“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This, and all such effects, represent one of the most basic ways in which one action causes another action to change. These definite fields operate as channels for inner communications. They may be formed instantly, sweeping out into other directions. They open through attraction. This attraction may originate as an emotional one, but the emotional feeling has its own electromagnetism, and the attraction is in direct proportion to the force of the emotion itself, or to the charge that the emotion may carry.

Any experience at all, whether mental or physical, also carries an electric and magnetic reality, so that the experience of any given individual is held in a sort of electric code within the cells. On a subconscious basis the individual is drawn to others who have had similar experiences to his own. He will be more attracted to the various field boundaries to which he himself has been accustomed.

These dreams go unrecognized by the conscious ego; but they do not go unrecorded by the inner self, and they therefore exist, and they form electromagnetic channels of their own to which—make that by which—the physical body itself is affected. The physical organism is constantly changed by all stimuli, whether or not the ego is aware of the stimuli. And it is affected by stimuli, whether or not science realizes that the particular stimuli even exists. Therefore, the physical organism reacts to this continuous unconscious mental activity in the form of continuing dream experiences, whether or not the individual is awake or asleep. All of these realities go into the formation of the personality, and unless they are all understood the personality itself will remain a mystery.

Dream experiences often, very often, change the course of human events. Again, all this takes place through the operation of electromagnetic systems. There is a definite connection between this constant dream activity undertaken by the unconscious self, and what you call inspiration or creative activity.

These apparent inspirations from nowhere definitely come from somewhere, and this somewhere is that inner dreaming condition, which is a necessity on the part of every consciousness, human or otherwise. Here I am using the word consciousness to cover all organisms with awareness. This dream activity seems divorced from the conscious state itself, and came before the conscious state within your physical system. It cannot be turned off, and it will not cease. It will only be noticed, as a rule, when the aware portions of the personality are disconnected from their physical stimulations to some considerable degree.

(Tonight Bill and Peggy Gallagher came to visit us. Bill told us that he would have to leave for a few minutes to pick up an advertisement at the bus terminal and take it to the newspaper office, the Star-Gazette, where he works. On the spur of the moment Peggy suggested that we all try to pick up impressions concerning the ad, while Bill was gone. Bill himself would not know the contents of the ad, which was in an envelope, until he opened it at the paper.

(Bill said that he would try to think strongly of the ad. He left here at approximately 10 PM and returned about 10:35. Rob, Peg, and I had all written down our impressions, and none of us knew what the others had written. None of Peg’s were correct. Many of mine, about 11 impressions, were correct, and some of Rob’s.

(My score would seem to be above chance. I did not seem to pick up impressions about the ad itself, however. I seemed to pick up impressions of Bill at the newspaper office, and follow him as he went about his chores. I had no idea at the time that any of my impressions were correct. Indeed I suspected that they were all wrong. I seem to work with words rather than images, that is, I pick up word impressions, I guess, rather than pictures.

(Correct on both points. Bill went upstairs to talk to the men in the Ad department. Though I have been in the newspaper building, I did not know that these offices were upstairs. Bill’s own office is downstairs, as I knew, and if I thought about it at all I assumed that all his business took place there. I had no idea that Bill had any connection with the upstairs offices at all, since the editorial work is done there, and he has nothing to do with that at all. Peg, who works up there, has told me often that she never sees him upstairs.