“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Physical play is pleasant, and accompanied by high imaginative activity. Muscles and mind are both exercised. The same kind of activity occurs in the child’s dream state as it learns to handle events before they are physically encountered. Intense dream activity is involved. Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are — not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events. Some of the exercises I will suggest will put you in touch with the way events are formed.

In dreams you deal with symbols, of course. Yet symbols are simply examples of other kinds of quite “objective” events. They are events that are what they seem to be, and they are equally events that do not “immediately” show themselves. One so-called event, therefore, may be a container of many others, while you only perceive its exterior face — and you call that face a symbol.

Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself. Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does. Events, therefore, cannot be precisely defined. You can explore your own experience of an event, and that exploration itself alters the nature of the seemingly separate event that you began to investigate. You share, then, a mass dream experience as you share a mass waking world. Your daily experience is private and uniquely yours, yet it happens within the context of a shared environment. The same applies to the dream state.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur. In that context your own existence is “forever” assured. You are the physical event of yourself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it you automatically exclude other experience of your own selfhood. The greater event of yourself exists in a context that is beyond your usual perception of events. That greater portion of yourself, however, forms the self that you know.

The inner material that “makes events real” comes from these other sources, however. Most of you are not aware of this basic, mysterious nature of events, because it does not occur to you to study the inner fabric. The past and future of any given event provides a kind of thickness, a kind of depth-in-time. The probabilities of an event escape you in practical terms.

[...] On the one hand they represent other events of the predream state, events beyond your comprehension in their “natural condition.” Such events are not lost, however, but translated into dreams as your own consciousness returns closer to its “home base.” Each aspect of a dream stands in coded form as a symbol for greater, undecipherable events.

As a continent does not exist alone, but also in relationship to other physical formations, so in your terms you form events so that they fit into a mass framework. [...] You are aware of other events, and take them into consideration, for example, regardless of appearances. You cannot force another person to experience an event he or she rejects. [...] So-called good or bad events each faithfully follow the inner mechanics.

Now any physical event is something like the impact of a rocket ship entering your world from “somewhere else.” [...] Events often appear and disappear in the same manner, yet they have impressed your reality. [...] Momentarily a field of relatedness is set up that is highly charged, one that provides an inner path by which probable events can flow into your area of recognized events.

[...] Practically speaking, however, the species accepts certain portions of dream reality as its so-called real events at any particular time, and about those specialized events it forms its “current” civilizations. [...] For that matter, their natural television operated better in some ways than your technological version, for their mental images allowed them to perceive events in neighboring areas or in other portions of the world. [...] The psychic and biological mechanisms were there, permitting the species to know, particularly in time of stress or danger, what normally unperceived events might threaten survival. But in the dream state, then as now, all such issues were contemporary, acting as models from which the species then chose the practical events that formed its physical experience.

Such issues, however, while obviously of concern, do not touch upon the greater events behind dream activity, or begin to touch upon the mysterious psychological actions that are behind the perception of any event. Dreams are primarily events, of course. Their importance to you lies precisely in the similarities and differences that characterize them in contrast to waking events.

In that respect you cannot rip apart your events to find the reality behind them, for that reality is not so much a glue that holds events together, but is invisibly entwined within your own psychological being. There are obvious differences between what you think of as waking and dream events. [...] In your world, conventional and practical sanity and physical manipulation are dependent upon your ability to discriminate, accepting as real only those events with which others more or less agree.

There, events are not dependent upon time. You, on the other hand, must work with the time version of events. Dreams provide an elegant framework that allows you to break down timeless events, placing them properly in the context of your own world. This proper placement is quite dependent upon an inner knowledge of probable future events, and your present time would be an impossible achievement were it not for this unconscious knowledge of the “future.”

In the same way you form events, often without being aware that you do so. It seems that events happen as it seems words are spoken. [...] You were involved with event-making before the time of your birth, however. The psyche forms events in the same way that the ocean forms waves — except that the ocean’s waves are confined to its surface or to its basin, while the psyche’s events are instantly translated, and splash out into mass psychological reality. In waking life you meet the completed event, so to speak. You encounter events in the arena of waking consciousness. In the dream state, and at other levels of consciousness, you deal more directly with the formation of events. [...]

The events that you recognize as official have a unitary nature in time that precludes those probable versions of them, from which they arose — versions that appeared to one extent or another in the dream state. [...] In that regard, in your framework of action you choose to “speak” one event rather than another. Your formation of events, however, does not simply reside in your unique psychological properties, of course, but is possible because of the corporal alphabet of the flesh.

In a way events are like the spoken components of language, yet voiced in a living form — and not for example only sounded. [...] To some extent, events are built up in the same fashion. [...]

[...] Events are everywhere forming. [...] You choose from those experiences certain ones as events in normal waking reality.

Now this event X is only one of a literally numberless amount of probable events which the conscious self could experience. For its purposes however the conscious self chooses this particular event X. But again, this event X, until the conscious self experiences it, is only one of many other probable events, different in no basic manner from the others. It becomes real, actual and different from those other probable events, only when it is experienced by our conscious self, or by this conscious self.

This event X becomes real then, in your terms, only when it is experienced or perceived by our conscious self. What about all of these other probable events, however? The only difference between them and event X is that event X was perceived and experienced by our conscious individual. In other words, were it not for this perception of the event X, it would still be as valid, or as invalid, as real or as unreal, as all the other probable events that were not perceived.

This leads us then to an obvious conclusion: if event X were not perceived it would still be a probability only. By the same token, if our individual chose to perceive and experience, say, event Y, then event Y would be the reality, and event X would still be unreal.

Since your physical time operates as it does, the physical organism does not have time within its own framework to experience any more than one probable event. It cannot focus upon two events at once. It goes without saying, again, that we are simplifying matters considerably, since each physical event is actually a gestalt of many small events.

[...] The news affects “future” events. [...] The newspapers are not the events they discuss, though they are their own kind of events. [...] If you watch news on television you have a larger view of a given news event. [...] The symbols carry the message, but they are not the event they depict.

Events as you understand them are only intrusions of multidimensional activities into space and time. Events are reflections of your dreams even as your dreams reflect the events you know; those you experienced, and those you anticipate in one way or another. In a manner of speaking, then, and without denying the great validity of your experience, events as you know them are but fragments of other happenings in which you are also intimately involved. The inner multidimensional shape of events occurs in a framework that you cannot structure, however, because as a rule you are not focused in that direction. [...]

[...] From your viewpoint it seems often that dreams are not events, or that they happen but do not happen. The lack of normal time and space intersections means that you cannot share your dreams with others in the way that you can share waking events. Nor can you remember dream events — or so it seems — as you do your normal conscious experience. In actual fact you remember consciously only certain highlighted events of your lives, and ordinary details of your days vanish as dreams seem to.

[...] You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. [...] The spontaneous activity, however, is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events.

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event. The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the part of each person involved, of course, so that the event’s implications and basic meanings may differ according to the focus of each participant. That given event, in your terms happening for the first time, say, begins to “work upon” the participants. Each one brings to it his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations — so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

[...] Strictly speaking, it isn’t dictation for Mass Events, but Jane and I are presenting portions of it here because Seth discussed events and memory with a different emphasis, and touched upon aspects of reincarnation² — all subjects that spring out of that ineffable, really undefinable quality he calls simultaneous time. [...] In these notes for Mass Events, I plan to refer to time — all kinds of it — from “time to time.”)

[...] In certain terms, however, the future represents, say, another kind of depth that belongs to events. [...] Events do also. But the roots of events go through your past, present, and future.

I use the word event here to include either object or happening. There is a field that combines both perceiver and perceived event, a communication and a system of similarities set up between them. [...] It is for this reason that the perceptor and the event change each other. [...]

You are only aware of any such changes when your present conscious attention is directed at any object or event. Objects or events known to you in your past still exert their pressures upon you even as your own effect still changes them. The same holds true for what you would term future objects or events.

There are all kinds of events traveling along the same pathways, equally used, that do not appear physically. [...] They may be transformed and emerge as realities or events within entirely different systems, in which they are then accepted by the inhabitants as vivid events. [...]

[...] You are bound by an entire spectrum of events, some that have already grown dim in your memory, and others that have not yet occurred in your time. You also affect these same events, shaping and altering them, and then reacting.

[...] Master events are those (long pause) whose main activity takes place in inner dimensions. (Long pause.) Such events are t-o-o (spelled) multidimensional to appear clearly in your reality, so that you see or experience only parts of them. They are source events. [...] The original action, however, of such events is unmanifest—not physical. Those events then “subsequently” show themselves in time and space, with extraordinary results.

“I got a definition of master events but forgot some of it … to the effect that master events are spectacular events whose main thrusts are outside of time, but whose actions on or in time [are] extravagant—out of proportion to their actual historical connections. The physical part of [such an] event in history is actually minimal in contrast to its effects … and something about master events touching the worlds of imagination and reason in different ways.

In a fashion man also is equipped with the ability to initiate actions on a nonphysical level that then become physical and continue to wind in and out of (pause) both realities, entwining dream events with historic ones, in such a fashion that the original nonphysical origins [are] often forgotten. [...] He often reacts to dream events as if they were physical, and to physical events as if they were dreams. [...]

They shed their light upon the “facts” of historical time, and influence those events. Master events may end up translated through mythology, or religion or art, or the effects may actually serve to give a framework to an entire civilization. [...]

Those experienced events, however, are also the result of a screening process. They attain their focus, brilliance, and physical validity because they rise into prominence on the backs of other seemingly unperceived events. In the dream state you work intimately with the “inner grammar” of events. [...] The skeletons of the inner workings of events are there more obvious. [...]

(9:53.) These events and responses continue to operate, however, particularly in the dream state where they do not intersect directly with full physical experience, as waking events do. All of these parallel or alternate experiences are then used to construct the physical events that you recognize. [...]

In dreams the preparations for experienced events take place, not only in the most minute details but in the larger context of the world scene. Events fit together, forming a cohesive whole that gives you a global scale of activities. The “future” history of the world, for example, is worked out now, as in the dream state each individual works with the probable events of private life. [...]

In dreams you know the beginning and end of events in the same fashion. Any one action in your life is taken in context with all of the other events from your birth to your death. [...]

(10:55.) You leave behind the physical nature of events and go into those areas in which events are formed. [...] In your terms, you literally look backward and forward in time at your individual self and your civilization, seeing where they merge, and feeling the infinite connections, so that each event you choose as your own will also be chosen as a world event — participated in to whatever extent by others, and adding to the available experience of the species from which others can also draw.

Dictation: Basically, events have nothing to do with what you think of as cause and effect. This is perhaps apparent to some degree when you study dream events, for there the kind of continuity you are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

[...] Each consciousness is endowed with creativity of a multidimensional nature, so that it will seek to create as many possible realities for itself as it can, using its own significance as a focus to draw into its experience whatever events are possible for it from the universe itself. It will then attract events from the universe, even as its own existence imprints the universe as an event with the indelible stamp of its own nature.

Actually the three sets of events could easily occur to the three people at once, and if no normal communication happened no one would be the wiser. The inner tapestry of events deals with just this kind of association. Emotional intensities and significances compose the nature of events. [...]

[...] In dreams the mind is free to play with events, and with their formation. The actualization of those events, however, requires certain practical circumstances. In play the children try out events initiated in the dream state, and “judge” these against the practical conditions. [...]

[...] The brain is primarily an event-forming psycho-mechanism through which consciousness operates. Its propensity for event-forming is obvious even in young children. [...]

[...] In your terms, events are still plastic to young children, in that they have not as yet learned to apply your stringent structure. There is an interesting point connected with the necessity to coordinate the workings of the senses, in that before this process occurs there is no rigid placement of events. [...]

[...] The brain itself is never satisfied with one version of an event, but will always use the imagination to form other versions in an activity quite as spontaneous as play. It also practices forming events as the muscles practice motion.

Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people. The events are “distorted,” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings….

[...] There are, then, certain events that connect the world. Though when everything is said and done these events come from outside of the world’s order, nevertheless they appear as constants within it. Their reality is the result of the most precise balancing of forces so that certain mental events appear quite real, and others are peripheral. [...]

What I want to emphasize here is the paranoid’s misinterpretation of innocuous personal or mass events, and to stress the ways in which physical events can be put together symbolically, so that from them a reality can be created that is almost part physical and part dream.

[...] Each person may react to the seasons in a very personalized manner, and yet you all share those natural events. [...] It is up to the conscious mind to interpret sense events as clearly and concisely as possible. [...]

You usually think, for example, that your feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the event itself. It seldom occurs to you that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of your focus is largely responsible for your interpretation of any event.

[...] You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events. Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive. Secondarily, you do of course then react to those events.

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. You will instead live in a world where events happen to you, in which you must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see yourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as you understand them, [each of] you must alter the focus of your attention to some extent, so that you begin to perceive the connections between your subjective reality at any given time, and those events that you perceive at any given time. You are the initiator of those events.

Ruburt is used to dealing with subjective events. [...] For him it is important, more than for many others, that he choose events with some discretion. When his mental event is, say, a book, he becomes engrossed in it, and this is positive. When he becomes overly concerned with his symptoms, however, the same event occurs, the same process, but with negative results.

Deeper communications than you realize happen between the waking and sleeping members of the species, and in such a manner the formation of physical events is to some extent timed, or paced. The planning stages for events, and the inner communications necessary, occur on the part of the sleeping members, while the waking doers are involved in objective events.

[...] It is a book telling of interior events. [...] The interior events are not “structured” by the use of drugs. Which could explain the events for many people. [...]

[...] The waking portion provides, say, the material supplies that visibly appear as objects or as events. These objects or events must be laid upon that prior framework, however. [...]

“Again: probable events are as real as that one event chosen from them to be a physical experience. Take our Event X again. It is only one of numberless probable events. For its purposes, however, the conscious ego chooses Event X. But until this ego experiences the event, it is only one of all the other probable events, different in no way. [...]

“Action is action whether or not you perceive it, and probable events are events whether or not you perceive them. Thoughts are also events, as are wishes and desires. The human system responds as fully to these as it does to physical events. In dreams, often portions of probable events are experienced in a semiconscious manner. [...]

“The ego must choose one event because of its limitations. But this other portion of the self can and does delve into what you could call Event Xl, X2, X3, et cetera. It can pursue and experience all of these alternative events in the same amount of physical time that it takes for the ego to experience Event X alone.

“Take, for example, Event X. This probable event will be experienced by the various portions of the self in their own way. When it is experienced by your ego, it is a physical event. [...]

Pretend a particular event happened that greatly disturbed you. In your mind imagine it not simply wiped out, but replaced by another event of more beneficial nature. [...] The event that you choose will automatically be a probable event, which did in fact happen, though it is not the event you chose to perceive in your given probable past.

Suffice it to say, you are surrounded by other influences and events. [...] You accept them as real without realizing that they are only portions of other events. Where your vision fails, you think reality ceases, so again you must train yourselves to look between events, between objects, within yourself when you do not seem to be doing anything. Watch out for events that appear to make no sense, for they are often clues to larger invisible events.

Because there are bleed-throughs and interconnections, it is possible for you to tune into a “future event,” say of an unfortunate nature, an event for which you are headed if you continue on your present course. A dream about it, for instance, may so frighten you that you avoid the event and do not experience it. If so, such a dream is a message from a probable self who did experience the event.

There are in your terms, then, unlimited probable future events for which you are now setting groundworks. The nature of the thoughts and feelings you originate and those that you habitually or characteristically receive set a pattern, so you will choose from those probable futures those events that will physically become your experience. [...]

[...] Through the characteristics of the brain, events that are of nonphysical origin become physically valid. [...] Those beliefs are used as screening and directing agents, separating certain nonphysical probable events from others, and bringing them into three-dimensional actuality.

Other probable events could just as well become physically experienced ones. [...] You will choose from those nonphysical probable events, therefore, only those you feel you are in accord with.

[...] They attract and bring into being certain events instead of others. Therefore, they determine the entry of experienced events from an endless variety of probable ones. [...]

[...] Past events continue. Consciously you only experience portions of events with your corporeal structure, yet the structure itself records them.

Initially this is mental action, an action-event. This action-event will then affect all other events, spiral inward and outward in all possible dimensions, and may be perceived in these dimensions in quite a different form from its original nature. [...]

Your psychological life is dependent upon your ability to perceive and react to such action-events. [...] Your identity, your inner self, is a main action-event, forming other such events that are the various portions of your personality.

There are both private and mass action-events, all of these being physically materialized within your system. [...] Many individuals reacting to a given event may do so by combining their energy to produce one major action-event in response.

[...] These inner events are the results of action’s own characteristics. [...]

It is very difficult to try to explain the nature of any event, or the ways in which any given specific mental attitude can release or inhibit the expression of any given series of events. [...]

[...] There are endless points of organization, intent, and interest that unite events. Many of your distracting events have uniting qualities that escape your joint notice.

The ramifications of Framework 2’s activity of course require great reorientation on your part, and necessitate a changed view of daily events. In that view, it will be seen that all events work toward your purposes—when you realize that they do. [...]

With a changed attitude, however, you will be able to follow those distractions’ “transformations”—that is, you will be able to glimpse how this distraction ends up in that insight, or how that distraction actually initiated a beneficial event, when in the past, everything seemed unrelated. Events fit into each other. [...]