“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

(“Well, I think it’s going to be a short session,” she finally laughed. “I feel restless — like going for a walk in the snow or something….” But the session hardly proved to be a short one. In connection with the practice element that Seth gives below, plus the following two paragraphs of related information, I’d like the reader to refer to chapters 7 and 8 in Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness. In them she discussed the development of her Sumari “language.”

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.

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

There are no basic dangers involved in alterations of consciousness without drugs, but artificial dangers can occur because of your cultural beliefs. These result because such individuals find themselves with no acceptable framework in which to correlate or understand their experiences. They try to fall back upon religious or scientific or pseudoscientific explanations.⁸

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.

(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.

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

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.”

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.

6. Reading backward is something I’ve casually indulged in for many years. I don’t think those actions inspired Seth’s advice here, although my unconscious motivations for such a practice may coincide with it. I developed the habit as a teenager, reading signs and automobile license plates aloud and backward when my father would take my mother, my two younger brothers, and myself for Sunday rides in his 1932 Chevrolet. I found it to be great fun. I also taught myself to read upside-down print — an equally fascinating endeavor. In later years, working with others on a daily basis, I’d occasionally talk backward in a joking manner (ekil siht). The interesting thing here was that after a while my co-workers not only came to understand what I was saying, but joined in the game.