“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The 699th session, in Volume 1, dealt in part with dream images and subjective dream “photographs.” I used Note 1 for that session to insert one of my favorite Jane poems: My Dreaming Self. She wrote it in 1965, a year and a half or so after beginning the Seth material. Now I can add that at the time Jane actually wrote two poems on dreaming; I’ve been saving the second one for use in Volume 2.

(Just as I had some small psychic adventures during our time off from “Unknown” Reality, Jane did too. One of hers that I’ll mention here is related to published material. During the night following the arrival of that first copy of Personal Reality, while lying quietly beside me in an altered state of consciousness, Jane received information of how “the ancients paralyzed the air.” It could then be walked upon and manipulated in various other ways. She woke me up to tell me about the experience, and to remind her to write an account of it the next day. She couldn’t identify its source, except to say that she hadn’t been dreaming. At the breakfast table, I told her I thought the material was connected to the sessions in Personal Reality on the interior sound, light, and electromagnetic values “around or from which” the physical image forms. Involved here also, I added, were certain ideas in her novel The Education of Oversoul Seven.²

(Pause.) The sleepwalkers, as we will call them, were not asleep to themselves, and would seem so only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. Their [overall] primary experience was outside of the body. The physical corporal existence was a secondary effect. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli, the most focused experience, the most maintained purpose, the most meaningful activity, and the most organized social and cultural behavior. Now this is the other side of your own experience, so to speak. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. The main activity, then, involved consciousness apart from the body. In your terms, physical culture was rudimentary.

In some of their own private dreams, many of my readers will have discovered a reality quite as vivid as the normal one, and sometimes more so. These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. Under certain conditions, for example, consciousness can leave the corporal mechanism while it remains intact — functioning, but at a maintenance level. When optimum conditions return, then the consciousness reactivates the body. Such behavior is possible not only with the animals. In systems different from your own, there are realities in which physical organisms are activated after what would seem to you to be centuries of inactivity¹² — again, when the conditions are right. To some extent your own life-and-death cycles are simply another aspect of the hibernation principle as you understand it. Your own consciousness leaves the body almost in the same way that messages leap the nerve ends.¹³ The consciousness is not destroyed in the meantime.

(First I thought of Seth’s assertion in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964, that “trees have their dreams”; [in Volume 1, see the quotations in Note 1 for Session 698]. [...]