“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Basically, events are not built one upon the other. They grow out of each other in a kind of spontaneous expansion, a profusion of creativity, while the conscious mind chooses which aspects to experience — and those aspects then become what you call an objective event.

(9:40.) Events obviously are not formed by your species alone, so that, as I mentioned in our last session, there is a level of the dream state in which all earth-tuned consciousnesses of all species and degrees come together. From your standpoint this represents a deep state of unconscious creativity — at the cellular levels particularly — by which all cellular life communicates and forms a vital biological network that provides the very basis for any “higher” experience at all.

Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself. Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does. Events, therefore, cannot be precisely defined. You can explore your own experience of an event, and that exploration itself alters the nature of the seemingly separate event that you began to investigate. You share, then, a mass dream experience as you share a mass waking world. Your daily experience is private and uniquely yours, yet it happens within the context of a shared environment. The same applies to the dream state.

Individually and en masse, in the dream state you change the orientation of your consciousness, and deal with the birth of events which are only later time-structured or physically experienced.

In such instances a dream, or a series of them, will often then alter the person’s beliefs in a way that could not otherwise occur, by providing new information. The same data might come in a state of inspiration, but it would in any case be the result of an acquisition of knowledge otherwise inaccessible. Love, purpose, belief, and intent — these shape your physical body and work upon it and with it even as at other levels cellular consciousness forms it.

The exercises will not work, however, in the way they are meant to if they are embarked upon with too serious an air or intent. They should be considered as creative play, though of a mental nature, and they actually consist of mental endeavors tried quite spontaneously by children. So they are not to be regarded as esoteric accomplishments. They represent the intent to discover once again the true transparent delight that you once felt in the manipulation of your own consciousness, as you looped and unlooped it like a child’s jumping rope.

Physical play is pleasant, and accompanied by high imaginative activity. Muscles and mind are both exercised. The same kind of activity occurs in the child’s dream state as it learns to handle events before they are physically encountered. Intense dream activity is involved. Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are — not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events. Some of the exercises I will suggest will put you in touch with the way events are formed.

(The next morning, Jane awakened with the title of a book in mind. The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher. She knew that it referred to William James — the American psychologist and philosopher who’d lived from 1842 to 1910 — and that a dream had been involved, though she’d forgotten it. The title was all that remained.