“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

The events of your life will follow a similar structure. Before conditioning, children’s play follows the love of performance, of body or imagination, for performance’s sake only; the expansion of mental or physical abilities. The most satisfying of events involve those characteristics. The exercises I will suggest have to do with games “that anybody can play,” then — with the natural joyful manipulation of the imagination that children employ.

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