“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“No,” I muttered, “But I had the strangest feeling, as if recording the dream would give it some kind of undue importance. Anyway, I’d rather just forget it,” I said. “I wish that I hadn’t remembered it at all.” But I got sleepily out of bed, wrote the dream down and dated it.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.