“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

One moment I sat at my desk with my paper and pen beside me. The next instant, my consciousness rushed out of my body, yet it was itself bodiless, taking up no space at all; it seemed to be merging with the air outside the window, plunging through the treetops, resting, curled within a single leaf. Exultation and comprehension, new ideas, sensations, novel groupings of images and words rushed through me so quickly there was no time to call out. There was no present, past or future: I knew this, suddenly, irrevocably.

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.

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.

Learning is the potential for constructing new idea complexes from existing ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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.