“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] In ordinary living, you often imagine yourself behaving in a different manner than you did, or in your mind reexperiencing events in order to gain greater understanding from them. [...] Events and objects are not absolute, remember, but plastic. Events can be changed both before and after their occurrence. [...]

[...] Events are not things that happen to you. [...] After death you will not concentrate upon the physical forms taken by time and events. [...]

[...] After death you may, under certain conditions and if you choose, experience the events of those seventy-seven years at your leisure — but not necessarily in terms of continuity. You may alter the events. [...]

[...] The events of which you are conscious are only those fragments of activities that intrude or appear to your normal waking consciousness. Other portions of these events are quite clear to you both in the dreaming state and beneath waking consciousness during the day.

This also has to do with large events, that you might for convenience’s sake think of for now as psychological objects — that is, events seen and recognized by large numbers of people in the same way that objects are.

[...] That event in Harrisburg means one thing to them. Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature because they are “smarter than” nature is — smarter than nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. [...]

(The last session we presented in Mass Events, the 841st, was held on March 14. [...]

[...] It would be hardly a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

(9:02.) Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination. Inner events are stressed over exterior ones. [...] In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content.

(9:23.) In the case of the man who wrote Ruburt, we have a mixture of those characteristics in which interior events—the events of the imagination—cast too strong a light upon physical events as far as the socially accepted blend is concerned. [...]

In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality. [...]

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced. [...] In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time. [...]

[...] To some extent events “grow” in the same fashion, and from the inside out, as you do. In a dream you are closer to those stages in which events are born. [...]

[...] Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

[...] As a language that you know is, again, dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences, so the dream that you experience and recall is also one statement of the psyche, coming into prominence; but it is also dependent upon other events that you do not recall, and that your consciousness, as it now operates, must automatically translate into its own terms.

[...] The imagination can of course conceive of many events, whether or not those events actually exist. [...]

This applies not only to seemingly “pure” objective events, but to the more complicated event of an individual psychological being. [...]

[...] They can hint at the greater diversity of being, the larger dimension of events. [...] They can serve as thresholds (long pause), but they cannot contain direct experience themselves with events that are intrinsically beyond those reaches. [...]

I recognize the difficulties, for example, that you encounter quite personally as you struggle with Ruburt’s physical condition, or those you experience, say, watching television news as you see spread before your vision unfortunate events that seem to portray most clearly evidence of man’s flawed nature. It is impossible for you to perceive in the same direct fashion the majestic, almost unimaginable field of creative action in which any of those events occur, however, in which each act, however seemingly destructive, has vital creative purposes that may or may not appear within the limited references of your conventional dimensions. [...]

When the inverted time system is understood for what it is, then the individual is in contact simultaneously with the experience gained in the so-called past, and is also able to take advantage of events which have not yet occurred within your present. This does not mean that he will be consciously aware of future events, for if you remember these events can be changed by him at any time. [...] He is constantly forming the events of the past, even as he forms the events of the present and future.

[...] An event foreseen through precognition or clairvoyance, a future event, may or may not actually occur within time as you know it. For you are seeing into probabilities, and the probable event may or may not occur, within your time system.

The whole psychological formation of the perceiver is entirely different, and there is no one event out of all probable events, but there is experience of all the mathematically probable events that could happen to any given individual, within any given amount of time as you know it.

In many respects the individual is not at the mercy of past events, for he changes them constantly. He is not therefore at the mercy of future events, for he changes these also, not only before but also after their occurrence. [...]

Psychological events have their own integrity, wholeness, but as the dimensions of an object can be more or less ascertained and agreed upon by many, the greater free flow granted to psychological events allows for no such easy conventional recognition. [...] Psychological events are automatically manufactured by each individual, and no one but the individual can really ascertain the quality of the product.

[...] You might say that perceivable events are composed of a conglomeration of certain levels of consciousness tuned in to form an event, say, instead of an object.

It is at first appalling to discover that the negative as well as the positive events are formed at automatic levels, but in response to your expectations and beliefs. World events such as those you read about in your newspaper are the result of conventional ideas and beliefs—those with which you were reared. [...]

The events of your lives are in part caused by the psychological results of that level of consciousness, but only in part. [...] Events are formed then by various levels of consciousness intersecting. [...]

Even the duration of an event or object in space or time is determined by the intensity of the thoughts or emotions that gave it birth. [...] An event or object that exists briefly in space may have a much greater duration in time. [...] Such an event or object does not merely exist symbolically within your mind or memory — but in your terms its actual reality continues as a time event.

There is no other valid way of changing physical events. [...] Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.

[...] They group through attraction, building up areas of events and circumstances that finally coalesce, so to speak, either in matter as objects — or as events in “time.”

[...] Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. [...]

[...] For the inner self can indeed perceive events that will occur after physical death. [...] The inner self can perceive events that will occur to itself after physical death, and it also can see events that will occur in which it is not involved.

In all of these instances however there are uncertainties, for probable future events can be foreseen as clearly as events that will more actually occur. No event is destined to occur, and it can be changed, not only before and during, but after its occurrence. [...]

[...] Therefore, it is more than possible to react in the past to an event that has not yet occurred, to be influenced by your own future.

[...] Suffice it to say that it is more than possible for an individual to react in the past to an event in the future which may never occur.

(9:51.) Events, then, are organized in a different fashion. Not only can you experience dramas in which you are intimately involved, as in waking life, but your range of activities is multiplied so that you can view events “from outside” your own usual context. [...]

In this case, the frightened perceiver knows full well that the terrible events on the screen will not suddenly explode into the living room. When you become caught in frightening physical events, however, it is equally foolhardy to yell or shout or stamp your feet, because that is not where the action is (smiling). Again, you have only to change your station. [...]

[...] Later, in waking life, you may discover that a friend of yours, a Mr. Taylor (spelled), has a party, or dies, or gets married, whatever the case may be; yet you might never connect the dream with the later event because you did not understand the way that words and images can be united in your dreams.

[...] Using it, you can perceive events not only from your own viewpoint, but from other focuses. [...]

In the past, if people didn’t remember their dreams, they’d project their dream events upon natural events, or read objective events as symbols that would actually express the dream itself. Now, even though people might forget their dreams, they often react to certain portions of TV dramas, or events that correlate with the dreams of the night before.

This has to do also with larger events that you might for convenience’s sake think of for now as psychological objects—that is, events seen and recognized by large numbers of people in the same way that objects are.

[...] Part of it will appear in your daily experience in one way or another—in your conversation or daily events. [...]

Because dreams are such a perfect combination of stimuli from the inner environment and the exterior environment, other events are often used to trigger inner dream messages, just as the opposite occurs. [...]

[...] The main nature of events, the majority of events, do not in quotes “solidify” until the last moment, in your terms. According to your understanding and interpretation of the word, events, none are predetermined by a source outside of yourselves.

Some of these are perceived and experienced as definite events within your own system. It is you who choose among the probabilities, and from these you form the given collection that compose any particular event.

Events are materialized in your time from their origins in notime, then. [...] Each event that you form from any given set of probabilities automatically gives rise to new probabilities.

[...] This was after she had gone through an auto accident; Seth has told us this accident is in reality two accidents, one involving B. Macdonnel in California, the other a future possible event involving Tam’s girl Eve, in or near New York City. [...]

[...] The self as you think of it is literally reborn in each instant, following an infinite number of events from the one official series of events that you recognize at any given “time.”

[...] When you are dealing with historic events you believe that no prediction is involved. Personally and as a species, you are convinced that there is a one-line series of finished events behind you.

When you seemingly look backward into time, and construct a history, you do so by projecting your own prime series of events into the past as it is understood. [...] You accept certain data — your present recognized series of events — then use that series as a measuring stick, so to speak: It automatically rejects what does not fit. [...]

Dictation (quietly and humorously): The unknown reality appears [to be] invisible only because you do not accept it in your prime series of events. [...]

(I’ll preface the workaday notes for the first session of Mass Events with the following comments, just to briefly summarize the lifetime endeavor that my wife, Jane Roberts, and I are involved in with the Seth books. [...] These notes, then, are written shortly after Seth finished dictating Mass Events in August 1979. [...] And these notes will also free Jane to deal with other matters in her Introduction for Mass Events.

Give us a moment… Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events. [...] His culture, his religion, his psychologies, and his psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur. (Loudly, then whispering so softly that I could barely hear:) This book will, then, be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.

[...] Even now, while I’m thinking about how to put Mass Events together for the reader, last night Seth came through with new material that he said will be part of another book. I should always remember that each time Jane and I sit for a session, it’s a unique event in the world.

Another purpose is involved in presenting Mass Events in context, though: I plan to use current professional and personal events from our lives as a sort of background or framework for the book as Jane delivers it for Seth. [...]

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of [...] If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. [...]

[...] Here, I want to stress the social aspects of dreams, and to point out the fact that dreams also show you some of the processes that are involved in the actual formation of physical events: You actually come into an event, therefore, long before the event physically happens, at other levels of consciousness, and a good deal of this prior activity takes place in the state of dreaming.

As I have frequently mentioned, you have a hand in forming all events to one extent or another, and at certain levels you are therefore involved in the construction of those global events that affect the world, whether they be of so-called natural or cultural nature.

[...] They also involve you in the most productive of enterprises as you begin to play with versions of events that are being considered for physical actualization, as on a personal level you “view” the probable events which your family, tribe, organization, community and country will actualize.

A remembered dream is a product of several things, but often it is your conscious interpretation of events that initially may have been quite different from your memory of them. To that extent the dream that you remember is a snapshot of a larger event, taken by your conscious mind. There are many kinds or varieties of dreams, some more and some less faithful to your memories of them — but as you remember a dream you automatically snatch certain portions of subjective events away from others, and try to “frame” these in space and time in ways that will make sense to your usual orientation. Even then, however, dream events are so multidimensional that this attempt is often a failure. [...] A photograph will show certain events natural to the time in which it was taken. [...]

[...] They involve probable “series” of events. For example, if one particular dream event is chosen for physical materialization, then in your reality other events will appear in due time, and in serial fashion.

So, from other streams of actuality you choose those events that you want physically materialized; and you do this according to your beliefs about the nature of reality. A photograph is taken, and you have before you then a picture of an event that in your terms has already happened. [...]

The official³ line of consciousness that you accepted blithely ignores any deviations, and when such events occur usually continues merrily on as if nothing had happened. [...]

(Long pause, hand to closed eyes.) Perceptions in general physical terms usually seem to involve information picked up from an arbitrarily designated structure, of an event seemingly occurring in another structure outside of itself. In the entire act of perception, however, there is a oneness and a unity between the seemingly objectively perceived event and the perceiver. [...]

The entire act has its own electromagnetic reality, and the event is actually electromagnetic motion. The movement within the atoms mentioned earlier therefore is a part, basically, of the entire perceived event. [...]

Your in quotes “unity” with the event that seems to exist outside of you is not understood. In paranormal instances you change your focus largely, throwing it into the seemingly independent event. [...]

Physically then you perceive an approximation of an inner event. The inner event basically is not physical. [...]

[...] However private a trance may be, it must take place in a physical world of shared events. I am touched by those events and so are you; so even while I sit in trance, dictating books as Seth, I can’t after all stray too far from our joint reality. [...] The glass of wine on the coffee table before me, the cigarettes, and the mass-produced table itself, are all reminders that my most adventuresome journeys into other realities are rooted, for now at least, in the physical world of events that we all share together.

While Seth was dictating The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, for example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred; and had the affair turned into a disaster, our Chemung County would have been used to house refugees. Many spectacular national events have happened, of course, since our first sessions took place late in 1963, but Seth seldom mentioned such issues, and then only in answer to our own questions. [...]

While Seth was dictating Mass Events, for example, another of our cats (Billy) died. Seth was discussing the Three Mile Island accident, but he left off book dictation for a while because we felt so badly, and gave us some excellent material on animal consciousness before and after death — because “tragedies” come in all shapes and sizes, and the most domestic events of our days offer Seth opportunities to comment on life itself.

[...] Yet those lives are lived in coexistence with a mass arena of events that brush against us gently at times, or drastically affect our days on other occasions. In this book Seth describes the continuum of existence that holds us all together and blends our private experiences into world events. [...]

[...] They will ignore or deny the inner feelings that alone would give the event any meaning in their lives. [...] You think of rain or earthquakes as natural events, for example, while you do not consider thoughts or emotions as natural events in the same terms. [...]

[...] In terms of your civilization, nature and spirit became divided so that you encounter the events of your lives largely in that context. To some degree or another, then, you must feel divorced from your bodies and from the events of nature. [...]

[...] You will interpret the private events of your lives, and the spectacular range of history, in the light of those assumptions about reality. They not only color your experience, but you create those events that more or less conform to those assumptions.

[...] Many illnesses are cured, then, through quite natural methods that not only involve physical healings, but bring into play other events — events that have great bearing on the psychological elements that may be involved behind the scenes. [...]

April 14 Rob decides we really have to do something to tackle my difficulties which have been more than considerable lately, he suggests I call Tam to see when Events is out; or if it is, since April 13 is date of arrival. [...] Then on April 14 Ethel Waters calls from Production at Tam’s insistence saying that after Events was delayed till May 14 because of the disclaimer problems; so it would come out the same month as God of Jane.... but that there were 10,000 back orders for Events, so I’d say that my dream probably gave me that indication, that something was held up. [...]