“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, I suspect that our relationship is far more complex. One thing I know: Seth does not have his present basic existence in the three-dimensional world, and I do. He has given us instructions that allow Rob, my students and myself to take our own sometimes faltering steps out of our usual physical reality. He initiated our exploration into the universe of dreams, for example, and is therefore largely responsible for this book. But we must return to our normal daily dimension of actuality. And Seth returns to his.

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.

Seth maintains that the dream universe has its own basic laws or “root assumptions” — mental equivalents to our laws of gravity, space and time. In other worlds, dream reality only seems discordant or meaningless because we judge it according to physical laws rather than by the rules that apply within it.

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.

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.