“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has just finished the final typing of her own The World View of Paul Cézanne, and now I’m ready to type the finished version of Volume I of Seth’s “Unknown” Reality. As I explain in the Introductory Notes for his book, we decided to publish Seth’s very long manuscript for “Unknown” in two volumes. This means that our readers can have access to somewhat less than half of that material while I prepare the much longer Volume 2 for later publication. Quite to my surprise, since typing isn’t one of her favorite activities, Jane announced that she’s going to help me type the final copy for Volume 1 — so each of us spent most of the day at our respective machines.

Instead events are built up, so to speak, from significances. But let us forget that term for a moment and consider association, with which you are already familiar, since your stream of consciousness operates in that fashion. By its very nature each consciousness is a particular, peculiar, and unique focus of awareness which will experience any possible realities through its own characteristics.

It also “stamps” or “impresses” the universe with its own imprint. No portion of the universe is inactive or passive, regardless of its seeming organization or its seeming lack of organization. Each consciousness, then, impresses the universe in its own fashion. Its very existence sets up a kind of significance, in whose light the rest of the universe will be interpreted. The universe knows itself through such significances. Each consciousness is endowed with creativity of a multidimensional nature, so that it will seek to create as many possible realities for itself as it can, using its own significance as a focus to draw into its experience whatever events are possible for it from the universe itself. It will then attract events from the universe, even as its own existence imprints the universe as an event with the indelible stamp of its own nature.

Put more simply from another viewpoint, each of you as you know yourselves has certain abilities and characteristics of your own. You experience reality through the cast of those abilities and characteristics, but you also stamp the universe with that particular imprint of individuality that is your own, and you attract those events that are suited to your nature and no other.

The inner significances, however, the associations, existed all at once, to be tuned in to at any point of time. They had their reality basically apart from time, even though they appeared within it.

Using such significances as yardsticks, you accept or reject probable events. You imprint the universe with your own significance, and using that as a focus you draw from it, or attract, those events that fit your unique purposes and needs. In doing so, to some extent you multiply the creative possibilities of the universe, forming from it a personal reality that would otherwise be absent, in those terms; and in so doing you also add in an immeasurable fashion to the reality of all other consciousness by increasing the bank of reality from which all consciousness draws.

Now: There is no such thing, basically, as random motion. There is no such thing as chaos. The universe, by whatever name and in whatever manifestation, attains its reality through ordered sequences of significances.

Your physical events happen to you as you. In dreams you may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or you may find yourself in the past or future instead of the present. In waking life you have the family that you recognize, or group of friends, or profession, or what have you. In dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life. In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions.

To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time. Your dream perceptions seem physical — you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. There are actually many other conditions of existence, but for now we will speak of a predream state, which is actually composed of several conditions of actuality. Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking, the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality. It would seem to you that experience becomes broader but less specific, but such is not the case. Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

This is simply an analogy because you are steeped in that other reality constantly; but its illuminations and nature are transmitted to the self that you know through the formation of dreams, and in your terms, “it takes time to dream.” This larger experience, from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey. Period. Using another analogy, it is as if you joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard your own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.

A direct cognition is involved in which each consciousness knows what each other one is doing, its “position,” and the implications of its experience. The entire fabric and framework of time and reality at each point is ascertained, and the probabilities probed and understood.

In larger terms, in the predream states you are aware of all of the activities of your own greater psyche as it participates in — and contributes to — the infinite existence of psychic consciousness as you understand it, and becomes aware of the psychological realities that form the framework of its own stability.