“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In waking reality you obviously share a mass world experience as well as a physical world environment.

When you ask: “How are events formed?” you more or less expect an answer couched in those terms. The answer is not that simple. The origin of events lies in that creative, subjective realm of being with which you are usually least concerned. This state of dreaming provides an inner network of communication, that in its way far surpasses your technological communications. The inner network deals with another kind of perceptual organization entirely. A rose is a rose is a rose. In the dream state, however, a rose can be an orange, a song, a grave, or a child as well, and be each equally.

In dreams you deal with symbols, of course. Yet symbols are simply examples of other kinds of quite “objective” events. They are events that are what they seem to be, and they are equally events that do not “immediately” show themselves. One so-called event, therefore, may be a container of many others, while you only perceive its exterior face — and you call that face a symbol.

(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.

What you call dreaming is obviously dependent upon this cellular communication, which distributes the life force throughout the planet. The formation of any psychological event therefore depends upon this interspecies relationship.

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.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur. In that context your own existence is “forever” assured. You are the physical event of yourself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it you automatically exclude other experience of your own selfhood. The greater event of yourself exists in a context that is beyond your usual perception of events. That greater portion of yourself, however, forms the self that you know.

In the dream state you step into a larger context to some extent. For that reason you also lose the special kind of precise orientation with which you are familiar. Yet you begin to sense, sometimes, the larger shape of events and the timeless nature of your own existence.

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.

Events are attracted or repelled by you according to your loves, beliefs, intents, and purposes. Your world provides a theater in which certain events can or cannot occur. Wars, violence, disasters — these are obviously shared by many, and are a part of your shared psychological and physical environment.

Some people encounter war directly, however, in terms of hand-to-hand combat, or bombing. Others are only inconvenienced by it. Here the mass shared environment is encountered as physical reality according to individual belief, love, and intent. In the deepest meaning there is no such thing as a victim, either of war, poverty, or disease. This does not mean that those negative qualities should not be combatted, for in the terms of conventional understanding it certainly appears that men and women are victims in many such cases. Therefore they behave like victims, and their beliefs reinforce such experience.

If this were really the case, however, mankind’s history would never change in any true regard. Alternate paths of experience — new possibilities and intuitive solutions — constantly appear in the dream state, so that man’s learning is not simply dependent upon a feedback system that does not allow for the insertion of creative material. Dreaming then provides the species with learning experience not otherwise available, in which behavior and events can be judged against more developed and higher understanding than that present in conventional daily reality at any level.

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 give-and-take between the two occurs largely in the dream state, where constant translations of data occur. Your thoughts and your body cells are reflected one in the other.

The dream state is the source of all physical events, in that it provides the great creative framework from which you choose your daily actuality.

Children quickly learn from their parents that experience must be structured in a certain conventional pattern. In their own periods of imaginative play, however, children utilize dream events, or events perceived in dreams, while clearly realizing that these are not considered actual in the “real” world.

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.

Children’s play, creativity, and dreams all involve you with the birth of events in the most direct of fashions. The games that you play or habitually observe will, of course, tell you much about the kind of organization that occurs in your own experience. Overall, you organize events around certain emotions. These can be combative, in which there will always be good teams and bad teams, salvation or destruction, winning or losing.

End of dictation. The next chapter will be called: “Games That Anybody Can Play. Dreams and the Formation of Events.”

(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.