“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not a neutral energy but one of strong emotional impact, reassuring, and in an odd way, personified — warm and amazingly immediate. Perhaps it envelops me, but I do not fall asleep or lose myself in nothingness. I am myself, but very small. I seem to fade into a distance that has nothing to do with space but more to do with psychological focus. Yet I am upheld, supported and protected in the midst of this pervading energy that seems to form about and within me.

Certainly my life has been vastly enriched by an odd subjective mobility. I write this book during the day in my study, looking out the wide bay windows at the street and at the mountains and river just beyond. But when I want new material for a particular chapter, I turn the focus of my attention from the exterior world to the interior one. Then my physical environment does not concern me, and my normal waking life is the dream.

I have been speaking for Seth in twice-weekly sessions since late 1963. At the very least, this has given me personal experience with altered states of consciousness and glimpses into subjective areas largely unexplored. Certainly, it was because of Seth that I found myself studying the dream reality that comes into focus while the body sleeps.

The relationship between Seth and myself snaps into focus by prearranged appointments, as suggested by him in the early day’s of the sessions. Each Monday and Wednesday at 9:00 P.M., I sit in my favorite rocker. Rob sits across from me on the couch with his note pad and pen, ready to take notes. Normal lights are lit. I may feel very unpsychic, or even cross. I may feel tired, or really want to go dancing. Yet at nine, the session begins, and Seth “comes alive.”

Seth calls himself an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality. Whoever or whatever he is, he is well equipped to discuss the nature of nonphysical existence and to serve as a guide through the other side of consciousness, for it is his natural environment. He comes as a visitor from levels of awareness beyond those with which we are usually acquainted.

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.

The locations that you visit while dreaming are as real to you then as physical locations are to you in the waking state. What you have is this: In the waking state, the whole self is focused toward physical reality, but in the dreaming state, it is focused in a different dimension. It is every bit as conscious and aware.

In the 28th Session, he used an analogy to explain this dual conscious focus:

It often seems to me that only when we close our eyes do we begin to see, literally and figuratively. This is somewhat of an exaggeration, and yet my experience, Rob’s and my students’ makes several facts clear. Our ordinary consciousness shows us only one specific view of reality. When we learn to close off our senses momentarily and change the focus of awareness, other quite valid glimpses of an interior universe begin to show themselves.