“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Three particular dream-events highlighted my psychic initiation and led, indirectly, to this book. The first was a comparatively minor dream that was surprising to me when it happened, but it could easily have been forgotten. The second was an amazing experience resulting from a dream that I could not remember. The third was a dream that gave me a startling glimpse into another kind of reality.

I didn’t know what to say because I was still so startled. Her eyes were very red and sore-looking, as they had been in my dream. I stayed with her for a short time, trying to be as comforting as I could. Finally I returned to my own apartment, distressed both because of her condition and the connection with my dream of the night before.

As the days passed, the dream was more or less forgotten. Only now and then did it nag at me with its disquieting connotations. I felt, uneasily, that a small but significant tear had been ripped in the nature of things. Looking back, I’m sure that I sniffed danger as surely as any animal who senses something strange and new in his environment — or as any adult when threatened by a change in the status quo. So for all general purposes, I put the dream out of my mind and went on my way. I later mentioned this dream in my first book in the field, How To Develop Your ESP Power. Even then, I had no idea that it would be only one of a series of psychic events involving Miss Cunningham, nor did I see its true significance in my own development.

Then, gradually, I became aware that my consciousness was settling back in my body again, but slowly, like dust motes descending through the evening air down to where my body sat upright at the table, head bent, fingers furiously scribbling notes about what was happening as if they had a mind of their own.

Since those notes were born so directly from that event, and since they represent the first strong intrusions from the interior universe into my own life, I still find them intriguing. I am looking at them now, as I work on this chapter some five years later. They seemed charged with a fierce vitality that leads me to consider the ambiguous nature of creativity, for if those ideas and the experience itself initiated a new kind of consciousness in me, they also possessed an explosive force powerful enough to considerably dismantle the previous frameworks of my thoughts and ideas. The ordinary surface of my world literally quaked open, and I had no conception then of what was still to emerge.

Ideas are mental transformations of energy by an entity into physical reality.

Idea constructions are transformations of ideas into physical reality.

Space is where our own idea constructions do not exist in the physical universe.

Idea complexes are groups of ideas formed together like building blocks to form more complicated constructions in physical reality.

Action is idea in motion. The senses are channels of projection by which ideas are projected outward to create the world of appearances.

The present is the apparent point of any idea’s emergence into physical reality.

The future is the apparent lapse between the disappearance of one idea construction and its replacement by another in physical reality.

Each evolutionary change is preceded and caused by a new idea. As the idea is in the process of being constructed onto the physical plane, it prepares the material world for its own actuality and creates the prerequisite conditions.

Evolution is energy’s movement toward conscious expression in the physical universe, but it is basically nonphysical. A species at any given time is the materialization of the inner images or ideas of its individual members, each of whom forms their own idea constructions.

Each entity perceives only his own constructions on a physical level. Because all constructions are more or less faithful reproductions in matter of the same basic ideas (since all individuals are, generally speaking, on the same level in this plane), then they agree sufficiently in space, time and degree so that the world of appearances has coherence and relative predictability.

All physical matter is idea construction. We only see our own constructions. So-called empty space is full of constructions not our own that we cannot perceive. Our skin connects us to other physical constructions, and through it we are involved in the complicated fabric of continuous matter. The action of each one of the most minute of these particles affects each other one. The slight motion of one grain of sand causes a corresponding alteration in the distribution of the stars and in all matter’s fabric, from an atom in a man’s skull down to the slightest variation in a microbe’s action.

More complicated organisms — mammals, for example — have need of further mechanisms to construct ideas because they are able to perceive more of them. Here memory is an element. Now the organism has a built-in ghost image of past constructions by which to perfect and test new ones. Reflection of some sort enters into the picture, and with it the organism is given more to do. Slowly, within its range of receptivity, it is given some choice in the actual construction of ideas into physical reality.

Suddenly, time blossomed like a strange flower in his skull. Before this he was transfixed in the present. But memory produced another dimension in the animal and man carried it further. No longer did memory flicker briefly and disappear, enclosing him in darkness again. Now it stretched brightly behind him and also stretched out ahead — a road on which he always saw his own changing image.

He learned continuity. And with his focused memory at his command, man’s ego was born, which could follow its own identity through the maze of blazing impulses that beset him, could recognize itself through the pattern of continuing constructions and could separate itself from its action in the physical world. Here you have the birth of subject and object, the I AM who is the doer or constructor, and the construction itself.

This new dimension enabled the species to manipulate and recognize its own constructions and freed it to focus greater energy in projecting some ideas over others. In other words, conscious purpose became possible, physically. Somewhere along the line, however, man began to divorce himself almost completely and artifically from his own constructions. Hence his groping, his sense of alienation from nature, his search for a Cause or Creator of a creation he no longer recognized as his own.

It’s impossible to describe the impression that this manuscript made on me, much less to verbalize the experience that accompanied it. All of these ideas were completely new to me and quite contrary to my own beliefs. I had never written anything like this before. Rob was painting in his studio at the time. When he came out, I was so excited and amazed that I could hardly speak.

We stayed up late that night, talking. I tried to explain what had happened, realizing for the first time the vast gulf between words and subjective feelings. So I showed Rob the manuscript. Without it, incidentally, I would have been left without any tangible evidence at all. Yet when it was all over, my intellect was on its own again. What did the whole thing mean? I knew beyond all doubt that the ideas I’d received were true, yet, intellectually, they shocked me completely.

Now, seven years later, I realize that this was an excellent example of the ways in which the inner self can suddenly regenerate and revitalize the personality, open up new methods of perception, shatter barriers and flood the personality with energy that sets it right, reorganizing it in more meaningful directions. It is a second birth. Such events are like geysers that erupt suddenly, bringing us close to the center of our being. They come from subjective rather than objective reality, and, in my case at least, they become objectified, their force propelling them into physical actualization.