“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We get on the bike and zoom through the countryside and while riding, I finally realize that this is a dream. I consider projecting but decide not to ruin the bike experience for Carl who would dearly love to own a motorcycle, even if he is only a dream Carl of mine.

Many do. You give probable selves a foundation and history and identity, and without your creation of them they would not exist. Would you, then, deny them reality in order to save them from any pain? Now, your headache can vanish. All existence is vulnerable … to the possibilities and probabilities of creation that dwell deeply with it. Even when you thrust a pain apart from yourself and give it as a heritage to a fragment personality, you give it also your creative power and your hopes. You do not set these personalities adrift without hope or potential.

The dreaming self is to some considerable degree aware of the probable self. There is give-and-take between the two, for much data is received by the dreaming self from the probable self — the self that experiences what the ego would call probable events.

Were it not for the experience of this probable self, and for its information given via the dreaming self to the subconscious, then it would be most difficult for the ego to come to any clear decisions in daily life. The ego does not realize the data that is being constantly fed into it. It cannot afford to, generally, since its focused energy must be used in the manipulation of physical actuality.

The probable self can be reached through hypnosis but only with excellent subjects and operators. Often it will not be recognized, however, for there will be no evidence of its experience in physical reality to back up its statements. Its data will agree when considered within its own framework. Reaching it in this manner would be highly difficult in any case. To my knowledge, it has not as yet been reached through hypnosis. It has been glimpsed but not recognized as a separate part of the self — in dream recordings and analytic sessions.

Again, these portions of the self exist in each reincarnation. In the materialization of personality through various reincarnations only the ego and layers of personal subconscious adapt new characteristics. Other portions retain their experience, identity, and knowledge. The ego, in fact, receives much of its stability because of this retention. Were it not for experiences in other lives on the part of deeper layers of the self, the ego would find it almost impossible to relate to other individuals, and the cohesive nature of society would not exist.

If you would have some idea of what the probable universe is like, then examine your own dreams, looking for those events which do not have any strong resemblance to the physical events of waking existence. Look for dream individuals with whom you are not acquainted in normally conscious life. Look for landscapes that appear bizarre or alien, for all of these exist somewhere. You have perceived them. They do not exist in the space that you know but neither are they nonexistent, mere imaginative toys of the dreaming mind, without substance.

You may act out many probabilities within dream reality and try out alternatives, and not necessarily short-term ones. You would have made an excellent doctor, for example. In your terms, you worked out this possibility by weaving, over a period of three years, a dream framework in which you learned exactly what your life would have been, had you gone into medicine.

In your present life, the same process continues. Most of these dreams are very disconnected from the ego and will not be recalled. The self who pursues these divergent paths is actual, however. The doctor you might have been once dreamed of a probable universe in which he would be an artist. He continues to work out his own probabilities. He exists in fact. You call his system an alternate system of probability, but this is precisely what he would call yours.

To any of them, the others would seem to exist in a probable universe, yet all are connected. All of you did not have the same parents, for example, and there are portions of probable situations existing in your own parents’ separate lives. [To Rob:] In two probable realities, your mother did not have children. You do not exist in these. In some, she married but not the man you know as father. A psychological connection exists between that first son in that other system and yourself.

In the dream state, the portions of the larger ‘structure’ sometimes communicate in highly codified symbols. It would be highly improbable that you could decipher many of these now. There is a feedback system that operates, and yet you must understand that these other identities are fully independent and individual. They exist in codified psychological structures within your personality, as you do in theirs.

All of these probable systems are open. In your system it seems as if you chose one course, one main line of probabilities, and that is the end of it. In your system, only one ego predominates and you think of yourself as that ego. In other systems, this is not necessarily the case. In some, the inner self is aware of having more than one ego, of playing more than one role at a time. As an analogy, this would be as if you lived, say, the life of a rich man of great talent, the life of a poor man and the life of a mother and career woman. You would be aware of each role and find abilities being developed in each. This is an analogy, and in several respects it could lead you astray if taken too literally. In such a system, there would be no breakup of time, you see. …