“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: There are vast distances of a psychological and psychic nature separating my reality from your own. To some degree Ruburt’s mind is the connective between us. As I speak in sessions, therefore, I am not entirely myself.

I am what I am, interpreted through your reality. I have personality characteristics by which those who have come to sessions can identify me. I have a peculiarity of voice and accent that is, if I may say so myself, unique and individualistic. Yet I come to your reality by a strange route — one that does not involve roads or highways but psychological dramas that wind backward like paths into the “psychological history” of your species. To some extent, I am like a particularly vivid, persistent, recurring dream image, visiting the mass psyche, only with a reality that is not confined to dreams — a dream image that attains a psychological fullness that can seem to make ordinary consciousness a weak apparition by contrast, psychologically speaking.

I am not speaking here of gods, but of psychological structures different from the ones you know. They cannot directly perceive or experience your reality in their “present” form of organization. In a manner of speaking they are in the background, from which the foreground of your experience emerges. They appear in your dreams in various ways. They are like the cloth from which you are cut. They are forces which have no need of names except for your convenience.

You may say if you wish that I am a dream image lacking even an image — but if so, then each individual whose life is changed by my words must question: “What is a dream?” In the same way that my personality exists without physical manifestation, so does your own. Your dreaming and waking experience has a direct effect upon the entire universe. The difference is that you are not consciously aware of what you are doing, but I am. I change a world to some extent, though in your terms I will not actually sit in a chair or walk the streets, or shake your hand, or see the twilight come, or the sunrise.

To me your world is a dream universe which I visit by invitation, a probable reality that I find unique and very dear — but one in which I can no longer have direct experience. Because I am not as immersed in it as you, I can tell you much about it, since your precise orientation necessitates a more narrow, concentrated view.

I am a personified energy source — but so are you. I have had many lives, in your terms, yet in other terms I have not lived physically, but rather lent or loaned my energy to lives that rose from my reality but were not me. In the same way you give birth to dream images of your own — hardly aware that you have done so, unconscious of the fact that you have provided impetus for a kind of psychological reality that quite escapes your notice. The dream stories you begin continue on their own. No dream is stillborn. Each chapter of this book is written in such a way that the ideas presented will activate your own intuitions, and open pathways between your dreaming and waking states.

Your own greater reality hovers about you in each instant. If you knew in precise terminology how you grew physically from a fetus to an adult, if you could consciously follow that process, you would not necessarily be better off, but possibly hindered in your growth; for you would begin to question: “Am I doing this right?” The perfection of the process would make you ill at ease.

In the same way, a step-by-step illustration of the nature of the dream state might well make you too self-conscious. (Humorously:) You would begin to question: “Am I dreaming right?”