“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.

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.

Art is as much a science, in the truest sense of the word, as biology is. Science as you think of it separates itself from the subject at hand. Art identifies with the subject. In your terms, then, other civilizations considered art as a fine science, and used it in such a way that it painted a very clear-cut picture of the nature of reality — a picture in which human emotion and motivation played a grand role.

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.

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 …”

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.

(Now for a couple of references concerning portions of the book material in tonight’s session. Like the dream information given above, these instances demonstrate how “Unknown” Reality and the events of Jane’s daily living are interwound.

4. Chapters 9 and 10 in Seth Speaks contain much information on dreams. For material on the classes held at after-death training centers, see in particular the 537th session in Chapter 9. While out of body during the sleep state, some people from our reality, Jane among them, assist those who have just died in adjusting to their various new environments. And from Seth in the 536th session: “… I had spent many lifetimes acting as [such] a guide under the tutorship of another in my daily sleep states.”