“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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. Now it seems to you that because you speak one sentence at any given time, rather than ten other possible versions of it, the sentence as spoken is the “correct” one. Its probable variations in grammar or tense or inflection escape you entirely. Yet unconsciously you may have tried out and discarded all of those, even though you have no memory of such experiences. So even in forming sentences you deal with probabilities, and to some extent or another your body mimics, say, the various muscular responses that might be involved with each unspoken sentence.

So, while each action of your life is taken in context with all other actions of your life until your death, this does not mean that your death is predestined to occur at any given time. As you might change your sentence in the middle from one version to another without even being consciously aware of it, so as you live your life you also work with probabilities. You are the self who speaks the sentence, and you are the self who lives the life. You are larger than the sentence that you speak, and larger than the life you live.

When you speak a sentence you do not stop to consider all of the rules of grammar. You do not mentally diagram the sentence ahead of time. You simply speak more or less automatically. This involves the utmost precision, both mentally and physically. When you experience an event, you do not usually stop either to examine the rules of perception or to wonder what these are. You simply experience or perceive.

(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. Again, you speak a sentence truly so that the end of it comes smoothly, though when you begin it you may not have known consciously what you were going to say. Some part of you knew the sentence’s beginning and end at once, however.

(11:22.) While you can only speak one sentence at a time, and in but one language, and while that sentence must be sounded one vowel or syllable at a time, still it is the result of a kind of circular knowledge or experience in which the sentence’s beginning and end is known simultaneously. [...]

[...] A sentence is built up as words, parts of speech, verbs, and adjectives, subjects and predicates, vowels and syllables, and underneath there is the entire structure that allows you to speak or read to begin with. [...] You form and organize sentences, yet you speak on faith, without actually knowing the methods involved in your speaking. [...]

[...] You were taught how to construct sentences in school, and you learned how to speak from your elders. [...] You are usually as unaware of this process as you are in normal practice of the ways in which you form your sentences, which seem to flow from you so automatically.

[...] Again, if you speak the English sentence “I am here,” you cannot speak the Chinese version at the same time. [...]

You could not only copy sentences, but—important development—you could form your own sentences, and express your own thoughts in that form. [...]

[...] Then you were told to put the words into sentences, and you followed the same procedure. [...]

[...] Your so-called mistakes exist as mistakes only in the light of your aspirations to perform better, to express more fully developed experiences, rather than to write better sentences.

Pretend that your life’s experience is a page of a book that you write, read, and experience from top to bottom, left to right, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. [...] Or others might mix and match the letters in entirely different fashions altogether, forming entirely different sentences. [...]

(Long pause at 10:47.) When you ask: “Who am I?” you are trying to read yourself as if you were a simple sentence already written. [...] The sentence that you recognize is only one of many probable variations. [...] You take it for granted that a sentence begun will be finished. [...]

[...] These result in certain time sequences that can be compared to sentences, written and read from one side, say, to the other.

(Now Seth came through with a sentence I didn’t think was correct:)

(“I’d like to go over that first sentence of the Bantam material — I’ve made a mistake, or something’s wrong somewhere.”

(At Seth’s request I reread the sentence twice.)

(Again at his request, I read back to Seth the sentence he’d just given.)

[...] Note the semicolon in the first sentence of the above paragraph. Seth requested that I punctuate the sentence just that way. [...]

[...] You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past-life experience. [...]

The universe expands, as I have said before, as an idea expands; and as sentences are built upon words, in your terms, and paragraphs upon sentences, and as each retains its own logic and continuity and evidence within that framework, so do all the portions of the universe appear to you also with the same cohesiveness (dash) — meaning continuity and order. Any sentence is meaningful. [...] That one sentence is (underlined) meaningful because of its organization of letters, or if it is spoken, its organization of vowels and syllables. [...]

[...] They exist as a kind of faulty sentence construction in a paragraph of living experience that you keep going back to, persistently trying to improve it. [...]

[...] And let the stressful episode momentarily rest, as if you were saying “Oh yes, there is indeed a most undesirable twisted group of sentences. [...]

You think, for example, without consciously knowing how you do so, and you speak long sentences without consciously being aware at the beginning of the sentence what the conclusion will be.

Take the English sentence: “I observe the tree.” [...]

[...] Instead, the sentence would have read something like this: “Running over the rocks, my water self flows together with others in slippery union.” [...]

Certain sounds are verbal replicas of molecular constructions, put together by you to form sentences in the same way, for example, that molecules are put together to form cells and tissue.

[...] Yet some languages have had sounds for feelings and subjective states, and they had no subjects or predicates, nor even a sentence structure that you would recognize.

[...] New sentence: Even as sentences are composed of words, there is no end to the number of sentences that can be spoken — so “time” is composed of an endless variety of electronic languages that can “speak” a million worlds instead of words.

(By the time I wrote the last sentence I was aware — again, without being upset — that it was taking me just a little longer than usual to come up with my abbreviations or symbols for such common words as “does,” “as,” and “even.” [...]

(I caught myself omitting the word “not” from the last sentence, and was quite aware by now that something was up. [...]

[...] I had a lot of trouble getting the following sentences down. [...]

(The rest of the sentence is unintelligible in my notes. [...]

In the first place, language as you know it is a slow affair: letter by letter strung out to make a word, and words to make a sentence, the result of a linear thought pattern. [...]

Some of my energy is also projected through Ruburt, and his energy and mine both activate his physical form during our sessions, and now as I speak these sentences. [...]

You make sentences out of the alphabet of your language. [...] Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses — experienced sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

[...] You are assimilating far more than you realize, but many sentences can pass invisibly until suddenly they click to you and take on new meaning—even sentences that you have read before. [...]

(Seth had told us last time that he was near the end of the chapter, but we hadn’t realized of course that he was to finish it with a sentence or two in the next session. [...]

Their sentences are silent

[...] That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. [...]

[...] I have just given you a very good clue in that last sentence. Think about that sentence and put it to use. [...]

[...] The following sentence:

[...] That one sentence is basically (underlined) scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. [...]