“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

After supper Jane reread my accounts of my dream of last Saturday morning. February 9, and of my waking experience the next evening.¹ Both events had involved intense perceptions of color and/or light, and I’d told Jane that anything Seth cared to say about them would be most welcome. I’m especially intrigued by any similarities between my two adventures and the near-death experiences we’ve been reading about lately. In those NDE’s, as they’re called, people have often reported encounters with intense white light. I hadn’t been near death during my own experiences, certainly, but I do feel that through them I’d glimpsed ever so slightly that “light of the universe” that’s been so eagerly sought for—and sometimes reported—throughout history.

Now: On certain occasions, sometimes near the point of death, but often simply in conscious states outside of the body, man is able to perceive that kind of light. In some out-of-body experiences Ruburt, for example, saw colors more dazzling than any physical ones, and you saw the same kind of colors in your dream. They are a part of your inner senses’ larger spectrum of perception, and in the dream state you were not relying upon your physical senses at all.

Now: The lamplight episode. Here you did as you supposed. You viewed that inner light, but the lampshades had two purposes: one, as you surmised, to give you a comforting image, literally to shade your eyes. Ruburt was correct, however, in seeing the connection between the lampshades and the Nazi experiments (in World War II) with human skin. The movie (on television last night), about cloning and Nazi atrocities, had made you wonder about the nature of life once again, and man’s immortality. The connection with cloning came out in the lampshades made of (human) skins, in the old news stories—though your lampshades merely stood for those, and were of fabric. The connection was beneath, however, and also represented your feeling that even those people tortured to death did live again. They were not extinguished. Their consciousnesses were indeed like bulbs, say, turned on in new lamps. The lights connected life and death, then. The lights also represented pure knowing.

“My friend, Floyd Waterman (I’ll call him), and I were in a five-and-ten-cent store in Sayre, my old hometown. We were both dressed, but knew that we had to take some sort of tests for sexual potency. We stood near the large plate-glass windows at the front of the store—quite exposed for all to see, in other words, including those eating at nearby tables, yet no one seemed to be paying any attention to us…. Floyd had to take the test first, stepping into a little booth such as a cashier might use. As I waited to go next I turned to look out the front windows—and suddenly found myself surrounded on three sides by walls of the most beautiful floor-to-ceiling, intricate and colorful latticework of diamond-shaped glass crystals I could possibly imagine. I cannot describe the intrinsic shimmer and sparkle of those faceted walls, shining and vibrating in warm oranges, browns, yellows, reds, and violets. Each segment of each color was held within a very thin black frame, as on a much cruder scale the pieces of a stained-glass window can be contained by channeled lead strips. I can still ‘see’ those dream lights and colors as I write this account several hours later, after describing them to Jane. I’ve thought of trying to do a painting of my best dream images of all time … yet wonder how I can do it….”

3. See the passages following Jane’s entry for March 31, 1977, in Chapter 10 of her The After Death Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James.