“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At the same time, Seth marched right along on this book, Psyche. Jane jokingly commented that she wished Seth could type too.)

Significances fall or happen in certain patterns, and when these become very obvious they appear as cause and effect. They are simply heavy-handed significances. Your associative processes and habits are perhaps the closest examples that can give clues of how significances operate. Even then, however, associations deal with the passage of time, and basically significances do not. You might think of your Aunt Sarah, for example, and in a few moments the associative process might bring you images of periods in the past when you visited your aunt, of her friends and neighbors, the articles in her house, and episodes connected with your relationship.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.