“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you suspect that abundance is somehow spiritually dangerous,⁴ then the king might be captured and punished. All kinds of other events might be involved: groups of people, for example, representing bands of “rampaging” desires. The entire drama would involve the “evolution” of an emotion or belief. In the dream state you set it free and see what will happen to it, how it will develop, where it will go.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama. You can observe the play, take a role in it, or move in and out of its acts as you prefer. You will use your own private symbols. These represent your psychic shorthand. They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol. Symbols themselves change. If you had before you your entire dream history and could read — as in a book — the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes. The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

The king, for example, may be at one time the symbol of great inner wealth. He may be kingly but poor, signifying the idea that wealth does not necessarily involve physical goods. He might at another time appear as a dictator, cruel and overbearing, where he would represent an entirely different framework of feeling and belief He might show himself as a young monarch, signaling a belief that “youth is king.” At various times in history the same image has been used quite differently. When people are fighting dictatorial monarchs then often the king appears in dreams as a despicable character, to be booted and routed out.

In all of these episodes definite emotional experience was involved. Also connected was an indefinable but unmistakable sense of familiarity. Space and time continually expand, and all probabilities of any given action are actualized in one reality or another. All of the potentials of the entity are also actualized.

In greater terms, these experiences all occur at once. The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts (and very vividly, too). I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own — but (louder) the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

1. The series of visions that made up my overall perception of the black woman in Jamaica were the most vivid I’ve experienced yet. For me they had a most unique, thrilling, immediate quality, and strong emotional involvement. As I sat at the typewriter in my studio, I was flooded with perceptions of myself as such a woman: Pursued by an armed English military officer, she ran for her life down a hilly village street. She wasn’t especially young. Her — my — name? Maumee, or Mawmee — an illiterate but shrewd, very strong personality who was acting in rebellion against the colonial authority of England in the early 1800’s. She escaped that time, and lived to struggle often against such forces on the island.

I’m most gratified that some of the Jamaican visions were externalized, that I didn’t see all of them within as I did for the Roman series. That is, with open eyes I saw fleeting hectic images in the studio. I felt emotions. I was exhilarated by the whole thing.

3. Both Jane and I think Seth’s statement, that in another probability “Ruburt … learned all there is to know about science …” is pretty strong, but since it came through that way we let it stand. However, as Jane wrote later in Chapter 11 of Politics: “Finding out what’s happening to electrons, say, is something I really enjoy. I admit I feel much more free than I do when I have people’s emotions to deal with. I’d rather ‘find’ a lost electron than a lost person any day, for example.”

“As a Roman, you pretended to be a follower while you were a man of rank in the military. You had no belief in the conventional gods, yet you were supposed to be conquering lands in their names. You traveled even to Africa. You had a disdain for leaders as liars, and of the masses as followers, and so you were always in one kind of dispute or another with your fellows, and even with the authorities. You were of a querulous nature, yet highly curious, and, again, physically involved.