“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I had prepared a test envelope to give to Jane during the 181st session, of August 25, but did not do so because of the short session. When the envelope was not used I did not mention it to her, but saved it for tonight’s session. It contained part of a calendar page for April 1965. I came across the calendar beneath a stack of books and on the spur of the moment decided to use it for the test, wondering whether this type of cut and dried subject matter would have as much emotional pull for Seth/Jane as the subject matter of the first two tests. See the 179th and 180th sessions. Jane was out of the house when I prepared the usual double envelope.

(Break at 9:17. Jane was dissociated as usual for a first delivery. Her eyes had remained closed, her voice quiet but fast. She had used some pauses however. She resumed in the same manner, with some longer pauses, at 9:26.)

They are felt according to their intensity only. You might say, returning to our analogy, that there is more color-mixing within the dream state, and the materials are immediately at hand. Distance is then seen in its true light, not in relation to physical space but in its basic relationship to emotional intensity. As you seem in the waking condition to travel out of an experience, or as you seem to separate yourself from it, then physical time enters into your awareness.

You move from the outskirts of one dream into the core of another without a change of intensity, and therefore without the sense of physical time passing. It goes without saying that a sense of time may or may not be interwoven in any given dream sequence, but you as the dreamer are not conscious of the physical hours that pass as you sleep.

This function is extremely important, and represents one of the main ways in which problem-solving is dealt with by the personality. This is also the reason why the plays of Shakespeare have endured the centuries. The dramas are not true to life in physical terms, but are true to life in psychic terms.

The creative abilities have full reign within the dream state, and it is here that the personality first tests its creative intensities and methods. The personality’s physical environment therefore is greatly colored and formed by his dream existence. There is some leakage from waking-life experience to dream experience, but this leakage usually represents the material needed, or the problem to be solved. Mental events and dream events are primary. The individual first manipulates situations within the dream reality, and then transposes his characteristic method of handling them upon the physical reality.

Necessary and vital information is therefore not collected. The problem is not seen in any total light, but in a distorted manner. This distorted picture is then delivered to the subconscious, which is able to make some corrections. It still cannot view the physical situation as clearly as can the ego under best conditions.

A very brief word here concerning your Mark. Putting up with him will not seem a chore if you realize that psychic energy is not only being used when you do so, but within reason, when you do so unresentfully, you are gaining psychic energies through interactions.

The very act of dealing with him kindly utilizes your own abilities in many ways, stretches the limitations of your sympathy and understanding, and of your patience, yes; but in so doing you become stronger and better able to deal with your fellow human beings in general, with benefits to all.

I am not speaking of overdoing this, as you understand. There is an analogy here, perhaps not flattering to Mark, but I do not mean it unkindly.

You recall that I told you animals relied upon the psychic energy of their owners. So do weaker personalities to some extent rely upon stronger ones. Now this could result in a draining of available energies, but when this occurs it is only because you are not as strong as usual. When energy is withdrawn for this reason, the individual who is used to relying upon it will feel bewildered and resentful, and abandoned without knowing the reason.

I say to you within reason, but if your abilities were fully developed I would not have to use that phrase, for you would be so renewed in any encounter that no such question would arise.

(Thus it seems that Seth traveled through the thickness of the paper, picking up impressions as he went along, and did this at least twice. He also mentioned “two people...perhaps a dress.” There were no people on either side of the test paper. Checking the whole calendar however, we noted there was a drawing of a man and a woman on the upper section of this particular page, but that I had left them behind in clipping out the test section. They would be about four inches removed from the clipping, and stood before another drawing of a house. We do not know if this is a legitimate interpretation of something “somehow connected with what we have here.”