“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As they sit thus comfortably ensconced (leaning forward with a smile), they observe dramas in which planets explode, and otherworld intelligences rise to challenge or to help the dauntless captain of the good ship Enterprise and the fearless “Spock” — but none of this threatens our friends, Ruburt and Joseph. They drink their coffee and eat their dessert.

Now: Your normal waking reality can be compared to a kind of television drama in which you participate directly in all of the dramas presented. You create them to begin with. You form your private and joint adventures, and bring them into experience by using your physical apparatus — your body — in a particular way, tuned in to a large programming area in which, however, there are many different stations. In your terms, these stations come alive. You are the drama that you experience, and all of your activities seem to revolve about you. You are also the perceiver.

(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. You can look down at a drama on the one hand, for example, and participate in it as well.

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.

Some of my friends may not watch such programs at all, but instead look at wholesome sagas, or religious dramas. A preacher may stand golden-faced, earnest-eyed, extolling the merits of goodness and damning the legions of the devil — and to some of my readers that devil, unseen, never appearing, may nevertheless seem quite real.

You can often get carried away by a television drama, so that for a moment you forget that it is “not real,” and in your concentration upon it you can momentarily ignore the greater reality about you.

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.

In this case you are yourself the programmer, and the true action is not where it appears to be — in the exterior events — but instead in the psyche, where you are writing and performing the drama. In the dream state, you are writing and performing many such dramas.