“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While I’m writing this book in the three-dimensional world, for example, the source material for it comes from the other side of consciousness — that dimension that is revealed to us in dreams, inspiration, trance states and creativity. This book is about Seth, dreams and “astral projection” — all aspects of a different kind of consciousness than the objective one with which we are usually occupied.

My out-of-body experiences are not nearly as well directed, deliberate or effective as Seth’s behavior is here, for example. Seth dictates one final draft of his own book, while I do at least three drafts of my own. (This present book is my third since the sessions began, so Seth is hardly “stealing” any of my creative energy.)

According to Seth, dreaming is a creative state of consciousness, a threshold of psychic activity in which we throw off usual restrictions to use our most basic abilities and realize our true independence from three-dimensional form. In dreams, Seth says, we write the script for our daily lives and perceive other levels of existence that our physical focus usually obscures.

Dreams, then, are not just imaginative indigestion or psychic chaos. We are not temporarily insane when we dream, as some theorists maintain. To the contrary, we may be far more sane and alert during some dream states than we are ordinarily. Certainly we are more creative. We may even be more “alive,” as you will see from some of our own experiences.

In other words, while most books are written about events that occur in waking reality, this one will be mainly concerned with events that happen precisely when consciousness is turned away from normal objective life. Much more is involved than even the nature of the dream state and man’s fascinating ability to withdraw consciousness from the body. These phenomena are only evidences of the greater creative consciousness that is inherent and active in each of us — the interior universe of which we know so little.

Today I received scientific corroboration by mail from James Beal, a NASA scientist, for some of Seth’s data on the units that Seth says underlie all physical particles. This information, given to us in sessions, was published in the appendix of The Seth Material. The paper Jim sent was so professionally oriented that I could hardly understand it, couched as it was in specialized mathematical language. Yet through Seth, we had received the same data. Someone — my own unconscious or Seth — had access to it; that much is certain. The creative consciousness was at work far “beneath” the consciousness I call my own.

We all have access to this creative consciousness, particularly in dreams and dissociated states when we are not so obsessed with physical sense data. Often, evidence of it emerges into consciousness in the guise of sudden hunches or creative inspiration.

This is most obvious in dreaming, of course. Dreams may well represent us at our most creative, for not only do we process the past day’s activities, but we also choose tomorrow’s events from the limitless probable actions that are presented to us while the waking self is still.

The water analogy intrigues me, though it can’t be followed too far without leading to distortions. A scuba diver, for instance, explores what he finds on the ocean floor and brings us clues from this vast, submerged area. I try to do the same thing, salvaging instead clues from the hidden layers of our inner being. But if he goes far enough, the scuba diver must somewhere come to the bottom of the ocean, and I don’t believe there is any bottom or boundary to this inner reality. Instead, I suspect that there are even stranger chasms and openings into other worlds of whose existence we are quite unaware — pools of creativity, consciousness and experience, from which not only our three-dimensional reality but also others spring.