“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I sneezed three times just as Jane took off her glasses and went into trance. As Seth, she stared at me with quite an amused air, waiting until I was ready to take notes.)

That is, the dream was giving you an example of one of the main characteristics of what we will call the magical approach. Ruburt did not stress this in his interpretation, which was otherwise excellent.

The main issue was the relative ease with which you were able to enlarge the hole in the glass door. Ease is the key word. To the world of the intellect, a glass door must be considered solid, as it is in the world of physical senses. In other quite as factual terms, indeed in the larger framework of facts, the door of course is not solid at all, as no objects are. Obviously that is known to science.

The intellect is basically able to handle many kinds of information, and information systems. It is far more flexible than you presently allow it to be. It can handle several (pause) main world views at once, realizing that they are each methods of perceiving and approaching reality. To some degree historically speaking, that sort of situation operated in the past when — comparatively speaking, now — people realized that there was indeed an inner world of complexity and richness that could be approached in certain fashions, one that existed alongside with the physical world, so that the two intersected. Certain approaches worked in one area, and others worked in the inner reality.

In modern times, then, the intellect was finally left with only one acceptable world view, with one set of assumptions, with only one main approach to reality and experience. The acceptable assumptions to a large extent ran directly contradictory to built-in biological, spiritual, and psychological assumptions that are a part of man’s heritage. The intellect does try to order experience, to make sense out of perception. When it is enriched (pause) by having in its possession several world views, then it does an excellent job of merging those into meaningful patterns, of sorting information and sending it to the proper places, so to speak.

Ruburt wanted to make sure that he was right. (Long pause.) He tried to go ahead and not go ahead at the same time. He tried to be daring and cautious, brave and safe. This applies to some extent to each of you, of course, precisely because you were gifted strongly both intellectually and intuitively. You tried to rationalize your creativity, both of you, to some extent. The rational line of thought finds creativity highly disruptive, so in those terms as highly gifted creative people, you would have encountered some difficulties in any case.

It is time that you regarded such difficulties instead as challenges that are a part of a creative adventure that you have yourselves chosen. You chose the adventure because it was the kind best suited to your own individual value fulfillment. In reconciling the many concepts and contradictions for yourselves, you also lead the way for many others. It would, again, help considerably if you thought of your work more as an adventure, an exciting creative adventure, than of work in your old terms.

At a conscious level, of course, neither of you realized, or wanted to realize, the kind of complete repeal and overhaul that was implied by our sessions, and for some years you managed to hold many official views of reality along with the newer concepts, not ready to understand that an entire new way of thinking was involved, a new relationship of the individual with reality. So you tried out some new methods piecemeal, here and there, with good-enough results.

“I dreamed that I was in the kitchen of the hill house, in Elmira, crouched down just inside the room’s glass storm door, which was closed. The kitchen’s inside wooden door was wide open, just to my left. Gus, the friendly old Shetland sheepdog who belonged to our neighbors across the street, came up to the storm door, looking for the handful of dry food I give him each morning when I scatter birdseed in the driveway. Gus was on the other side of the door, on the screened-in back porch, as he should be — only then I saw to my amazement that he was starting to walk through the glass panel in his eagerness to get to the food. I felt his head pushing effortlessly through the glass, and exclaimed about this to Jane, who sat at her usual place at the breakfast table just in back of me. I was really surprised. I had my hands on Gus’s head as he sought to enter the kitchen through the glass.

“I gently pushed against Gus’s head, and he began to back out through the glass. With a sudden inspiration I kept my hands on his head until they went through the glass with him as he withdrew. Then, in order to obtain some physical proof that this was really happening, with my right hand I began to ‘carve’ a squarish hole a few inches across in the glass where Gus’s head had been. I made the opening as the glass began to ‘congeal’. The hole’s sides were smoothly rounded and posed no problem as far as sharp edges went. And I ended up with the proof I wanted — an irregular hole that I had formed in the glass with my fingers. The dream glass was about one-quarter-inch thick — double, say, its ‘real’ thickness.

“After the Gus part of the dream, I saw through the glass door a man standing quite at military attention. He was older, graying, impeccably dressed in the dark blue uniform of an officer of the Navy. He was handsome and tall and slim. He looked something like the blue male I’m painting from a recent dream, although that one is in civilian clothes. There’s a resemblance between the two, but I’m not particularly claiming that the officer is the civilian. I only want to note that this would make the second instance recently in which I might have had the same character appear in separate dreams.

“The Navy man never came through the door like Gus had, though, nor did he speak to me or move. He simply stood at attention on the porch, symbolizing I don’t know what. He was an officer of considerable rank, with a number of stripes on his cuffs. Perhaps the equivalent of an army colonel.

“Later in the dream, maybe at night, I was sitting on a couch with some close friends, as at a small party. My brother Linden, from out of town, could have been there. The room didn’t look much like our living room at the hill house. Jane was present. I believe we had the TV on. Either a character on the screen said something, or someone in the room did — whatever, it triggered my memory of the Gus episode. I began to laugh and squirm with glee, telling our friends that I’d experienced something great, and that I could show them the physical evidence of it. I didn’t get to actually show the hole in the glass, though, but for some little time I kept laughing and saying, to everyone’s surprise and amusement, that I’d really had that adventure this morning.”

“This is another terrific dream, continuing the one in the last session, in which Rob was constructing an image of the magical self — seeing it as a kind of Captain Marvel character. In this dream, though, he uses the magic himself, making it far more accessible.

Jane did such a fine job interpreting the dream (in my estimation!) that I didn’t bug her for more details. Later, however, I wished that I’d asked her a few questions. I think she’s quite right about the naval officer being a symbol for the more conventional, or rigid, rational self. I would have liked my wife’s comments on my brother Linden being in the dream. He’s a year younger than I am, and lives with his family down in Pennsylvania. He’s become quite religiously oriented, as is his right. I think that as I joyfully talked about my magical exploration in the dream, I was telling him something like: “Hey, there’s more than one way to explore the self, to be religious!” And I think that Linden and I were in correspondence in the dream state, and that in some way he got the message. …

My dream of August 16 was difficult to visually present: How could I show my contact with Gus through the seemingly solid glass — show that, as Seth says, desire is action? I first sketched the dream late in August, but did’t finish the painting of it until December.