“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.

Give us a moment … To some extent language does make the unknown known and recognizable. It sets up signposts that each person in a culture recognizes. To do this, however, it latches upon certain significances and ignores others. You might know the word for “rock” for instance. Knowing the word might actually prevent you from seeing any specific rock clearly as it is, or recognizing how it is different from all other rocks.

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.

The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards.⁶ In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.

The freshness of dream experience lies in its direct nature. Your cultural world view does not have any clear understanding of the nature of dreams, so that their direct, clear expression is not recalled often in the morning. (Pause.) At night you tune in to dreaming reality simply by closing out so-called waking reality, but the same kind of dream experience continues beneath your focus in waking life. Dreaming, you are still aware of your daily experience, but it is seemingly peripheral. Waking, your dream experience is peripheral also, but you are less aware of that condition. Both together represent the dimensions of your consciousness, and they exist simultaneously. You can and often do work out in dreams the challenges of daily life. In waking life you are also working out challenges set for yourselves in the dream state. Obviously, then, your consciousness is equipped to function in the known and unknown realities, and the divisions that you have set up are quite arbitrary.

(Seth postponed ending the session to make some comments on Jane’s changing attitudes toward her physical environment, added a few remarks about the drawings I’m doing for Dialogues, then, in excellent humor, closed out the session at 12:01 A.M. Jane said her trance had been considerably deeper after break; certainly her delivery had been infused with more energy. And that energy lingered, for she felt much better now.)

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.”

4. This material reminds me of Seth in the 681st session in Volume 1: “The deeper explanations, however [in this case of probabilities], demand a further expansion of ideas of consciousness … It is not so much a matter of Ruburt’s vocabulary, incidentally, since even a specialized scientific one would only present these ideas in its own distorted fashion. It is more a problem of basic language itself, as you are acquainted with it. Words do not exist, for example, for some of the ideas I hope to convey. We will at any rate begin.”