“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: You must first of all understand that your own greater reality exists whether you are in flesh or out of it, and that your subjective experience has a far greater scope than the physical brain itself allows.

Give us a moment, and rest your hand … A practitioner of this ancient art learns first of all how to become conscious in normal terms, while in the sleep state. Then he² becomes sensitive to the different subjective alterations that occur when dreams begin, happen, and end. He familiarizes himself with the symbolism of his own dreams, and sees how these do or do not correlate with the exterior symbols that appear in the waking life that he shares with others. I will have more to say about these shared symbols later, for they can become agreed upon signposts.

In a manner of speaking, they are indeed learning centers.⁴ Many people have dreams in which they are attending classes, for example, in another kind of reality. Whether or not such dreams are “distorted,” many of them represent a valid inner experience. All of this, however, is but a beginning for our dream-art scientist, for he or she then begins to recognize the fact of involvement with many different levels and kinds of reality and activity. He must learn to isolate these, separate one from the other, and then try to understand the laws that govern them. As he does so, he learns that some of these realities nearly coincide with the physical one, that on certain levels events become physical in the future, for example, while others do not. He is then beginning to glimpse the blueprints for the world that you know.

(10:10. “He just stopped so you could rest your fingers,” Jane said after coming out of an excellent trance. The rate of her delivery had been average. “It’s sure funny: I can feel a whole lot more right there now, waiting to be given — but before the session, nothing. This book is different. I have to get into it in a certain deliberate way that I didn’t have to for the others [Seth Speaks and Personal Reality].” Jane snapped her fingers several times. “In ESP class Seth comes through trigger fast, like he did all those times last night. But not here; yet once I get started I want to keep going …”

Now: You manufacture articles. It has taken you centuries to reach your point of technological achievement. It seems to you then that objects come from the outside, generally speaking — for after all, do you not make them in your factories and laboratories?

You work with material that is already there, provided. You mix, change, and rearrange what is already given. The entire physical universe emerges from an inside, however, and none of your manufacture would provide you with even one object, were it not for those that appeared as source materials long before. Wood, plants, all the species of the earth, the seasons and the planet itself, come from this unidentifiable inside. Physical events have the same source.

(10:39.) Simply as an analogy, look at it this way: Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid — a dream that presents reality in a certain light; a dream that is above all meaningful, creative, based not upon chaos (with a knowing look), but upon spontaneous order. To understand it, however, you must go to another level of consciousness — one where, perhaps, the dream momentarily does not seem so real. There, from another viewpoint, you can see it even more clearly, holding it like a photograph in your hands; at the same time you can see from that broader perspective that you do indeed also stand outside of the dream context, but in a “within” that cannot show in the snapshot because of its limitations.

This is personal material. First of all, however, this book will open up many very important areas, and provide guidelines for many others to follow.