“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must of course interpret events in a personal manner. You create them. Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world. With most mental aberrations, you are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible. These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish between a private and a publicly-shared reality.

Many such people are highly creative and imaginative. Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world. I am speaking in general terms now, and in those terms such people are leery of human relationships. Each person forms his or her own reality, and yet that personal reality must also be shared with others, and must be affected by the reality of others….

Now give us a moment… As creatures dwelling in time and space, your senses provide you with highly specific data, and with a cohesive-enough physical reality. Each person may react to the seasons in a very personalized manner, and yet you all share those natural events. They provide a framework for experience. It is up to the conscious mind to interpret sense events as clearly and concisely as possible. This allows for the necessary freedom of action for psychological and physical mobility. You are an imaginative species, and so the physical world is colored, charged, by your own imaginative projections, and powered by the great sweep of the emotions. But when you are confused or upset, it is an excellent idea to return your attention to the natural world as it appears at any given moment — to sense its effect upon you as separate from your own projections.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Wars, violence, disasters — these are obviously shared by many, and are a part of your shared psychological and physical environment.

In waking reality you obviously share a mass world experience as well as a physical world environment.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur. [...]

It is as if you shared, say, a psychological planet, populated by people who had the same roots, the same ground of being — as if you shared the same continents, mountains, and oceans. Instead you share certain patterns of development, images, memories, and desires. These are reflected in your physical life, and in one way or another elements of your life are shared in the same fashion.

[...] You share in certain overall patterns that are in themselves original.

[...] Such environments may be private, as in the case of persons with what are generally called mental disorders, or they may be shared by many, in — for example — mass paranoia.

[...] Shared dreams present their own historic organization, for the shared memory of your race does not only include physical events, but reaches much further than this.

In certain areas of mass shared dreams, collective mankind deals with the problems of his political and social objective structure. [...]

[...] It is true indeed that all dreams to some extent are shared, for the privacy that you imagine exists within them is, as Ruburt correctly supposed, an illusion.

[...] Shared dreams are therefore well beneath awareness.

[...] We have not touched upon it often, if at all, and it has to do with something Ruburt wondered about: Mass, or shared, dreams.

Now, your physical universe is obviously composed of shared perceptions, and mass dreams would of course be of the same nature. [...]

We will then discuss briefly, very briefly, mass or shared dreams.

[...] That is, dreams that are shared at one time or another by the majority of living persons on your planet.

[...] You would share what you learned with the world —but he who seeks knowledge must first of all be himself or herself, for most members of the world cannot follow such a course.

[...] Each of you conspired to share your knowledge with the world, so that other lives were also enriched.

Now you will have some experiences that are shared in the dream state. [...]

Now the dreams that you would have, and had, in shared experience, are root dreams. [...]

There are also some root dreams shared by the race as a whole.

[...] Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it is a mass psychologically shared property—but at one “time” in the beginning this was not so.

[...] It seemed to have a more private nature, and only gradually, in those terms, did it become publicly shared.

The act of love did not seem as unique—it did not seem to belong to the two of you alone any more, but you must share it with others, and you resented it. [...] The children were born because others would by implication share in the knowledge of relationship involved. You did not want to share this.

[...] There is behind it all also, a great embarrassment that you must share such a sensation with others, if you experienced it within marriage—it is expected within marriage—people looking at you, in other words, if you are married can say that you do it.

[...] They and the land seemed one, sharing the present seasons, the daily work—but more than that, their fathers and their forefathers and usually many past generations of given families came from the same area. People lived in houses shared by their elders that had earlier been shared by their elders backward through family lines, so that daily experience and family incident was not nearly as restrained to the present in your terms. [...]

The strong private nature leads to personal discoveries, and his basically direct way of dealing with the world means that he wants to share those discoveries. He often feels that he needs protection against that same world, for while he shares so much with his fellows. [...]

You shared that kind of feeling to a considerable extent. [...]

[...] As the smallest cell within your body participates to its degree in your daily experience, so does the soul to an immeasurably greater extent share in the events of the entity.

[...] Was Seth saying that we share a soul with others?

[...] Even considering the rest of the paragraph under discussion, she wanted to learn more; she wasn’t taken with the idea of a group soul, say, or of sharing a soul. [...]

[...] He familiarizes himself with the symbolism of his own dreams, and sees how these do or do not correlate with the exterior symbols that appear in the waking life that he shares with others. I will have more to say about these shared symbols later, for they can become agreed upon signposts.

(10:39.) Simply as an analogy, look at it this way: Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid — a dream that presents reality in a certain light; a dream that is above all meaningful, creative, based not upon chaos (with a knowing look), but upon spontaneous order. [...]

I’d like to share them

(I didn’t eat lunch because Lynn had arranged a surprise birthday party for one of the nurses, and she invited me to share in the food. [...] Jane and I shared it. [...]

[...] They may be tortured or agonized like ordinary human beings, but they cannot be fulfilled like ordinary human beings—they cannot have friends or share confidences, or let down their hair with each other. [...]

[...] You have feelings from your backgrounds that to share is to be vulnerable, to lose what you have, and the feeling that you can save your abilities only by cutting yourselves off from others.

Some of Ruburt’s students would receive great feelings of creative endeavor if you allowed them the simple pleasure of making out envelopes for your (new) letter (to correspondents), but you are afraid of sharing that work, menial as it is. [...]

That is, trance work you feel requires a safe framework and stresses a private stance even though its messages can be shared. [...]

Now: Your friend Peter [Smith] shared the same earthly period.⁴ You were not counterparts — or you are not counterparts, but closely enough allied so that in certain terms you “share” some of the same psychic memories, like cousins who speak about old dimly remembered brothers.

[...] They share a certain portion of your experience, but they use that experience as they choose. [...]

[...] You share certain biological similarities with your parents, but there are other biological groupings not understood, uniting counterparts in any given century.

[...] Your sharing of the intuitive feeling however was extremely important and of great benefit. [...]

I do not mean to imply, however, that only the great share in this communication of consciousness. (Pause.) A great simplicity is necessary, and out of this, many of the most lowly in men’s terms also share in these communications. [...]

[...] Their achievements may be misunderstood or physically lost, but at this level of consciousness they share in these communications, and at another level of existence their achievements are recognized.