“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Later you may not recall it, but you have a more direct connection with reality in the dream state, and the intensity of the dream experience is more completely perceived. I am speaking now in terms of basic reality. It is less camouflaged in the dream state. For this reason, in any projections you may be startled, for here you also enter a less strictly camouflaged situation.

You will sometimes automatically translate this reality into physical terms. Such images will be hallucinatory, but it may take a while for you to distinguish their real nature. It must be understood however here that all physical objects are also hallucinatory. They may be called mass hallucinations.

Once more, the undifferentiated layers or areas are composed of the vitality that forms the camouflage of all systems. It is not therefore—that is, such an area is not, therefore—a separate thing in itself, but simply a portion of vitality that contains no camouflage, and is therefore again unrecognizable to those within any given system.

Now, there is a connection between these areas and the idea of infinity, but first take your first break, and we shall continue.

The completely uncamouflaged layer could be rather bewildering. However you might automatically attempt to project images within it. The images would not take, so to speak, but would appear and disappear with great rapidity. This would be a silent area. Thoughts as a rule would not be perceived here, for the symbols that form them would not be understood.

The thoughts would not be perceived if they were present, you see. If a certain intensity is reached here however, a peak of intensity, then you could perceive the spacious present as it exists within your native system. You could, from this peak, theoretically look into the other system, but you would not understand what you perceived. You would not have the proper root assumptions, you see.

The tangerine then would be compared to a group of many systems, and yet it would represent in itself but one small portion of an unperceived whole. The tangerine would be but one segment, you see, of a larger system. You can see then why projections would lead you in a far different direction from your normal linear sort of travel, and why time as you know it would be meaningless.

Nor do such projections involve necessarily journeys through space as you know it. There are systems, extremely vivid in intensity, that have no existence in physical reality. It is now thought, I believe, that time and space are basically one, but they are both a part of something else. They are merely the camouflage patterns by which you perceive reality. Space, as you experience it in the dream state, comes much closer to reality.

Practically speaking, this is seldom done, but it has been on occasion. The brain cannot contain such episodes. A portion of the self would retain these experiences. Now in a creative individual, some of these could be expressed symbolically in a painting or other work of art, but the ego could not consider them as actual.

Your physical time is something like this. There is a strong connection here I have been trying to get through, but it is for now too difficult for Ruburt to catch. All of the experience an artist has gained is in any given painting, not physically perceived, but strongly perceived by the inner senses.

The spacious present is always present (smile)—my pun—in any work of art. As you should know, there is a difference in the type of mobility of an objective painting, and an abstract one. The fluidity or the spacious present pervades the dream state as it pervades a painting, but the images are projected into the spacious present by the dreamer, according to his own understanding and experience.

Now, some systems have no basic form, but adopt the form, the forms, thrust upon it. Your own system is obviously one of these. Other systems, by their very nature, set up a resistance, that resists. There is in such cases a constant battle of forms.

(Jane said Seth had been trying to get through concepts that were difficult. She had an image of spirals, for instance, all interlocked without being regular, that concerned the material on paintings and time, but she couldn’t get it clearly nor even describe it adequately. There were images within this concept that were something like an accordion, Jane said, having to do with time opening and closing, etc.