“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Often the seeming meaninglessness of dreams is the result of your own ignorance of dream symbolism and organization. For example: You may also misinterpret “revelatory” material because you try to structure it in reference to your ordinary conscious organizations. Many valuable and quite practical insights that could be utilized go astray, therefore. I am going to suggest, then, some simple exercises that will allow you to directly experience the “feel of your being” in a different way.

First of all, the various kinds of organizations used by the psyche can be compared at one level, at least, with different arts. Music is not better than the visual arts, for example. A sculpture cannot be compared with a musical note. I am not saying, then, that one mode of organization is better than another. You have simply specialized in one of the many arts of consciousness, and that one can be vastly enriched by knowledge and practice of the others.

As I have mentioned many times, cellular comprehension deals with probabilities and encompasses future and past, so at that level of activity time as you understand it does not exist. You are not consciously aware of such data, however. The psyche — at the other end of the scale, so to speak — is also free of time. Often, however, your own stream of consciousness leads you to think of events outside of their usual order. You may receive a letter from your Aunt Bessie, for example. In a matter of moments it may trigger you to think of events in your childhood, so that many mental images fly through your mind. You might wonder if your aunt will take an anticipated journey to Europe next year, and that thought might give birth to images of an imagined future. All of these thoughts and images will be colored by the emotions that are connected to the letter, and to all of the events with which you and your aunt have been involved.

Thoughts of your own next birthday, for instance, may instantly lead you to think of past ones, or a series of birthday pictures may come to mind of your own twelfth birthday, your third, your seventh, in an order uniquely your own. That order will be determined by emotional associations — the same kind followed by the dreaming self.

(9:40.) The next time an opportunity arises, and you recognize the presence of a fairly strong emotion in yourself, then let your associations flow. Events and images will spring to mind in an out-of-time context. Some such remembered events will make sense to you. You will clearly see the connection between the emotion and event, but others will not be so obvious. Experience the events as clearly as you can. When you are finished, purposefully alter the sequence. Remember an event, and then follow it with the memory of one that actually came earlier. Pretend that the future one came before the past one.

(9:54.) Now: Consciously construct a dream. Tell yourself you are going to do so, and begin with the first thought or image that comes to mind. When you are finished with your daydream, then use free association to interpret it to yourself.

Some of you will meet with some resistance in these exercises. You will enjoy reading about them, but you will find all kinds of excuses that prevent you from trying them yourself. If you are honest, many of you will sense a reluctance, for certain qualities of consciousness are brought into play that run counter to your usual conscious experience.

You might feel as if you are crossing your wires, so to speak, or stretching vaguely sensed psychic muscles. The purpose is not so much the perfect execution of such exercises as it is to involve you in a different mode of experience and of awareness that comes into being as you perform in the ways suggested. You have been taught not to mix, say, waking and dreaming conditions, not to daydream. You have been taught to focus all of your attention clearly, ambitiously, energetically in a particular way — so daydreaming, or mixing and matching modes of consciousness, appears passive in a derogatory fashion, or nonactive, or idle. (Louder:) “The devil finds work for idle hands” — an old Christian dictum.

You will not remember, or want to remember, your own dreams for the same reason. Many people, therefore, tell themselves that they are very impatient to discover the nature and extent of the psyche, and cannot understand why they meet with so little success. At the same time, such beliefs convince them that the self is evil. These beliefs must be weeded out. If you cannot honestly encounter the dimensions of your creaturehood, you surely cannot explore the greater dimensions of the psyche. This blocking of associations, however, is a very important element that impedes many people. The psyche’s organizations are broader, and in their way more rational than most of your conscious beliefs about the self.

Many individuals are afraid that they will be swept away by inner explorations, that insanity will overtake them, when instead the physical stance of the body and personality is firmly rooted in these alternate organizations. There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind. You have simply put a lid on it, allowing it to be only so conscious, and no more. You have said: “Here it is safe to be conscious, and here it is not.”

Many of you believe that it is safe to make a nuclear bomb, but that it is insane to use your dreams as another method of manipulating daily life; or that it is all right to be consciously aware of your viruses, wars, and disasters, but that it is not all right to be consciously aware of other portions of the self that could solve such problems.

The idea, then, is not to annihilate normal consciousness, but quite literally to expand it by bringing into its focus other levels of reality that it can indeed intrinsically perceive and utilize.

I will suggest many exercises throughout this book. Some of them will necessitate variations of normal consciousness. I may ask you to forget physical stimuli, or suggest that you amplify them, but I am nowhere stating that your mode of consciousness is wrong. It is limited, not by nature, but by your own beliefs and practice. You have not carried it far enough.

The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. These exercises will bring you in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Your consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercises are done. Certain questions that you may have asked may be answered in such a state, but not in ways that you can anticipate, nor can you necessarily translate the answers into known terms. The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. They are quite native, again, in dream states, and are always present as alternatives beneath usual awareness.

Continue to rely upon known channels of information, but implement these and begin to explore the unrecognized ones also available. What information do you have, for example, presently unknown to yourself? Try your hand at predicting future events. In the beginning, it does not matter whether or not your predictions are “true.” You will be stretching your consciousness into areas usually unused. Do not put any great stake in your predictions, for if you do you will be very disappointed if they do not work out, and end the entire procedure.

Now, in the normal course of events you attract experience in the same fashion. You anticipate events. You are aware of them before they happen, whether or not you ever succeed in conscious predictions. You form your life, however, through the intimate interworkings of your own conscious goals and beliefs.

(11:17.) While your future can on occasion be correctly perceived ahead of time by a gifted psychic, the future is too plastic for any kind of systematized framework. Free will is always involved. Yet many people are frightened of remembering dreams because they fear that a dream of disaster will necessarily be followed by such an event. The mobility of consciousness provides far greater freedom. In fact, such a dream can instead be used to circumnavigate such a probability.

Only if you understand your own freedom in such areas will you allow yourselves to explore alternate states of consciousness, or the environment of dreams. Such exercises are not to be used to supersede the world you know, but to supplement it, to complete it, and to allow you to perceive its true dimensions.

He dreamed of flying, and that impetus led to the physical inventions that made mechanical flight possible. I am not speaking symbolically here, but quite literally. From the beginning, I said that the self was not confined to the body. This means that the consciousness has other methods of perceiving information, that even in physical life experience is not confined to what is sensed in usual terms. This remains fine theory, however, unless you allow yourself enough freedom to experiment with other modes of perception.

(“No, not unless you want to comment on some questions Jane had in mind.”)