“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph: The blueprints for reality will not be found in the exterior universe. Some other civilizations experimented with a different kind of science than the one with which you are familiar. They met with varying degrees of success in their attempts to understand the nature of reality, and it is true that their overall goals were different than yours. Such people were focusing their consciousnesses in a completely different direction. Your own behavior, customs, sciences, arts, and disciplines are in a way uniquely yours, yet they also provide glimpses into the ways in which various groupings of abilities can be used to probe into the “unknown” reality.

(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.

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.

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.

(10:35.) 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

(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.

(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.

(1. At the end of the paragraph of material begun at 10:35, where Seth touched upon the “withinness of consciousness”: I thought his data there echoed Jane’s own, as she recorded it in The Wonderworks.

(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.