“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions. To some extent your language organizes your feelings and emotions. The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

In daily language, objects have certain names. Obviously the names are not the objects, but symbols for them. Even these symbols, however, divide you as the perceiver from the rest of the world, which becomes objectified. You can yourself understand far more about the nature of the psyche, for example, than you think that you can. To do this, however, you must leave your daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to your own feelings and imagination. Your language tells you that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not. Many of your most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of your language, so you disregard them.

These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche. It is not that an understanding of your psyche is beyond you: It is usually that you try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways — through the use of daily language.

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. For this reason it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based. Therefore the imagination is often considered suspect.

You might stand alone in your doorway, or in a field — or even on a street, surrounded by many people in a large city — look upward, suddenly struck by the great sweeping clouds above, and feel yourself a part of them. You might momentarily experience a great yearning or feel your own emotions suddenly filled with that same moving majesty, so that for an instant you and the sky seem to be one.

(Pause at 10:12.) Mundane language tells you, as you think with its patterns, that your imagination is running away with you, for obviously you are one thing and the sky is another. You and sky do not equate — or (amused) as friend Spock would say: “It is not logical.” The feeling swiftly fades after bemusing you briefly. You might be spiritually refreshed, yet as a rule you would not consider the feeling to be a statement of any legitimate reality, or a representation of your psyche’s existence.

The emotions and the imagination, however, give you your closest contact with other portions of your own reality. They also liberate your intellect so that its powers are not limited by concepts it has been taught are true. Instead, such concepts are relatively true — operationally true. For example, the physical laws that you are familiar with operate where you are. They are true, relatively speaking. In those terms you are one person physically objectified, staring upward in the scene just mentioned at an objectified sky. You weigh so many pounds, tilt your head at such-and-such an angle to peer upward at the skyscape, and physically speaking, you can be categorized.

In those same terms the clouds could be physically measured, and shown to be so far above you — composed of, say, winds of a certain velocity, ready to pour down a precise amount of rain or whatever. Physically speaking then, obviously, you are separate from the clouds, and so in those terms your momentary experience of uniting with them would seem to be a lie — at least not factual, or “the product of your imagination.”

Instead, such an event is a direct expression of the psyche’s knowledge. It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feels its own emotional power leap. Your emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified — raised, say, to a higher power. There are multitudinous such examples that could be given, as in each day your psyche presents evidence of its own greater being — evidence that you are taught to overlook, or to dismiss because it is not factual.

What is imaginary is not true: You are taught this as children. The imagination, however, brings you into connection with a different kind of truth, or a different framework in which experience can be legitimately perceived. The larger truths of the psyche exist in that dimension.

You cannot treat thoughts and imagination in such a literal manner, nor in a large respect should you try to “guard your thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that you wanted to keep purely bred. Your thoughts do form your reality. If you do not fear them, however, they create their own balances. The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world you usually recognize that there good and evil, as you think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.

In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true,” whether or not it is duplicated in waking life. Dream events happen in a different context — one, you might say, of the imagination. Here you experience a valid reality that exists on its own, so to speak; one in which the psyche’s own language is given greater freedom.

To some extent, however, you form physical events while you are dreaming. Then, freed from waking limitations, you process your experience, weigh it according to your own intents and purposes, correlate it with information so vast you could not be consciously aware of it. In most dreams you do not simply think of a situation. You imaginatively become part of it. It is real in every fashion except that of physical fact.

That reality represents your origin, and is the natural environment in which the psyche resides. Your beliefs, cultural background, and to some extent your languages, set up barriers so that this dream dimension seems unreal to you. Even when you catch yourselves in the most vivid of dream adventures, or find yourselves traveling outside of your bodies while dreaming, you still do not give such experiences equal validity with waking ones.

Subjectively speaking, you are everywhere surrounded by your own greater reality, but you do not look in the right places. You have been taught not to trust your feelings, your dreams, or your imagination precisely because these do not often fit the accepted reality of facts.