“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“C’mon, Seth,” Jane said impatiently at 9:15; we’d been waiting since 9:00 for the session to begin. “I feel stuff there, but I haven’t got it clear yet….” Then:)

(Still quietly:) It is true that you create your own dreams, but it is also true that you only focus upon certain portions of your dream creations. Even in the dream state, any present expands into its own version of past and future; so in those terms the dream possesses its own background, its own kind (underlined) of historic past, the moment you construct it.

(9:42.) Physicists think of atoms as particles. Their wavelike characteristics are not observed. At other levels of reality, atoms behave in a wavelike manner … Give us a moment … Subjectively, you will think of your own thoughts as waves rather than as particles. Yet in the dream level of reality those waves “break” into particles, so to speak. They form pseudo-objects from your viewpoint. While dreaming you accept that reality as real. Only upon awakening do the dream objects seem not-real, or imaginary. The nervous system itself is biologically equipped to perceive various gradations of physical matter, and there are “in-between” impulse passageways that are utilized while dreaming. From your point of view these are alternate passageways, but in the dream state they allow you to perceive as physical matter objects that in the waking state would not be observable.

Give us a moment … The dream world is as organized as your own, but from the waking state you do not focus upon that inner organization. Your dream images exist. They are quite as real as a table or a chair. They are built up from particles, invisible only from the waking situation.

In your physical universe such particles are invisible components, deduced but never directly encountered. To a certain extent they are latent. In some other realities, however, their characteristics rule rather than the attributes of the visible particles that you see. Dream images, therefore, exist at a different range of matter.

(10:01. Jane’s trance had been good, but still she’d been bothered by the sounds of traffic rising up from the busy intersection close by our living room windows. Someone had made considerable noise while cleaning the halls of the apartment house, also — “… all while Seth wanted me to get that material just right,” Jane said a bit ruefully. “Maybe I can get better at it, but you need such a fine control….” Finally she laughed. “I don’t know who’s going to read this book but they’ll sure find a lot in it to study.”

Give us a moment … I am putting this as simply as possible; but when your “original self” enters [part of] itself into three-dimensional life from an inner reality, the energy waves carrying it break — not simply into one particle, following our analogy, but into a number of conscious particles. In certain terms these are built up using the medium at hand — the biological properties of the earth. They spread out from the “point of contact,” forming individual lives. In your conception of the centuries, then, there are other counterparts of yourself living at the same time and in different places — all creative versions of the original self. There is a great intimate cooperation that exists biologically and spiritually between all of the beings on your planet “at any given time.” You are all connected psychically in terms of inner and outer structures. A certain identity and cohesiveness is also maintained because of these inner connections.

Your dream adventures, however exciting, remain “invisible” from your waking standpoint. Within dreams space and time expand, again, as I have mentioned,⁷ but in a way that you cannot physically pinpoint. Your own exterior space exists in precisely the same manner from the standpoint of any other reality (emphatically). For that matter, you yourself are so richly creative that your own thoughts give birth to other quite legitimate systems of which you have no knowledge.

Again, your idea of personhood limits you when you think of these concepts. You imagine personhood to be a kind of mental particle that must have definite boundaries, or it will lose its identity. The identity of even the smallest consciousness is always maintained — but not limited. If you can think of your present idea of identity as if it were but one shape or one motion of a moving particle, a shape or a motion that never loses its imprint or meaning, then you could also see how you could follow it forward or backward to the shape or motion taken “before or afterward.”

(11:43 P.M. An aside: Lately I’d delayed typing these sessions from my notes because I’ve been so busy doing the finished pen-and-ink drawings for Jane’s Dialogues. Currently I’m working on the 12th one out of the 40 planned. Jane hasn’t had a book session to read since the 718th, for November 6, was held almost four weeks ago. Now she reminded me that she misses keeping up with Seth’s dictation — that she has trouble deciphering my personal shorthand, and that not knowing what Seth has been saying makes her feel “uneasy.” This even though she and Seth have demonstrated often by now that as a team they’re most capable of producing a work “blind,” as it were, and on a continuing basis. But I’d become so involved with artwork that I hadn’t appreciated her own interests and concerns.