“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the dream state you range beyond your waking world view. You are able to bring into focus other interests and activities. These can remain in the background during waking life — or you can decide to enlarge your world view by taking advantage of your dreaming activities. Many of the exercises given here are geared in that direction.

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.

(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.

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

Music is a language. Painting is a language. The senses have a language of their own — one that seeps into structured words but dimly.

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….”