“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Perhaps ten minutes before the session began, I showed Jane an article I found in the New York Times for October 3,1966. She read it, then I clipped it for future use. It concerns a study of animals in dreams, conducted by a psychologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Cellular consciousness itself straddles, so to speak, various levels of sleep activity. Various aspects of it come to the forefront at definite times. This consciousness is constant, whether you wake or sleep. It existed before the ego’s formation, and in many cases exists after the ego’s organization is altered. In sleep cellular consciousness often intrudes into the dream process, appearing in the form of dream images. Cellular consciousness is highly codified in actuality, much more emotional than visual, and the visual dream images are but translations of inner comprehensions. (Long pause, nearly one minute.)

Children recall animal dreams more frequently simply because they are closer to cellular consciousness to begin with. Such dreams do carry the individual out away from ego identity, and at the same time closer to an inner identity that the ego usually attempts to deny.

Now, the future is also present in cellular consciousness. The ego, again, simply censors dreams from the cellular consciousness level when they deal with time that is not yet physical in your terms. Cellular consciousness is usually considered as simply a repository for past knowledge having to do with personal or racial existence. Because of the spacious present however, cellular consciousness also contains blueprints of the future.

Once again, however, these are of course blueprints of probabilities. As you know, the past itself is constantly changed as your own attitude toward it changes. Therefore you see, even dealing with the past, cellular consciousness does not involve knowledge of a closed and finished time of existence. Obviously then, the future is also constantly changing. Cellular consciousness mirrors these changes, you see.

The expansion is in all directions, so to speak. We have not quite completely explained the idea of traveling through intensities to you, simply because words are inadequate. The idea of traveling through intensities gives the result, in your system, of traveling through time, as I have told you.

(Seth helped us out with our interpretations after break, as sometimes happens. Whenever possible we prefer to make as many connections between the data and the envelope object as we can on our own. Our purpose in conducting these experiments in this manner is to see what Jane, or Seth, can pick up about a concealed object that bears some kind of emotional charge related to us personally. To this end, envelope objects are often deliberately chosen by me with emotional involvement in mind, since Seth has said many times that his abilities have an emotional basis; this primary emotional basis is then disciplined and given shape by the intellect.

(“The travel connection again. Now the feeling of trains, or a tunnel, as a train tunnel would be. This is an attempt to get at the curved corridor connection more clearly.” This is difficult to interpret without place names, and I did not think to ask Seth for any at the time. In any traveling Wendell might have done from his home in Edgewater, NJ, to New York City, trains and cars could very well have been involved.

(Tunnels would also be involved going to New York City, but not as far as I know in travel on only the New Jersey side of the Hudson. I lived in that area for a few years, some time ago, and recall no tunnels at the moment.

(“The number four.” We seldom can make positive connections with single numbers. The number 4 appears three times on the empty envelope object. See the tracing on page 71.

(“The photograph connection is strong [pause] but I do not believe the item is this precisely.” [Pause.] Seth tried to help Jane discriminate here, as he often does. Tonight’s object of course is not a picture or photo, but an envelope that contained a letter about people who make pictures. Also, I was taking pictures of Jane last week, as explained. Thus it can be seen how all such related data, even though separated by much time, comes together in these session experiments. This particular chain of association was not anticipated by me when I picked the Crowley envelope as object for tonight. The two studio settings—the studio I worked in with Wendell Crowley in 1941-3, and my present studio, are separated by as much as 23 years.

(Let it be noted there is a bridge of sorts here however, in that for most of this intervening time I have had a studio of my own. Jane and I married in 1954, and so she has been strongly aware of studio connections with me, on a steady basis, since then, and has often heard me talk about earlier studios.

(“One thirty-five.” My hunch was that this referred either to the end of the reunion discussed in Wendell’s letter—at 1:35 AM, or the time Wendell himself left the party. Inspection of his letter showed that Wendell states “I left at about 12:30 AM,” but that other member of the party remained after he left. Seth is more specific after break.

Your friend left nearly an hour after he imagines, hence the time.