“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With gentle irony:) You made a remark earlier this evening to the effect that the individual could do nothing in the face of such organized behavior—a remark that by now I’m sure you regret voicing. (I laughed.) Those ideas to begin with began with individuals. The people who make and report the news are individuals. The people who read or view the news are individuals. To some extent through the books you are helping people alter their psychic organizations, to look at the world in a different fashion, and therefore to view a different world—a world in which their experiences are different than they would have been otherwise.

I am, again, not telling you to be blind to physical events, but to realize that the news media, and your organizations, are not giving you an “objective” view of the world, but a view compounded and composed by Freudian and Darwinian beliefs. I would also like to remind you both of the difference between direct experience and second-handed tales. Examine your own personal experience with physical reality now and then when you have a moment (with irony), relying only upon your own experience. It is impossible, I know, and not really beneficial, to try to separate yourselves entirely from the cultural world, but you should understand the makeup of that world, and be able now and then at least to separate your private experiences from it, even though they must occur in its context.

I am trying to induce Ruburt to drop his muscular armor. In the world of his experience he does not need it. His direct experience has not included it, the cruel adult world that he must protect himself against. It certainly does not include a frightening psychic world, actually or otherwise. Any fears he had there he picked up through reading, or through the reports of others, so let him also separate his private experience in that respect.

Collecting such distorted data about inner or outer worlds can only make an individual build up defenses, or want to. The newspaper world is, then, highly distorted, organized in such a manner that its data reinforce negative beliefs, and constantly give evidence only of negative patterns. These then are taken as an objective picture of the fact world.

Your aspirations are a part of your world view. [...] Your world view includes your attitudes toward your parents, and toward their parents. [...] Your world view must include your beliefs about the body and the mind, about religion, history, and philosophy—and you stand as an entity, a psychological entity, in the center of this inner world.

You accept certain ideas and beliefs as a part of your world view, as everyone does. As a youngster, you—and also Ruburt—challenged many of “the world’s” beliefs, and refused to accept them as a part of your personalized world views.

(To me:)Your world view, for example, involves your knowledge and comprehension of government and politics as you perceive them, through reading or television. [...] Your world view includes paintings that exist in your imagination, as well as paintings done in your terms “so far.”

You threw out conventional religious ideas first, and then conventional scientific ideas, so while these may be a part of your society, they are not a part of your personalized world views. [...] It is rather futile to ever wish that you were both “at one with the world,” or to imagine yourselves following its beliefs blindly, but in blissful ignorance.

[...] The true complexity and importance of the dream world as an independent field of existence has not yet been fully impressed upon you. Yet, while your world and the dream world are basically independent, they exert pressures and influences one upon the other.

Many concepts, advancements and practical inventions simply wait in abeyance in the world of dreams until some man accepts them as possibilities within his frame of reality. Imagination is waking man’s connection with the world of dreams. [...] Often the dream world possesses concepts which will one day completely transform the history of your field, but a denial of such concepts as actualities or possibilities within reality hold these back and put off breakthroughs that are sorely needed.

The dream world has a molecular construction, but this construction takes up no space as you know it. The dream world consists of depths and dimensions, expansions and contractions that are more clearly related, perhaps, to ideals that have no need for the particular kind of structure with which you are familiar. [...] Action in the dream world is more fluid. [...]

[...] But each of you creates a dream world of validity, actuality, durability and self-determination, in the same way that the entity projects the reality of its various personalities. As there is usually no contact between the entity and the ordinary conscious ego, there is usually no contact on a conscious level between the self who dreams and the dream world which has its own independent existence.

(9:41.) Children often feel that the world and time began with their birth. They take the world’s past on faith. In very important terms this is quite a legitimate feeling, for no one else can experience the world from any other viewpoint except from his or her own, or affect it except through private action. En masse, that individual action obviously causes world events.

[...] It is somewhat more difficult for you to understand the ways in which your own actions and those of others combine to bring about world events. [...] It is true to say that the world begins and ends with each person. That is, each of your actions is so important, contributing to the experience of others whom you do not know, that each individual is like a center about which the world revolves.

[...] You draw sustenance from the world, and grow through its medium. You contribute your abilities and experience, helping to form the world’s civilization and culture. [...]

[...] Physical world events therefore rest upon the existence of implied probable events. [...] Other probabilities, therefore, emphasize events that are only implied (as pauses) in your reality, so that your physical events become the implied probable ones upon which other worlds reside.

[...] 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. [...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever. [...]

(Long pause, one of many, at 10:28.) It is the source of your world, so therefore it contains not only all knowledge physically available, but far more. [...] This is not to compare the reality that you know in derogative terms to the other-source existence, either, for your own world contains, as each other world does, a uniqueness and an originality that in those terms exists nowhere else — for no world of existence is like any other.

As you have an ego, fully conscious, directed toward the physical world, you also have what I call an inner ego, directed toward inner reality. You have, in other words, a portion of yourself that is fully conscious in Framework 2. The ego in your ordinary world, which again we will call Framework 1, is uniquely equipped to deal with that environment. [...] It can stretch its capacities, becoming far more aware of inner events than it is normally allowed to do, but its main purpose is to deal with the world of effects, to encounter events.

Once scientists theorized the ether as the medium in which the physical universe existed.¹ Framework 2 is the psychological medium in which the consciousness of the world exists. [...] It is directed outward into the physical world. [...]

I am speaking of that framework now only as it applies to your world — not in its relationship to other realities. [...] He did not thoroughly understand, however, the creative ramifications involved, for it did not occur to him at the time that the prime work of your world was actually done by you in that other wider aspect of your existence.

(The idea seemed to be that creativity, mine and anyone’s, is initially playful, curious, seeks expression—and is one of the highest kinds of psychic play—the artist playing with concepts no matter what the art; and actually inserts his or her reality onto the world, superimposed upon it. But the creative basic part of the personality enjoys that; the doing, primarily—the art will always be an individual interpretation and recreation of the world—that exists for itself and is its own meaning.

[...] I am“lucky” that the books sell, and that does mean that the world does accept “my work” to a certain important degree. [...] If you confuse the issues you try to temper your creativity (to gain approval, etc.) which can dilute the work; or you set up protective measures to protect yourself against the worlds disapproval or scorn.

(It was: distinguish between the natural and cultural or social world and assure myself I am safe in the natural world.

(Its very difficult for the practical world—for people who aren’t primarily “artists or creators” to deal with that sort of thing; they don’t know where to place it and ideas alone make them uncomfortable—they aren’t real or unreal according to their way of looking at reality.

The alternate wake-sleep patterns of the world then, again, help pace the information. [...] The world mind needs all of that information in order to produce continuous world events. [...] The world mind, then, in your terms, could not be conscious all at one time, and the varying graduated waking-sleeping patterns—the overlapping between the extremes you mention—provide overall balance and allow for smooth communications of an inner kind.

Now: you spoke earlier this evening of moments in boyhood when you simply observed and appreciated the natural world. If you are each ahead of your times in certain terms, you are very much in the natural world. You are in your times then in important biological and psychic ways, interconnected with all other physical creatures, and with the natural world itself. There is a cultural world, and a natural one.

Inner cooperation is maintained on the part of people in opposite portions of the world—methods that could not be utilized if all woke or slept at the same time. This hardly seems of ordinary interest at all, yet preplans for battles, for example, have been received in sleep states, in which an enemy in a far country planned an invasion and the signals were received through the world’s internal network of communication.

[...] The natural world as you think of it depends upon these interactions. [...] The weather, however, is the result of the world’s natural moods, and intuitive predictions would be far more predictable, for they would deal with those variables that cannot appear, or be predicted, at the exterior level.

(9:35.) In your painting, you are constantly involved with bringing some event into the world that was not there before. [...] There is so much physical evidence in the world. [...] When man believed the world was flat, he used his thought processes in such a way that they had great difficulty in imagining any other kind of world, and read the evidence so that it fit the flat-world picture.

To some extent, creativity involves you (pause) in a contradiction with the evidence of reality within your world. It puts you in a peculiar state of being—or in a peculiar relationship with the accepted world of factual evidence. [...] In the usual awake state, in the terms now of this discussion, you deal with the available physical evidence of the world as it appears to present perception, that is, or with what you can see or feel or touch, either immediately or through physical instruments. [...]

[...] The creative act involves you in a process whereby you bring from a mental dimension new events into the world that were not there before.

[...] It is not a part of the world’s physical evidence. [...]

Those data were equal in his experience to those physical data of the world, so that the two kinds of experience constantly enriched each other. [...] You cannot of course limit your world to the world of facts at any given time, though you may try to do so. [...] She is dealing instead with an inner world of myths. [...]

[...] As a people you are geared, say, to the exploration of the physical world. [...] You do not understand that an idea can indeed change the world, unless you see firmly that the idea has a factual basis.

If in your private subjective reality you label yourself, unthinkingly now, in too-limited a fashion, then you can see yourself for example as the isolated artist at the brunt of society, the misunderstood poet that must be protected from the world’s ways—mythic material that falls short. Such ideas can have strength only if you forget to identify yourself with the great inner order of nature, and with the physical natural world.

When you identify with nature you automatically fulfill your own world. [...] You need not pit yourselves then against what you think of as a society that does not understand you, for that society falls into place as simply being one present aspect of a vaster natural world in which you are indeed firmly rooted. [...]

[...] The whole affair is quite complicated since — again as I have intimated — the world freshly springs into new creativity at each moment. No matter what your version of creativity, or the creation of the world, you are stuck with questions of where such energy came from, for it seems that unimaginable energy was released more or less at one time, and that this energy must then run out.

The historical and cultural world as you know it appears to be the only one objective world, of course, with its history already written, its present, and hopefully its probable future.

[...] At the same time, do not dwell too much upon that world situation, for a concentration upon your own nature and upon the physical nature of your world — the seasons, and so forth — allows you to refresh your own energy, and frees you to take advantage of that clear vision that is so necessary.

(The page proofs for Jane’s The World View of Paul Cézanne arrived in the mail from her publisher this morning, and she’s been busy correcting them most of the day since — checking the type for errors in spelling, punctuation, omission, and so forth.)

“The dream world is not a formless, haphazard, semiconstruction. [...] The true complexity and importance of the dream world as an independent field of existence has not yet been impressed upon you. Yet while your world and the dream world are basically independent, they still exert pressures and influences, one upon the other.

These arts are useless if they are not practiced — useless in that they lie ever latent, that they are not brought out into the exterior framework of your world. To use these arts requires first of all the knowledge that beneath the world you know is another; that alongside the focus of consciousness with which you are familiar there are other focuses quite as legitimate.

[...] For example, without the peculiar spark set off through the interrelationship existing between the inner self and the physical being, the dream world would not exist. But conversely, the dream world is a necessity for the continued existence of the physical individual.

[...] These can help you become aware again of those inner idealizations that form your private reality and your mass world. [...]

(A note: I must write that not only was I surprised that Seth opened the session with an analysis of the dream, but that I was even more surprised with the generous connotations he ascribed to it: I may love my fellow man, but often times feel that that feeling is compromised by events in our world, even though I fully acknowledge my own part in helping create that world in the most intimate detail. [...] Perhaps it’s all another reflection of that curious dichotomy I’ve often felt: One may rail against the world in general, and the behavior of its individuals in particular. Yet as one gets to know each of the individuals in his or her world in particular, it becomes more and more difficult to blame them for the state of the world, or much else for that matter: One becomes too enmeshed with their individuality and humanness. [...]

[...] For you embrace the world through, say, inner devotions rather than exterior acts. The woman is alone, with many empty rooms behind her, signifying that you set yourself apart from the many worlds of commerce in your day—meaning social commerce—and that such an understanding can also bring loneliness. [...]

Your mental world is full of ideas and feelings that surge toward actualization. [...] You must feel that you are a self, and that you can express that self in the world that you know.

The group is always pitted against the world, which becomes its enemy. [...] Evidences of the world’s corruption are collected, and any proofs of man’s good intent begin to fade away. [...]

In the dream world, however, each feeling or idea can be immediately expressed and experienced. The physical world has buildings in it that you manufacture — that is, they do not spring up naturally from the ground itself. In the same way, your thoughts are “manufactured products” in the dream world. [...]

[...] They have as strong a part to play in dream reality as shadows do in the physical world. [...] In the dream world hallucinations are like conscious shadows. [...]

[...] In the physical world you have mass sense data about you. [...] In the dream world, however, such thoughts will definitely form your environment.

[...] The photographer in the dream world, though, will find an entirely different situation, for there consciousness can capture scenes from entirely different times as easily as the waking photographer can take pictures of different places. [...]

[...] Metaphysically, they can be thought of as the point at which All That Is acts to form [your] world—the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of divine fact. [...] Ethically, the CU’s represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. [...]

The perspective from which you watch world events is vital, and it is true that communication now brings to the conscious mind a far greater barrage than before. But it is also a barrage that makes man see his own activities, and even with the growth of the new nationalism in the Third World, those nations begin from a new perspective, in which the eyes of the world are indeed upon them.

[...] All of the inventions that you often think now happened quite by chance—the discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the coming of the Iron Age or whatever—all of that inventiveness was the result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. Man dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know.

It makes little difference whether you watch the news or not—but it makes all the difference in the world what you think of world events.

What is perfectly clear to one portion of that world brain may not be perceived at all by the other side, and vice versa. For the purposes of this discussion, we must simplify, so we will say that generally speaking your own country aligns itself with the world of reason, while in the same fashion Iran allies itself with the world of emotion. [...]

Both portions of this world mind, or world brain, therefore, operate in exaggerated fashions, so that their own characteristics are almost caricatured, untempered as it were by other portions, as if perhaps in an individual the left and right portions of the brain were artificially functionally separated. [...]

[...] This almost always occurs when there are misunderstandings in particular areas between the picture of the self or the world as painted by the intellect, and the picture of the world or of the self painted by the emotions. [...]

[...] They unite and stimulate his creative abilities so that he does what comes naturally, easily and vitally to him, searching out his own view of reality—but in certain areas the intellect and the emotions begin to separate in their visions of the picture of the world. The intellect (long pause, eyes closed) disapproves of certain feelings and emotions because the intellect, allied with (pause) the social aspects of reality, thinks in terms of a public face, or respectability, of its position with other adults in the world. [...]

(A note added in December 1977: The 718th session on world views proved to be a cornerstone in Jane’s own development, and in Seth’s thematic structure as well. Jane’s The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation, was published earlier this year, and as I type this final manuscript for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality I can add that she’s also completed The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. [...]

[...] You can also call this home station or local program your world view, since from it you perceive your reality. [...] You may be delighted or appalled, according to whether or not your new perceptions agree or disagree with your established world view.

(Slowly:) He was aware, however, of the universe through William James’s world view. [...] Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that “living picture” exists despite time or space. [...]

(Pause, one of many.) Each world view exists at its own particular “frequency,” and can only be tuned in to by those who are more or less within the same range. [...] It is not possible to move in to such a world view if you are basically at odds with it, for example. [...]

[...] Most people, as I mentioned, experience their contacts with the world through many prepared structures—that of church, community, clubs, professional organizations, family affiliations, academic affiliations—and these frameworks serve automatically to cushion such contact, and in a way, while permitting contact with the world, also blunting it to some extent. In that respect, most individuals do not stand alone, and, in that respect Ruburt feels that except for you he does, and must meet the world “head-on” when there is such conflict.

[...] His nature is open—basically trustful, and direct in its dealings with the world and others. He began to find, of course, that the world could react quite differently to openness and trust. [...]

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. [...]

[...] As contacts with the world are lessened, however, there is little feedback, so that the “dangers” of the world can easily become exaggerated—and little experience is gained in dealing with the far more mundane aspects of such contact.

Events that appear senseless demand some kind of explanation, and the explanations of the official world no longer content its members. The massacre of the Jews in the Second World War, in the numbers that existed, would not happen now, for the eyes of the world could not be kept out now, as they were then.

[...] If you worry about the world, you can somehow perhaps save it—or so many people think. If you don’t worry about the world, you are considered unfeeling, and it certainly seems ridiculous to imagine that the world can somehow take care of itself, and even remedy whatever damage it seems man has done to it.

Otherwise you will only be left with the world’s “official evidence.” [...] The old world view, the official one, may still be comforting you, for it is shared by millions. [...]

[...] In some fashion, in order to maintain sanity, I end up laughing at what goes on in the world—probably a last resort. [...]

Psychically, your world is composed of the contents of its consciousness. You have maps of continents and oceans, and in the entire view each portion is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, all fitting together perfectly, smoothly flowing into the natural structure of the world. So at any given time there is a world consciousness, a perfect jigsaw of awareness in which each identity, however large or small, has its part.

[...] To some extent you realize that the world has physical contents, existing at one time yet varying in their characteristics. In those terms, the world is composed of its physical ingredients. [...]

If you could orbit your planet in a different kind of craft, you could view the psychic contents of the world, seeing the world consciousness shining far more brilliantly than any lighted city. [...]

(All emphatically and joyously:) In your terms, the world is intensely different from one moment to another, with each smallest portion of consciousness choosing its reality from a field of infinite probabilities.³ Immense calculations, far beyond your conscious decisions as you think of them, are possible only because of the unutterable freedom that resides within minute worlds inside your skull — patterns of interrelationships, counterparts so cunningly woven that each is unique, freewheeling, and involved in an infinite cooperative venture so powerful that the atoms stay in certain forms, and the same stars shine in the sky.