“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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Personality is the individual’s overall responses to ideas received and constructed. It represents the emotional coloration of the individual’s ideas and constructions at any given “time.”

Physical time is the apparent lapse between the emergence of an idea in the physical universe (as a construction) and its replacement by another.

Psychological time is the apparent lapse between the conception of ideas.

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.

Sleep is the entity’s rest from physical idea construction. Only enough energy is used to keep the personal image construction in existence. The entity withdraws into basic energy realms and is comparatively free from time since idea construction is at a minimum level. The entity is in contact with other entities at a subconscious area.

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.

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.

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.