“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Basically, events have nothing to do with what you think of as cause and effect. This is perhaps apparent to some degree when you study dream events, for there the kind of continuity you are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

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.

(9:49.) At the same time Aunt Sarah, unbeknown to you, might pick up a blue vase, one that you had just seen in your mind as belonging on a shelf in her living room. Touching the vase, your Aunt Sarah might think of the person who gave it to her, now on the other side of the continent. That person, perhaps thinking of buying a present for someone, might settle upon a vase in a flash of inspiration, or suddenly begin humming a song with the name “Sarah” in the title, or possibly even think of your aunt. If on the other hand any opposing associations existed anywhere along the line, the “chain” of association could be broken. The last lady might consider a vase, for example, but reject the idea. Because of the time element, it seems to you that the first episode caused the others, and that your first association concerning your aunt brought about the “following” events.

Actually the three sets of events could easily occur to the three people at once, and if no normal communication happened no one would be the wiser. The inner tapestry of events deals with just this kind of association. Emotional intensities and significances compose the nature of events. In dreams you work with the kind of intensities involved, exploring multitudinous significances. These are like charged emotional patterns, formed of your own highly personal emotions and intents.

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.

Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body’s full participation. These significances, then, involve from your end certain biological cues that regulate the intersection of psychological events with physical activity in time and space. Only when all conditions match your own highly specific requirements are the necessary cues activated to give you physical experience. To that extent in dreams you are “on hold,” involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience.

These significances set up their own codes, then, so that physical events must be coded in a certain fashion, and dreams in another. There is, then, what can be called a predream state, or a state of experience from which the dream will be formed. Such experience will carry a different kind of code, further divorcing it from that acceptable intersection with bodily activity, space, and time.

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.

(10:55.) You leave behind the physical nature of events and go into those areas in which events are formed. In ways most difficult to describe, you encounter the universe in a more direct fashion, using inner senses that are far more ranging. Using your own indestructible validity as “bait,” you go forth to draw from the universe the raw material of experience. You are yourself, yet at that level you are also a part of that universe from which that self springs, and its power and vitality are your own, to be uniquely focused. In your terms, you literally look backward and forward in time at your individual self and your civilization, seeing where they merge, and feeling the infinite connections, so that each event you choose as your own will also be chosen as a world event — participated in to whatever extent by others, and adding to the available experience of the species from which others can also draw.

Now: Events do not become physical, then, unless certain requirements are met, and certain codes activated.

It is then further processed into individual significances, drives, or intents, which convert it into the required codes that will then determine the nature of actualized waking events. Data must be of particular kinds of intensity before they register as physical matter, or are experienced as physical events. Part of this processing occurs in the dream state, and creativity plays a large part in the preliminary process.