“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your home station¹ does not simply present programming for you to view. Instead you help create the program, of course, even while you are part of it. On any given afternoon certain elements of experience will be “given,” roughly sketched in. There are certain cues to set the stage, colon: It may be a snowy, humid, or dry and sunny day, for instance; the location may be city or town. Yet within that loose framework you create the program of the day according to your own world view.

If that view is expansive, then you have far greater leeway in creating your experience. You can add greater depth, so to speak, to the characterization. You can, in other words, take advantage of the unknown reality by letting it add to your home station.

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.

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.

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.

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

In a way, the one-line kind of consciousness that you have developed can be correlated with your use of any one language. Experience is programmed, highly specialized, and attains a seemingly tight organization only because (intently) it limits so much of reality. In those terms, if you are bilingual you are somewhat better off, for your thoughts have a choice of two paths. Biologically, you are physically capable of speaking any language now in use on the face of the earth. You would consider it an achievement if you learned to speak many languages. You would not find it frightening or unnatural, though you would take it for granted that some training was involved. In the same way, your one-line kind of consciousness is but one of many “languages.” The others are as native, as natural, as biologically feasible.

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.

(Pause at 11:43.) Languages express certain kinds of reality, usually by organizing experience verbally and mentally. In your case, again, a certain neurological prejudice occurs. If you experienced greater instances of out-of-body consciousness, for example, then your verbal expressions of space and time would automatically change. If you became aware of more of your dreaming experience, your language would automatically expand. Again automatically, you would also become aware of other neurological patterns than those you use. These (intently), activated, would then be picked up by your scientific instruments, and therefore change your ideas in such fields.

(Long pause.) Many people find themselves singing “gibberish” when they are alone, and trying to free themselves from language structuring. Children often play by constructing their own languages; and speaking with tongues (glossolalia) is a beautiful example of the attempt to express a reality that escapes the tyranny of overly structured words.

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.”

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.”

Numerous forms of vocal communication — whether “true” speech or not, in current opinion — undoubtedly existed among the ancestors of our species for many millennia before the appearance of late Neanderthal man, however; according to conservative estimates such methods could have been in use for well over two million years, perhaps beginning even with our prehuman or animal stages. Jane and I find certain other research claims inconceivable: that in some of those earlier times verbal exchanges between members of the species, whether they be called prehuman or human, could have been a hindrance rather than an asset. To us, even the potential for audible communication has always been as much a part of our creature states as arms and legs. I’m only noting that such abilities represent one more means, upon a vast time scale, by which consciousness inexhaustibly seeks to know itself in this camouflage reality.

Seth tells us, of course, that prehuman communication and human language and speech have originated in rhythmic patterns again and again, since in the far past our planet has seen the development of a number of presently unknown civilizations. See, for example, his material on reincarnational civilizations and the Lumanians in Chapter 15 of Seth Speaks. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see his discussion on ancient man in the 702nd session, as well as Jane’s own material on the “innumerable species of man-in-the-making” in Appendix 6.

5. As an artist I’m so used to observing our physical world in terms of forms, colors, shadows, shapes, and “negative shapes” — the patterns formed by areas between and around shadows or objects — that I sometimes have to remind myself of the obvious: that each individual in the world perceives it from his or her own viewpoint. How strange, I’ve found myself thinking, that Joe, say, doesn’t see our environment in artistic terms, since what I see is so plain to me. But then, I tell myself, Joe has a method of cognition that’s quite natural to him. If he loves flowers, for instance, he may enjoy more of a sheer emotional reaction through the appreciation of a rose than I can.

7. Seth has said all of this in various ways before, of course, since he began coming through Jane almost exactly 11 years ago — yet to my mind the four paragraphs just given contain some of his most important material in the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality. Certainly it buttresses any of his dream information in Volume 1.

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….”