“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Above all, it deepened my trust in Seth and in his psychological insight and impressed me once again with the remarkable abilities of the inner intuitive self, for it is this part of me that makes communication with Seth possible. For another thing, because of the program format the trance was cut short, and this gave me the opportunity to study the trance phenomenon from a different angle.

Following Seth’s instructions, my husband and I first learned to recall and record our dreams. Through later experiments, we discovered that we could bring our normal waking consciousness into the dream state and “come awake” while dreaming. Later we began to take bolder steps into these inner areas, learning to manipulate consciousness in what was for us an entirely new way.

Here I will stress subjective experience itself as it is turned toward the dreaming state in particular, and deal with Seth’s conceptions of the dream universe through excerpts from his continuing manuscript. This book will also serve as a journal of our own subjective excursions as first Rob and I, and then my students, used Seth’s ideas as maps into that strange inner landscape. We have become involved in the keenest of adventures in which ordinary obstructions do not exist while the usual suppositions of physical life do not apply.

It’s tricky to play hopscotch back and forth between various stages of consciousness, to travel into little-understood subjective realms, explore those inner landscapes and return with any clear clues as to their nature. Such explorations are highly important, however, because they bring us in touch with that basic inner reality that underlies our individual conscious thought and existence and which is the bedrock of our civilization.

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.