“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are not alone in physical reality, so obviously your picture of the world is also affected by the world views of others, and you play a part in their experiences. There is a constant waking give-and-take. The same give-and-take occurs in the dream state, however. You affect your world through your dreams, then, as much as you do through your waking activities. In terms of time, lapses had to occur as various species physically matured and developed. They did so in response to inner impetus. The many languages that are now known originated in what you can call, from your point of view, nonwaking reality. Words, again, are related to the neurological structure, and languages follow that pattern. In the dream state many kinds of communication occur, and there are inner translations. Two people with different languages can speak together quite clearly in certain dreams, and understand each other perfectly. They may each translate the communication into their familiar language.

Underneath this, however, there are basic inner sounds upon which all language is based, in which certain images give forth their own sound, and the two together portray clear, precise meaning.² A long time ago I said that language would be impossible were it not for its basis in telepathic communication³ — and that communication is built up of microscopic images and sounds. These are translated into different languages.

Consciously, then, your world view is affected by the language of your culture or country. Certain sounds, inflections, and expressions, taken together, have a more or less precise meaning. The meaning is usually quite specific, and often directional. Words in a language function not only by defining what a specific object is, for example, but also by defining what it is not.⁴

The play of sunlight or shadow upon any given rock may utterly escape you.⁵ You will simply pass it by under the category of “rock.” In the dream state you might find yourself sleeping on a sunwarmed rock, or climbing on icy ones. You might feel yourself encased in a rock, with your consciousness dispersed. You might have any number of different experiences involving rocks, all quite liberating. After such an experience you might look at rocks in an entirely different fashion, and see them in ways that escape your language. Rocks give forth sounds that you do not hear, for example, yet your language automatically limits your perception of what any rock is. To some extent words come between you and your direct expression. They should and can express that experience instead.

(She has excellent hearing, so if her trance hadn’t been as deep as usual, for whatever reasons, then even ordinary sounds might disrupt her. I told Jane that Seth’s information was as penetrating as ever. I also reminded her that the house was actually quieter than it usually is. A wet snow had started after supper and we’d shut our windows, thus cutting down on the rumble and clatter of automobile traffic.

(Seth’s remarks about inner sounds were quite interesting in view of an episode that had taken place 10 minutes or so before the session started. As we made ready for it in our living room, Jane became aware of a faint buzzing — a sound I couldn’t hear. She repeatedly exclaimed over this noise until, investigating, we located its source high up in a far corner: a small insect moving among the leaves of our philodendron vines. We’ve encouraged the plants to grow up a set of poles that reach from the top of a bookcase to the ceiling. [The whole structure serves as a modest room divider, shielding the living room from the hall entrance to the apartment.]

Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words — so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different “words” for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before.

To get in direct contact with your own feelings as they are, comma, again make up your own spontaneous sounds sometimes. Your emotions often cannot be expressed clearly in terms of language, and such unpatterning can allow them to flow freely.

Your physical life and your dreaming life are so intimately connected that it can be misleading to say what I am about to say, colon: that waking experience springs from the unknown dream reality. On the one hand the statement is indeed true. On the other hand, the intricate inner workings make it impossible to separate one from the other. “Reality” operates basically, however, in a way that is perceived more clearly in the dream state. Freedom from time and place, the wider kind of communication, the great mobility of consciousness — all of these experiences under dreaming conditions are characteristic of the basic nature of reality — whereas your waking experience provides limitations that are indicators of certain conditions only. Period.

To some extent the greater expression of consciousness can be experienced under usual waking conditions, but only when a personality is flexible enough and secure enough to alter the focus of consciousness. This way, other unperceived data become available. The unknown reality is not beyond your experience, therefore. Any of your scientific or religious disciplines could benefit from a study of the dreaming consciousness, for there the basic nature of reality exists as clearly as you can perceive it. The inner condition of dreaming is valid. You find yourselves in other times and places because basically neither time nor space exists as you suppose.⁷

(11:18.) Ruburt has been involved with what he calls the Sumari language (as referred to in the notes at break). This is an expression of the consciousness at a different focus. It is the native expression of a kind of experience that happens just outside of your official one-line focus of consciousness. First of all, it breaks up verbal patterning.⁹ It is composed, however, of sounds and syllables Ruburt has heard before, made up of jumbled Romance languages.¹⁰ These are “foreign” as far as he is concerned. At the same time those sounds are, in your terms, filled with the implications of antiquity, and bring up connotations of the species’ and of the psyche’s past.

(Pause.) They alter the usual physical response to meaningful sound. You may not realize it, but your language actually structures your visual perception of objects. Sumari breaks down the usual patterning, therefore, but it also releases the nervous system from its structured response to any particular stimulus. The sounds, however, while spontaneous, are not unstructured. They will present a sound equivalent of the emotion or object perceived, an equivalent that is very direct and immediate, and that bears legitimate correspondence with the object or emotion.

The English itself, however, then becomes charged, freshened with new concepts, carrying within a strangeness that itself alters the relationship of the words. This is a dream or trance language. It is as native to its level of consciousness as English is to your own — or Indian, or Chinese, or whatever. The various focuses of consciousness will have their own “languages.” Ruburt has discovered that beneath the Sumari there are deeper meanings.¹¹ He has become aware of what he calls long and short sounds. Some come so quickly that he cannot keep track, or speak them quickly enough. Others are so slow that he feels a sentence would take a week to utter.¹² These are the signatures of different focuses of consciousness as they are transposed in your space-time system.

Give us a moment … Other focuses of consciousness besides your own have different concepts of time, and are actually more biologically correct, in that they have greater knowledge of both cellular and spiritual realities. There is nothing “wrong” with your present habitual kind of consciousness, any more than there is anything wrong with speaking only one language. There is within you, however, the impetus to explore, to expand, to create, and that will automatically lead you to explore inner lands of consciousness; as, in your terms, it has led you to explore the other countries of the physical world.

2. In Chapter 5 of Personal Reality, sessions 623–25 all contain Seth material on inner sound, light, and electromagnetic structures of the body that ordinarily we do not perceive. From the 624th session, for example: “I told you that thoughts are translated into this inner sound, but thoughts always attempt to materialize themselves also. As such they are incipient images, collectors of energy.”

3. Seth could be referring to his remark in the 34th session for March 11, 1964: “Telepathic communications go on continually beneath consciousness, and without the aid of telepathy and of the inner senses, language itself would be meaningless. The hidden cues are the symbols that make language intelligible.”

9. Jane first came through with Sumari in her ESP class for November 23, 1971. Seth then devoted portions of the next five sessions to that development. From the 600th for December 13: “Each symbol in an alphabet stands for unutterable symbols beneath it … Sound itself, even without recognizable words, carries meaning. Oddly enough, sometimes the given meaning of the word does battle with the psychic and physical meaning of the sounds that compose it … The [Sumari] word ‘shambalina’ connotes the changing faces that the inner self adopts through its various experiences. Now this is a word that hints of relationships for which you have no word.” And from the 602nd for January 5, 1972: “In your language there are words that sound like the reality they try to represent. These are called ‘onomatopoeia’ [in English]. ‘Hush’ is an example….”