“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Your world view is your personalized interpretation of the physical universe.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

A small word to Ruburt. He is altering his world view….

1. Seth began his “home station” and “world view” discussions in sessions 711 and 718, respectively.

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.