“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The so-called stream of consciousness is simply that — one small stream of thoughts, images, and impressions — that is part of a much deeper river of consciousness that represents your own far greater existence and experience. You spend all your time examining this one small stream, so that you become hypnotized by its flow, and entranced by its motion. Simultaneously these other streams of perception and consciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

Now often you tune into these other streams of consciousness without realizing that you have done so — for again, they are a part of the same river of your identity. All are therefore connected.

Some of these may involve the thoughts of what you would call a reincarnational self, focused in another period of history as you know it. You may instead, “pick up” an event in which a probable self is involved, according to your inclination, your psychic suppleness, your curiosity, your desire for knowledge. In other words, you may become aware of a far greater reality than you now know, use abilities that you do not realize you possess, know beyond all doubt that your own consciousness and identity is independent of the world in which you now focus your primary attention. If all of that were not true, I would not be writing this book and you would not be reading it.

Here the basic experience is hastily dressed up as much as possible in physical clothes. This is not because you want to understand the experience, but because you refuse to accept it as basically nonphysical. All dreams are not of this nature. Some dreams themselves do take place in psychic or mental areas connected with your daily activities, in which case no dressing-up process is necessary. But in the very deep reaches of sleep experience — those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories — you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.

At the same time, you make this information available to all these other portions of your identity, who dwell in entirely different realities, and you receive from them comparable information. You do not lose contact with your ordinary waking self. You simply do not focus upon it. You turn your attention away. In the daytime you simply reverse the process. If you were looking at your daily normal self from the other viewpoint, you see, using an analogy here, you might find that physically waking self as strange as you now find the sleeping self. The analogy will not hold however, simply because this sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.

Now I am obviously such a one in your terms, swimming up through other dimensions of reality and observing a dimension of existence that is yours rather than my own. There are, therefore, channels that exist between all these streams of consciousness, all these symbolic rivers of psychological and psychic experience, and there are journeys that can be made from my dimension as well as yours.

Now initially Ruburt and Joseph and I were a part of the same entity, or overall identity, and so symbolically speaking, there are psychic currents that unite us. All of these merge into what has often been compared to as an ocean of consciousness, a well from which all actuality springs. Start with any one consciousness, and theoretically you will find all others.

(Her fiction, Seth added, was Jane’s “way of probing probabilities and of trying to understand other people. All of her [writing] is a part of her creative life, but now she is investigating the nature of reality far more directly…. There is a great unity in the personality’s main interests. Nothing will be left behind. The creative self is operating, you see — going exactly where it wants to go.”