“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your scientists spend many long years in training. If the same amount of time were spent to learn a different kind of science, you could indeed discover far more about the known and unknown realities. There are some individuals embarked upon a study of dreams, working in the “dream laboratories”; but here again there is prejudiced perception, with scientists on the outside studying the dreams of others, or emphasizing the physical changes that occur in the dream state. The trouble is that many in the sciences do not comprehend that there is an inner reality. (Intently:) It is not only as valid as the exterior one, but it is the origin for it. It is that world that offers you answers, solutions, and would reveal many of the blueprints that exist behind the world of your experience.

(9:53.) The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world.¹ Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness — one that is equally at home in either existence, well-grounded and secure in each. Almost anyone can become a satisfied and productive amateur in this art-science; but its true fulfillment takes years of training, a strong sense of purpose, and a dedication — as does any true vocation.

To some extent, a natural talent is a prerequisite for such a true dream-art scientist. A sense of daring, exploration, independence, and spontaneity is required. Such a work is a joy. There are some such people who are quite unrecognized by your societies, because the particular gifts involved are given zero priority. But the talent still exists.

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 …”

(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.

(2. Then almost immediately after 10:39, when Seth referred to “chaos”: His rather sly emphasis on the word didn’t escape me. Currently Jane and I are reading a book written by a biologist. It has many good things in it, but we’re disturbed when we come to passages in which the author describes “life” as opposed to “nonlife”, or in which he postulates an ultimate chaos — the running-down of our universe into a final random distribution of matter — as inevitable. Such ideas are surely the projections of a limited human view, we think, and are quite misleading. Also, as we grew up independently of each other, Jane and I gradually dispensed with conventional scientific ideas that life had occurred by chance; the emotional natures of our creative endeavors led us to question the theory. Now we don’t think it’s true even in ordinary scientific terms.