“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Not only are you part of other independent selves, each one focused in its own reality, but there is a sympathetic relationship that exists. For example, because of this relationship, your experience need not be limited by the physical perceptive mechanisms. You can draw upon knowledge that belongs to these other independent selves. You can learn to focus your attention away from physical reality, to learn new methods of perception that will enable you to enlarge your concept of reality and greatly expand your own experience.

It is only because you believe that physical existence is the only valid one, that it does not occur to you to look for other realities. Such things as telepathy and clairvoyance can give you hints of other kinds of perception, but you are also involved in quite definite experiences both while you are normally waking and while you are asleep.

(9:35.) You are as actively and vividly concerned in these realities as you are in the one in which your main attention is now focused. Now, as you are merely concerned with your physical body and physical self as a rule, you give your attention to the stream of consciousness that seems to deal with it. These other streams of consciousness, however, are connected with other self-forms that you do not perceive. The body, in other words, is simply one manifestation of what you are in one reality, but in these other realities you have other forms.

Any creative work involves you in a cooperative process in which you learn to dip into these other streams of consciousness, and come up with a perception that has far more dimensions than one arising from the one narrow, usual stream of consciousness that you know. Great creativity is then multidimensional for this reason. Its origin is not from one reality, but from many, and it is tinged with the multiplicity of that origin.

Now: These other existences of yours go on quite merrily whether you are waking or sleeping, but while you are awake ordinarily you block them out. In the dream state you are much more aware of them, although there is a final process of dreaming that often masks intense psychological and psychic experience, and unfortunately what you usually recall is this final dream version.

In this final version the basic experience is converted as nearly as possible into physical terms. It is therefore distorted. This final touching-up process is not done by deeper layers of the self however, but is much more nearly a conscious process than you realize.

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.

(10:20.) In this state you also pursue works and endeavors that may or may not be connected with your interests as you know of them. You are learning, studying, playing; you are anything but asleep (smile) as you think of the term. You are highly active. (Humorously): You are involved in the underground work, in the real nitty-gritty of existence.

I do not want to minimize the importance of your state of consciousness; as, for example, you read this book. Presumably you are awake, but in many ways when you are awake, you are resting far more than you are in your so-called unconscious nightly state. Then to a larger extent you realize your own reality, and are free to use abilities that in the daytime you ignore or deny.

(10:26.) At a very simple level, for example, your consciousness leaves your body often in the sleep state. You communicate with people in other levels of reality that you have known, but far beyond this, you creatively maintain and revitalize your physical image. You process daily experience, project it into what you think of as the future, choose from an infinity of probable events those you will make physical, and begin the mental and psychic processes that will bring them into the world of substance.

(Pause at 10:43.) Now often the ego acts as a dam, to hold back other perceptions — not because it was meant to, or because it is in the nature of an ego to behave in such a fashion, or even because it is a main function of an ego, but simply because you have been taught that the purpose of an ego is restrictive rather than expanding. You actually imagine that the ego is a very weak portion of the self, that it must defend itself against other areas of the self that are far stronger and more persuasive and indeed more dangerous; and so you have trained it to wear blinders, and quite against its natural inclinations.

The ego does want to understand and interpret physical reality, and to relate to it. It wants to help you survive within physical existence, but by putting blinders upon it, you hamper its perception and native flexibility. Then because it is inflexible you say that this is the natural function and characteristic of the ego.

(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.”