“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

Here are some further excerpts from “Idea Construction.”

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.

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.