“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, regarding again the nature of action, I would like to discuss action in relation to the dream reality, for you are intimately familiar with action in dreams, and your practical experience will enable you to understand the true nature of action more clearly.

We mentioned that there are always actions within actions, and made it clear that all action does not necessarily involve motion that is apparent as motion to you. Actions may be thresholds or openings for other actions. To one extent or another all actions involve unfoldings. The action of dreaming itself is partially a physical phenomena. There is then, comparatively speaking, the outside action that makes dreaming possible, the action that is dreaming.

There are then truly endless varieties of actions within the dream, which is itself a continuing act. There is, most simply, within a dream the creation of images. These images then also act. They move, speak, walk, run. There is at times a dream within a dream, where the dreamer dreams that he dreams. Here of course the dimensions are even more diverse.

Many of these actions performed by dream images are muscular ones, physical manipulations. But many of these actions are also mental manipulations, or esthetic realizations and even esthetic performances. These dream images are not one-dimensional, cardboard figures by any means. Their mobility in terms of perspectives and within space is far greater than your own.

Nor is the dream universe a shadow image of your own. It carries on according to the possibilities inherent within it, as you carry on according to the possibilities that exist within the physical field. The possibilities for action vary, however, within these two fields as they vary within all other fields. You may say that in sleeping you focus your energies to form a different reality than the reality of waking physical matter.

In many respects actions within the dream universe are indeed more direct than in your own. It is because you remember but vague glimmerings and disconnected episodes that dreams appear, sometimes, chaotic or meaningless, particularly to the ego, which censors rigidly much of the information that the subconscious does retain.

For most people this censoring process is valuable, since it prevents the personality from being snowed under by data it is not equipped to handle. The ability to retain experience gained within other fields is the trend of further development. You are at least however to some extent familiar with this field of dream action, and every man intuitively knows his involvement here.

I used the term “pass out of” the dream universe purposely, for here we see a mobility of action easily and often accomplished, a passing in and out that involves an action without movement in space. The dreamer is acquainted intimately, and has at his fingertips so to speak, a memory of his previous dream experiences, and carries within him the many inner individualistic purposes which are behind his dream actions.

Obviously, time in terms of continuity, is not an element of importance in the dream universe, and this is one of the reasons for the lack of physical structure. The intuitions and certain inner abilities here have so much more freedom that it is unnecessary for molecules to be used in any imprisoning form or structure. Action is more spontaneous within the dream universe, more fluid. The images appear and disappear much more quickly because value fulfillment is allowed greater reign.

This involves, simply, a quickening of experience and action relatively unhampered by the sort of time necessities inherent within the physical universe. Action itself therefore is allowed greater freedom. This is not to say that structure does not exist within the dream universe, for structures of a mental or psychic nature do exist. But structure is not dependent upon matter as in the physical universe, and the motion of molecules is more spontaneous, and an almost unbelievable depth of experience is possible within what would seem to you a fraction of a moment.

I will have more to say concerning the connection between the two fields and their manifestation in action, for one of the closest glimpses you can get of pure action is action as it is involved within the dream universe, and in this mobility as the personality passes into and out of the dream field. Within your own universe you deal with the transformation of action into physical manipulations, but this involves but a small portion of the nature of action, and it is my purpose to familiarize you with action as it exists more or less in its pure form.

But these developments, nevertheless, are the results of actions that occur in many perspectives at once, and not developments that occur as within the physical system, through actions that happen in a series seemingly strung out moment after moment.

A certain portion of physical growth, in terms of a series of physical moments, is therefore necessary for value fulfillment to show itself within a physical organism. Within the dream field and within many other systems, this series of moments is unknown. Development comes not from a series of actions strung out along a single line, one before the other in lengthwise fashion. Instead development is largely a matter of value fulfillment, which is achieved through the perspectives of action, through traveling within any given action, and following it and changing with it. To make this clearer, I have said that action exists within limitless perspectives, and that you are mainly familiar with it as it is materialized along a single line of continuity within the physical system. You experience action then as if you were moving along a single line, each dot on the line representing a moment of your time. But at the imaginary point on your line that represents any given moment, action moves out in all directions. From the standpoint of that moment point, you could imagine action forming an imaginary circle with that point as an apex. But this happens at the point of every moment.

There is no particular boundary to the circle. It widens outward indefinitely. Now. In the dream universe, in all systems of such nature, development is achieved not by traveling your single line, but by delving into that point that you call a moment. The physical laws simply do not apply here, within such a value fulfillment system. Basically your own physical universe is at the apex of such a system itself, and it is only because of the purpose and nature of the particular apex that experience appears, from my viewpoint, to be so slowed down. The particular point, in one manner, is being pursued by you in such a slow fashion that it appears to be a series of happenings strung out in a thread of continuity. You experience action as one happening after another, not because of the nature of action itself but because of the nature of your own structure and perception.

This is in itself, you see, a form of value fulfillment, since you are perceiving one simultaneous action as if it were a series of separate actions. You are delving into one action, and within it continually creating action within action. This is however, or this can be, while fulfilling, also limiting.