“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.

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.

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.

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.

Ideas are mental transformations of energy by an entity into physical reality.

Idea constructions are transformations of ideas into physical reality.

Idea complexes are groups of ideas formed together like building blocks to form more complicated constructions in physical reality.

The present is the apparent point of any idea’s emergence into physical reality.

The future is the apparent lapse between the disappearance of one idea construction and its replacement by another in physical reality.

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.

The ability of the entity to transform energy into an idea and then to construct it physically determines the entity’s place on the physical evolutionary plane. Simple organisms are capable of “picking up” fewer communications. Their range is less, but the vitality and validity of their constructions is excellent. In simple organisms such as the paramecium and amoeba, the few sharp ideas received are constructed almost simultaneously, without reflection. The organism needs no other mechanism to translate ideas. What it has is sufficient.

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.

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.