“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 …”

(10:35.) Give us a moment … The true scientist understands that he must probe the interior and not the exterior universe; he will comprehend that he cannot isolate himself from a reality of which he is necessarily a part, and that to do so presents at best a distorted picture. In quite true terms, your dreams and the trees outside of your windows have a common denominator: they both spring from the withinness of consciousness.⁵

(Much of tonight’s private material is the kind that eventually appears in Jane’s “own” works, such as Adventures, or is translated in her poetry. Within it are a few hints about certain more general aspects of her abilities, and those can be presented here. “Ruburt,” Seth commented, “is just beginning his own dream endeavors, which could not seriously start until he learned to have faith in his own being.” [Appendix 11 contains excerpts from The Wonderworks, the paper Jane wrote almost two weeks ago on Seth, dreams, and the creation of our reality. In my notes for The Wonderworks I described her own recent dream series — which still continues, by the way.] And: “In our case,” Seth said a bit later, “Ruburt almost ‘becomes’ the material he receives from me. If certain other beneficial alterations occur, and further understanding on Ruburt’s part, we may be able to meet at other levels of consciousness — in the dream state, when he is not cooperating in the production of our book material.” For Jane has never met Seth, face to face, you might say, in a dream. The closest she’s come to this situation is in giving a session for him in the dream state, as she does in waking life.

(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.

2. Since from this point Seth uses the masculine pronouns “he” and “him” while discussing representatives of the race, I refer the reader to Note 5 for Session 696, in Section 3.