“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.

The initial dream involved a neighbor, Miss Cunningham, who lived in this apartment house long before we knew it existed. When Rob and I moved here in 1960, she had already spent a quarter of a century in her three small rooms, surrounded by books of poetry and drama. As we came up the front steps, we often saw her sitting in the upstairs window, watching the traffic below. But the year we arrived, her life began to shrink. She retired from her position as a high school drama teacher and spent more and more time in her little apartment.

That summer, Rob and I vacationed in Maine. We hadn’t communicated with Miss Cunningham at all. But on the night of our return to Elmira, I awakened suddenly with the memory of a disquieting dream which bothered me so much that I awakened Rob. He sat up, astonished. Neither of us remembered dreams at all.

“No,” I muttered, “But I had the strangest feeling, as if recording the dream would give it some kind of undue importance. Anyway, I’d rather just forget it,” I said. “I wish that I hadn’t remembered it at all.” But I got sleepily out of bed, wrote the dream down and dated it.

“Well, it has to be something like that,” I said. “I admit that the whole thing is … evocative, but it irritates me, too. I mean, think of how much more difficult life could be if we could see the future in dreams? I’ve got enough to handle as it is.”

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.

I described that experience in The Seth Material, but because it rose from the world of dreams and is so connected with unconscious activity, I want to examine it from a different viewpoint here. The Miss Cunningham dream had startled me. This time, I was swept away by the most awe-inspiring event of my life to that date; yet, I was not afraid.

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.

But then, as I returned, the intensity of the experience began to fade. The miracle began to withdraw. Three hours in all had passed. I was left with a pile of scribbled notes, written and titled automatically: “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction” — all that was physically salvaged from that remarkable experience. And I knew beyond all doubt that those ideas had been given to me initially in the forgotten dream of the night before.

In The Seth Material, I included only a few brief quotes from “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction,” but here I will go into that manuscript somewhat more thoroughly, since it is so close to the “raw form” that erupted from that experience and represents, in embryo, I believe, the material that Seth would later be giving us. The manuscript itself consisted of approximately forty pages of scribbled notes written during the height of the experience. Later I wrote fifty more pages as I tried to recapture the feelings and insights I’d had at the time.

I’m including here only some of the passages that were written by my fingers without my knowledge while I was out of my body. To some of my readers these ideas will be far from original. I discovered later that many of them have appeared in “esoteric” manuscripts throughout the centuries, though to me they were not only completely new but also were accompanied by such intense certainty that I would never be able to doubt their validity.

The past is the memory of ideas that were but are no longer physical constructions.

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.

At no point can we actually say that one construction vanishes and another takes its place, but artificially we adopt certain points as past, present and future, for convenience. At some point, we agree that the physical construction ceases to be one thing and becomes another, but, actually, it still contains elements of the “past” construction and is already becoming the “next” one.

I was involved with the “pure” experience behind the diagram and words with which I was left. The revelation was that there were no real boundaries to the self; skin did not separate us from others but connected us in a webwork of energy; what we thought of as Self and Not-Self were interrelated; and that, in this life at least, ideas were constantly being transformed into matter.

The ability of the entity to transform energy into an idea and then to construct it physically determines the entity’s place on the physical evolutionary plane. Simple organisms are capable of “picking up” fewer communications. Their range is less, but the vitality and validity of their constructions is excellent. In simple organisms such as the paramecium and amoeba, the few sharp ideas received are constructed almost simultaneously, without reflection. The organism needs no other mechanism to translate ideas. What it has is sufficient.

The reflection is brief, but for a moment the animal partakes of a new dimension. The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. There is a pause: the organism — dog or tiger — can choose to attack or not to attack. The amoeba must construct its small world without reflection and without time as we know it.

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.