“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.

In the beginning, Rob and I only saw her face to face in the dark apartment house hallway, usually at the mailbox. She was fiercely independent, tall and slim, with neatly coiffeured hair and tailored clothes. Her English was flawless. She had an excellent reputation as a teacher, and now and then she was visited by former students to whom she served tea. During the holidays, her mailbox was stuffed with cards.

“I saw Miss Cunningham, of all people,” I said. “We were in a hospital. She wore a black suit, and her eyes were terribly red and sore. She was crying, saying over and over, ‘Oh dear, I have to go away, and I don’t want to go.’ There was a glassed-in area to the left in the hospital lobby, where you could buy gifts for the patients. It was all so real.”

In the morning, I was still upset. Our television set hadn’t worked the night before. We didn’t have a phone then, so I decided to ask Miss Cunningham if I could use hers to call a repairman. Actually, I thought that if I saw her, hale and hearty as always, I’d feel better. Then, I reasoned, I could just dismiss my dream and forget the whole thing.

The minute I knocked on the door, Miss Cunningham opened it. Her hands reached out for mine, supplicatingly. Usually she was primly polite and rather distant. The change in her manner instantly alarmed me. Startled, I drew back for just a moment before asking what was wrong. “Oh, I’m so glad to see someone,” she said. “I’m so upset. I’ve just learned that I have cataracts, and I’ll need operations on both of my eyes. It’s so depressing.” Her voice wavered. With a gesture of despair, she waved at the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and at the magazines piled on the coffee table. “I read so much … so much. What would I ever do if I lost my sight?”

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.

Yet, later in the day, I managed to convince myself that only coincidence was involved. “After all,” I said to Rob, “she wasn’t wearing black. And we weren’t in a hospital. Maybe I just noticed subconsciously that her eyes were failing and then made up the dream.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This rough diagram “came” with the above material. It was supposed to represent the energy of the entity as it flowed outward through the subconscious to the conscious, in order to construct the physical image and environment in response to the self’s idea of what it was.

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.

Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man, the opposite becomes true. He has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him to construct all of his ideas physically. As his scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.

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.

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.

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.