“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you dream, however, you are to some extent experiencing reality from a different “set” entirely. Now, when you try to adjust your dreaming set in the same way that you would the waking one, you end up with static and blurred images. The set itself, however, is quite as effective as the one you use when you are awake, and it has a far greater range. It can bring in many programs. When you watch your ordinary television program, perhaps on a Saturday afternoon, you view the program as an observer. Let me give you an example.

Ruburt and Joseph know that Star Trek is not “real.” Planets can explode on the television screen, and Ruburt will not spill one drop of coffee. The cozy living room is quite safe from the imaginary catastrophes that are occurring just a few feet from the couch. Yet in a way the program reflects certain beliefs of your society in general, and so it is like a specialized mass waking dream — real but not real. For a moment, though, let us change the program to your favorite cops-and-robbers show. A woman is shot down in the street. Now this drama becomes “more real,” more immediately probable, less comfortable. So watching such a program, you may feel slightly threatened yourself, yet still largely unconcerned.

Sometimes you are deliciously frightened by a horror program, for example. You may feel compelled to see how it comes out, and find yourself unable to go to bed until the horrendous situation is resolved. All the time you know that salvation is nearby: You can always switch off the program. If someone watching a gory midnight special suddenly screams or shouts or leaps up from the chair, how comical this seems, because the action is appropriate not to the “real” situation, but geared instead to a pseudodrama. The yelling and screaming will have absolutely no effect upon the program’s actors, and will alter the drama not one whit. The appropriate action would be to turn the station off.

(9:32.) Your waking life is the result of the most precise kind of organization, held competently and with amazing clarity. While each person views that reality from a slightly different focus, still it occurs within certain ranges or frequencies. You bring it into clear focus in almost the same way that you adjust your television picture, only in this case not only sound and images are synchronized, but phenomena of far greater complexity. Following this analogy, everyone sees a slightly different picture of reality, and follows his or her own program — yet all of the “sets” are the same.

I would like to make a few comments regarding “programs”—that is, certainly it must seem to you both that you begin many therapeutically designed programs only to have them disappear. There is a rhythm to such programs, however, and it is natural for the self to rouse at certain times, begin such activity, then apparently (underlined) discard them.

The habitual nature of the programming that you give your own minds helps continue the chronic condition. (Long pause.) Such a program, to be effective, must also include Ruburt’s initiative, so that he rouses himself and definitely begins to take advantage of those energies that he has—that is, energy exercises for himself. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Therefore Ruburt’s idea of a new program is a quite natural therapeutic one. [...]

[...] That should be a part of the program, in other words, regardless of what Ruburt intends to do bookwise with those sessions. [...]

[...] First imagine that during the daily programming there are three soap operas, four news programs, several excellent dramas, a few operas, some popular music, several religious sermons, and some sports programs. Each of these has its own commercials or messages, which may or may not have anything to do with the programs given.

First of all, it would be nearly impossible for you to sample all of these programs with any effectiveness while going about your own affairs. To make matters more complicated, again, these programs do not involve only sound. [...] Beside that, there is a give-and-take between programs.

[...] This Wilford, while carrying on within his own drama as, say, a sickly grocer in Iowa, with a mistress he cannot support, and a wife that he must support (with amusement) — this poor, besieged man on station KYU is also aware of all the other programs going on at the other stations. [...] There is a constant, creative give-and-take between the day’s various programs. [...]

[...] The separate programs existing at once each have their own schedules, and from your reality you could not play them all at once. [...] From your point of view you could not pick up the grocer’s escapades and the symphony, for instance, if both came through at 8 o’clock in the evening, without switching from one to the other: You would have to choose which program you wanted.

There is no need in my outlining in detail the multitudinous events that must occur so that you can watch your favorite program. [...] Your job is simply to choose the programs of your choice on any evening. Many others are watching the same programs, of course, yet each person will react quite individually.

We will call the world as you physically experience it, Framework 1. In Framework 1, you watch television programs, for example. [...] You have favorite programs. [...]

Now somewhere there is a program director, who must take care of the entire programming. [...]

In this book I will try to tell you what goes on behind the scenes — to show you the ways in which you choose your daily physical programs, and to describe how those personal choices mix and merge to form a mass reality. [...] You can turn off a program that offends you. [...]

Like this imaginary multidimensional television, the psyche contains within it other programs than the one in which you are acting — other plots, environments, and world situations. Theoretically you can indeed momentarily “walk out of” your program into another as easily, when you know how, as you now move from one room to another. You must know that the other programs exist or the possibility of such action will not occur to you. In larger terms all of the programs are but portions of one, colon: The various sets are real, however, and the characters quite alive.

Give us a moment … The hat on the table, while possessing all of the necessary paraphernalia of reality for that scene, might also, however, serve as a different kind of reference point for one of the other programs simultaneously occurring. In that reality, say program two, the entire configuration of hat and table may be meaningless, while still being interpreted in an entirely different way from a quite different perspective. There in program two the table might be a flat natural plain, and the hat an oddly shaped structure upon it — a natural rather than a manufactured one. [...] Any of the objects shown in the program you are watching, then, may be used as a different kind of reference point in another reality, in which those objects appear as something else.

Think again of the psyche in the manner mentioned, taking it for granted that the program now on the screen is a fully dimensioned reality, and that hidden somehow in its very elements are all of the other programs not showing. These are not lined up in space behind the “front” program, but in a completely different way contained within it. [...]

In a manner of speaking, however, all of the other programs are “latent” in the one you are watching. [...] There is a give-and-take quite invisible to you between one program and another, and action within one, again, affects the action within each of the others.

(9:57.) Suppose that you turned on your television set to watch a program, for example, and found that through some malfunction a massive bleed-through had occurred so that several programs were scrambled, and yet appeared at once, seemingly without rhyme or reason. [...] If all of this was transposed over the program that you expected, you would indeed think that nothing made any sense.

[...] Often it seems that you have no more control over the drama of your own life than you have over the outcome of a television program. [...] It becomes very difficult to explain such occurrences in the light of the plots and scenes provided by your usual mental programming. [...]

Each character, however, or portion of a scene, would represent in fragmented form another quite valid program [or reality, in brackets]. [...]

So, often such dreams are like programmed dramas, in that you clothe such visitations in familiar props. [...]

[...] When I got out to the living room to wait for the session, I found her watching one of those fascinating, multiple-subject science programs on the educational channel: Various experts were discussing topics like childbirth and sound, Kirlian photography, astronomy, particle physics, and so forth. After the program ended at 9:00 I explained to Jane out of my own limited knowledge how particle accelerators—“atom smashers”—work. [...]

[...] I’m also presenting it because it shows how an event on one day of our lives—a television program—influenced Jane’s delivery of one session of the Seth material. [...]

“I don’t think I should have watched that program,” she said. [...]

“No, it’s just that before that program I felt he had a lot of complicated material to give, and I couldn’t get it afterward,” Jane replied. [...]

Even your home station has many programs, and you have usually tuned in to one main one and ignored others. Characters in your “favorite program” at home may appear in far different guises when you are between stations, and elements of other programs that you have ignored at home may suddenly become apparent to you.

[...] At home you may tune in to religious programs. [...] You may try to ignore what you consider other programs dealing with hatred, fear, or violence. [...] You may have tuned out what you think of as negative feelings or programming. [...]

If you listen to an FM radio station, there is a handy lock-in gadget that automatically keeps the station in clear focus; it stops the program from “drifting.” [...]

[...] Often your daily program is not nearly as clear or well-focused as it should be, but full of static; and while this may annoy you, you often put up with it or even become so used to the lack of harmony that you forget what a clear reception is like. [...]

In the same way, however, you almost programmed yourselves to react in certain physical fashions, and for the same reasons. Our ideas are as close to fact as you can get, granting the necessary translations, and as you build your lives on those frameworks you will no longer be programmed, reacting to erroneous “facts” as if they had a basis in reality. [...]

They might have seemed like even brilliant (amused) theoretical statements, my own pronouncements, but little by little you accepted them intellectually while still being emotionally bound through habit, so that indeed, as Ruburt wrote, you almost became programmed, your questions about reality based upon the erroneous facts of Darwinism, Freudianism, or religion. [...]

The ulcer simply can be cured, but this will involve on the part of the personality a disciplined program of self-understanding. Certainly such a program will be worthwhile. [...] Instead what is advisable is a gradual but definite program that will result in a legitimate and a long-lasting cure.

I intend to speak more concerning your friend, we can initiate a program for him. It will perhaps seem like a conservative program, and he will do all of the work.

The trouble with many health programs for recovery is that they cause the sufferer to focus upon his illness more than ever. [...] Our program for your friend will almost immediately include a brief but effective suggestion that should be given before sleep, and at various times during the day.

We may not expand this program this evening. [...]

These are beliefs of Ruburt’s. He felt in the past that you did not consistently keep with him in any program of improvement, except for badminton. [...]

[...] Tell him if possible to forget the symptoms as much as he can, and concentrate instead upon his work and our program. [...]

[...] Writing in his journal daily with his notations of present programs always represents a conscious intent that serves a beneficial natural hypnotic suggestion of accomplishment. [...]

Whatever program he works with for that time is important, for it is his manner of changing beliefs. [...]

He is not to make an effort to get up correctly then, but instead to take it for granted that the program will automatically and is automatically allowing him to. His trust in his body will grow as the program is implemented, and you have barely begun to utilize it.

The entire program, all of the suggestions, must automatically become a part of Ruburt’s life. [...]

[...] Some physical activity, if only dancing by himself with the radio, should be a part of this program. [...]

(My suspicion is that her cold-and-other symptoms mean that we’ve set up some resistance on the part of her psyche since she initiated the Day 1 program on February 2. Today is Day 18 of the program. [...]

[...] She said she’d dozed through most of her evening TV programs — something she hardly ever does. [...]

After the program, Sonja said that the character analysis given along with the reading described her beautifully. She also told us that she had used both color and fabric to communicate with children on an educational television program — a fact unknown to us.

[...] Actually, since I hadn’t gone into trance on any other programs, I doubted I would now. [...]

When I came out of trance, Rob was smiling, Jack and Sonja looked dazed, the camera crew were staring at me and the program was over. [...]

[...] A taxi was already waiting to take us to our next show, a radio program. [...]

You may think of your soul or entity — though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy — as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

[...] It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed. [...]

[...] Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way. [...]

[...] “I feel like someone on that TV show,” she said, referring to a popular science fiction program we’d seen earlier this evening. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Let Ruburt follow the program faithfully, yet with a more carefree attitude toward it, with a more relaxed attitude, He should reread the book, yet in his free moments he need not concentrate upon the program. [...]

Now, Ruburt, follow through on the program, but do not be overly concerned on a conscious level. [...]

[...] You should also follow the program outlined in the book. [...]

[...] Your heart may beat faster and you can become very agitated watching certain television programs. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s actions were appropriate for the horror program, and so were some of yours when you were afraid of painting because it did not bring in money. [...]

Not walking properly was an inappropriate defense mechanism no longer needed, a reaction in response to a program that made him feel unsafe.

[...] His enthusiasm for a program is important. The program makes little difference. [...]

[...] This is merely a slow beginning, but the initial steps have been made, and the first and initial program has been completed. [...] But the first portion of our program has been completed in many other ways, having to do with the development of abilities, and with the development of that gestalt which we now form.

We can now begin shortly on other aspects of our program, the second. You are not unfamiliar with this program, Joseph, nor indeed is Ruburt. [...]

[...] I would here add however that those others in this room have also helped us in at least one phase of our program. [...]

[...] The second phase of our program will include definite expansions in the scope of our general material. [...]