenient than most of my readers in that regard. Still, he often expects his own rather unorthodox experiences to appear in the kind of orderly garb with which you are all familiar.

It did not occur to him that those experiences had anything to do with this book, or that in acting so spontaneously he was following any kind of inner order. He wanted these pages to follow neatly one by one. Each of his experiences, however, demonstrates the ways in which the psyche’s direct experiences defy your prosaic concepts of time, reality, and the orderly sequence of events. They also served to point up the differences between knowledge and comprehension, and emphasize the importance of desire and of the emotions.

It would be idiotic of you to say that you were forced to become an adult, however. For one thing, at any given time you could end the process — and many do. In other words, because the pattern for development exists in your terms, this does not mean that each such development is not unique.

In your terms again, then, at any one earth time many such patterns exist. In greater respects however, all time is simultaneous, and so all such physical patterns exist at once.

Ruburt paints as a hobby. Sometimes he paints for fairly long periods of time, then forgets about it. Joseph is an artist. Ruburt has been wondering about the contents of the mind, curious as to what information was available to it. The Christmas holidays were approaching. He asked Joseph what he would like for a gift, and Joseph more or less replied: “A book on Cézanne.”

Ruburt’s love for Joseph, his own purposes, and his growing questions, along with his interest in painting in general, triggered exactly the kind of stimulus that broke through conventional beliefs about time and knowledge. Ruburt tuned in to Cézanne’s “world view.” He did not contact Cézanne per se, but Cézanne’s comprehension of painting as an art.

If you are gifted, and want to be a musician, for example, then you may literally learn while you are asleep, tuning in to the world views of other musicians, both alive and dead in your terms. When you are awake, you will receive inner hints, nudges or inspirations. You may still need to practice, but your practice will be largely in joy, and will not take as long as it might others. The reception of such information facilitates skill, and operates basically outside of time’s sequences.

Ruburt’s Cézanne material therefore comes very quickly, taking a bare portion of the day. Yet its quality is such that professional art critics could learn from it, though some of their productions might take much longer periods of time, and result from an extensive conscious knowledge of art, which Ruburt almost entirely lacks. The productions of the psyche by their nature, therefore, burst aside many most cherished beliefs.