“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Certainly for more than the hundredth time I say: “Your beliefs form your reality,” and this means that your beliefs structure the events you know.

Such experience then convinces you more thoroughly of the reality you perceive until a vicious circle is formed, in which all events mirror beliefs so perfectly that no leeway seems to appear between the two.

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.

(Nevertheless, during the morning Jane suddenly felt that “something was ready.” She put fresh paper in her typewriter and at once began what may very well be a new book. I watched, bemused and certainly delighted, as she got to work. Again, like the Cézanne manuscript, this morning’s material “came” so quickly that she had to type as quickly as she could to keep up with its flow.

(It will be most interesting to see what develops.)