“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In dismay, I heard Rob snoring. In any case, I wasn’t in my physical body, and he probably wouldn’t know anything was wrong anyhow. And where was Seth? Where were all those “guides” who were supposed to come running to your aid when you got in predicaments like this? All these thoughts went scurrying through my mind as I tried to fight this thing off. I was very conscious of the creature’s weight, which was really amazing, and its intent—which was to maul me up as much as possible, if not to kill me outright.

Now that I was safe I was more than a little ashamed of myself for being such a coward, but I wasn’t so complacent that I felt like going right back to sleep, either! So I got up, drank a glass of milk, and thought of all the things I should have done—like saying grandly: “Get thou behind me, Satan,” or some such. The least I could have done, I thought, was bite back.

Now Seth said: “Our friend [meaning me] attempted to choose a different battlefield last night. He decided to think of all negative feelings as enemies, and to give them form in another plane of reality where he could do battle with them. This was not an astral plane, but a lower one.

“The energy behind his ‘black thing’ was the energy of hidden fears, but such a thing could be formed by anyone, since there are fears in any man. Ruburt tried to isolate them, give them form, and fight them all at once. The thing was actually a rather clumsy lower-dimensional animal, a provoked dumb dog of other dimensions who then attacked him, symbolically enough, by biting. Any ‘thing’ so created entirely of fears would be frightened and particularly angry at its creator. It could do nothing but attack to protect whatever reality it had, for it knew Ruburt created it only to slay it, if possible.

“It did have reality, therefore. Ruburt leapt back to safety and normal consciousness. The thing then dissipated [as far as Ruburt was concerned]. For when Ruburt ‘ran home’ he automatically withdrew the energy [of his attention] from it. … Ruburt tried to separate from himself all those elements he considers negative, and fight them at once, almost as if in so doing he could remove evil from the universe.

It has been known throughout the ages that dreams can give us clues to all kinds of behavior. Psychoanalysts use dreams to delve into subconscious motivations, but few people know how to utilize dreams creatively: to improve health, gain inspiration, restore vitality, solve problems, and enrich family relationships.

Seth says quite firmly: “There are other considerations that must be understood. … When aggressiveness is the problem, for example, the preliminary dream suggestion should include a statement that the aggression will not be directed against a particular person. In all cases, it is the intangible element [aggressiveness, here] that is the problem, and not the person against whom the individual may want to vent it.

While all of this is of practical interest, Rob and I are even more intrigued by Seth’s explanation of dream reality. Since I’ve had many out-of-body experiences from the dream state, I was rather concerned about the reality of the environments in which I found myself. Seth began his discussions on the nature of dream reality very soon after the sessions began, and they still continue. Until I learned from Seth to “monitor” my own dreams, and awaken my critical faculties, I was simply astounded by some of his statements.

Seth has answered many questions that were in Rob’s mind, and are probably in your own. How is it that ordinary daily life seems much more real to us than any dream existence? And if such a universe is valid, why doesn’t it intrude on our daily life even more? At least we all more or less agree on what happens physically, but dreams are highly individual. How can there be any continuity to a dream universe? Within such a universe, how could anyone possibly agree with anyone else as to what was happening?

“First of all,” Seth said, “the physical universe itself is a conglomeration of diverse individualistic symbols, none of which means precisely the same thing to any two individuals, and in which even so-called basic qualities like color and placement in space cannot be relied upon. You merely focus upon the similarities. Telepathy could be called the glue that holds the physical universe in precarious position, so that you can agree on the existence and properties of objects. …

Each dream object is actually double- or triple-decked, a symbol for other, deeper data. A dream involving reincarnational information, for example, may also serve to help us face a present-day problem by reminding us of other unused abilities inherent in our personalities. I’ve had two particularly vivid reincarnational dreams. One, occurring shortly after our sessions began, really frightened me because I was afraid that it might be precognitive, I dreamed that I was an old woman in a very poor hospital ward of some kind. I was dying of cancer and knew it, but wasn’t a bit frightened. An old man beside me was also about to die. I told him not to worry, that I would be there to help him. Then I died, but there seemed to be no break in consciousness. I helped the old man out of his body and kept telling him that everything was all right.

As the dream opened, we entered a large hall. A group of men, attired in the same costumes, sat on brightly colored pillows on the floor, roughly in a circle, with the center of the floor clear. I knew all of the men from a previous life in which I had been their leader, dying very young. These men had grown old, while I had been reborn. Now I had come back to fulfill a promise I had made to return. I was well aware that they would not recognize me in this body in which they had not known me.

All the while my partner was laughing loudly, and I was having a tremendous time. Finally I returned to my body and stood up to the cries and shouts of recognition. The rest I hardly remember. I know women were brought to us, but, smiling, we waved them away, preferring to talk to our old comrades first. All of us had very dark skin.

Early in our sessions, Seth said that he once had a Turkish existence, but we have no information on one for us. We have all kinds of gaps to be filled in on our own past lives, however, because as long as I refused to accept reincarnation, I asked Rob not to ask for reincarnational material. Also, I became so upset when Seth gave such data that he probably thought it best to discontinue it for a while. When Seth is involved with a block of sessions on one subject, we hate to upset the continuity of the material by asking him to go into something else, and besides, we’ve learned that Seth eventually answers as many of our questions as possible.

Some Seth sessions tell us precisely how we form dreams, what chemicals are built up during waking consciousness and then released in dream-making, and others deal with the electromagnetic composition of dream reality. But all through is the insistence upon what we would call, I suppose, the “objectivity” of dream life.

Look at this projection from the dream state, for example. One morning after breakfast I lay down to try a dream projection. This simply means that I can sometimes recognize when I am dreaming, bring my normal “waking consciousness” into the dream situation, and then use it to project my consciousness elsewhere. When I got to this point that morning, I felt myself leave my body, knowing all the while that it was safe and comfortable in bed, with the door locked.

The books caught my eye again. “Go ahead,” he said, “memorize the titles. I’m sorry, but it won’t do you any good. You won’t remember.” Now all of them smiled more sympathetically.

“There is form within dream reality,” he said, “but form is first of all potential existing within psychic energy. The potential form exists long before its physical materialization. The house that you may live in within five years may not yet exist in your terms. It may not have been built yet, therefore physically you would not perceive it. Still, such a house does have form, and does exist within the Spacious Present.

I could write several books dealing with dreams alone, as Seth explains them. According to the Seth Material, our psychic development and growth, learning processes and experience, are all involved with our dream life. In it we visit other levels of existence, and even gain needed skills. There are definite electromagnetic and chemical connections that unite our stages of consciousness at such times, and he goes into detail about them.

According to Seth there are many other systems of reality in which we operate, all unknown to the waking ego. Not only are there universal systems composed of matter and antimatter, but there are an infinite variety of realities in between. Apparently there are also “probable realities,” in which we follow paths we may have taken, but did not, in physical life.

Seth told us many times that all experience is electrically coded within our cells but not dependent upon them. And this also applies to dream experience. He goes on to say: “A man’s thoughts and dreams are far more reaching than he knows. They exist in more dimensions; they affect worlds of which he is unaware. They are as concrete, in effect, as any building. They appear in many guises within many systems, and once created cannot be withdrawn. …

“The electric reality of a dream is decoded, so that its effects are experienced not only by the brain, but in the furthest reaches of the body. Dream experiences, long forgotten consciously, are forever contained as electrically coded data within the cells of the physical organism. … They exist within the cells [along with all an individual’s experience] … The cells form about them. These electrically coded signals form counterparts of complete experience, and the pattern is then independent of physical reality.”