“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Summer passed and autumn had begun before the next experience, one that was to change my life. I awakened one September morning with the feeling that I’d had a most unusual dream during the night, one that would affect me deeply. Yet I had no memory of the dream at all, and as the day went on, the feeling vanished. That night I sat down to write poetry for an hour as usual, and, suddenly, the small rift that had opened so slightly with the first dream now yawned wide open.

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

Memory is the ghost image of “past” idea constructions.

After death, the entity will have its ghost images (memories) at its command, though their apparent sequence will no longer apply. Memories are properties of the subconscious energy entity and, as such, are indestructible (though they may be unavailable to the individual under various circumstances).

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.

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.

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.