In the Voice of the Songbird

I am Marcella, called the Songbird because of my voice and because I can make men’s bodies sing. I can write my story in my own hand, because my father paid for a tutor. He was a merchant who sailed to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
     Bruno brings me figs and young green olives of Lucca, the best of the new harvest. The cloth of gold that trims my dress belonged to my mother. The mad monk of Florence tried to kill her for wearing it, under his sumptuary laws. Witch, they called her, as they call me, though none dares to raise a hand against me so long as I have the favor of the bishop. I confess that I sewed the mouth of a toad shut to punish a calumniator for speaking against me and to silence his abuses, and that I melted a wax imago of Cosimo’s organ after he raped me.
     I will never marry, but I know men and they know me. There is no one in the city as practiced in the arts of love, though there are acts I will not perform, not even for the bishop.
    Bruno will guard my body with his life, and he is as strong as a bear. But I know I will not be allowed the fullness of my years. I have no wish to survive the withering of my body, still firm and juicy as a maiden’s after forty summers.
    I will heed the wishes of my sisters of the Hive. We are about in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message.

~

I wrote these lines after leading a group journey to real place in the Imaginal Realm, a Chamber of Mirrors where you can look into the lives of personalities in other times who are part of your multidimensional family. Participants in the workshop were asked to write an autobiographical statement in the voice of a personality of another time. The voice that wanted to speak through me was that of Marcella. Her reference to her mother's persecution by a "mad monk" (evidently Savonarola, a Dominican who ruled Florence and staged the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities before he was excommunicated and executed in 1498) suggests she lived in 16th century Italy. I am glad to know her, because in most of my impressions of past lives closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power.
     Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future; I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible.
    Perhaps Marcella and I will now be able to share gifts. In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side, and I would be happy with that. Except that the encounter also feels transpersonal. Jane Robert's Seth insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." Perhaps I am making a little progress.
     Marcella hints at an Order of women content to call themselves a Hive. I have encountered this language, and similar women, in other times and other lands, "in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message", just as Marcella says.

Illustration: Portrait of Beatrice d'Este by Bartolemeo Veneto (1510) Public Domain

Perennial Lessons of Oversoul 7

 "Let's see...I'm a man on Wednesday and Friday, a woman on Sunday and Thursday, and I have the rest of the time off for independent study.

   "Actually...this is somewhat more complicated. Each life is lived in a different area of time to which various designations are given. As Lydia I'm in the twentieth century, as Josef in the seventeenth, as Ma-ah in 35,000 B.C., and as Proteus in the 23rd century, A.D."

As the opening of a novel, this is hard to beat as an attention-grabber. I remember sitting forward in my seat, catching my breath, the first time I read these lines in the summer of 1988, fifteen years after they were written. If you don't recognize the source, maybe it's time for you to go find it, even if you think you don't like didactic fiction. The Education of Oversoul 7, the first of a trilogy by Jane Roberts, presents a working model of our possible relationships with personalities connected to us in other places and times, and with intelligences on higher levels of being and consciousness.

     The speaker on the opening page is Oversoul 7. He is a fallible being, responsible for four very fallible humans facing different, yet interrelated, challenges in different places in time, from the Ice Age to a future in which most humans are "floaters" living in a plastic environment suspended above the Earth.
     The first lines of the novel are not a spoiler, because we soon come to understand that things are even more complex and exciting than Oversoul 7 understands at this point. He is not some all-knowing "spirit guide" or guardian angel. Though to a certain extent he can play guide and teacher to his trans-temporal set of human charges, he is answerable to his own mentor and supervisor on a level above himself. This mysterious entity, who never stays long in any single form, is identified as Cyprus. It is hinted that Oversoul 7, like the humans he supervises, may be one of a set of "oversouls" all related, and subject, to Cyprus. Most certainly, Oversoul 7 is no "master". He is a student whose classroom is the world. All his engagements with his human personalities are tests on which he is being graded.

      When he's reporting to Cyprus, as he is doing in the opening scene, Oversoul Seven generally adopts the default appearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, very appropriate since in relation to higher intelligence he is a schoolboy. When his humans perceive him, most often in dreams, they see him as a wise old man. His ability to stay present to all four of his human personalities and help out in times of crisis is impeded by his tendency to play favorites and get drawn into one of the dramas, while losing track of the other three.

      Thus the first great lesson we derive from the adventures of Oversoul 7 is: the teacher is a student too. Our ability to gain from our teachers and communicate with the Self on higher levels will be severely limited until we understand this simple and fundamental truth.

      The second great lesson, for us, in the Oversoul 7 story is that we may have relationships with personalities in other times and other probable realities, past and future, that are intensely relevant to our current life dramas - and that all these lives are going on now. What is happening in 35,000 B.C. can change a situation today, and what is happening in the 23rd century can inspire and transform the life of a painter living in the 17th century. There are constant "bleed-throughs" between one life and another life, rarely noticed by humans on the ground except in dreams that are frequently forgotten.

      That is the third great lesson: that to understand how all of this works first-hand, we need to become more active and conscious dreamers.

      The fourth great lesson, for me, is this: yes, reincarnation is possible, but it is not automatic and it does not operate only according to the rules of linear time. One of Oversoul 7's favorite personalities is Lydia, a feisty, chain-smoking woman writer who has set off in a well-furnished trailer, at seventy-three, for a sunset romance with her younger lover. 

       In the first Oversoul 7 novel and in its sequel (The Further Education of Oversoul 7) we follow Lydia's journey through death and the choices she comes to make when her understanding of the soul (which she wasn't sure about in life) begins to grow. She enjoys herself, for a time, in a young and attractive body in a personal post-death world she builds from her desire and imagination. When this begins to pall, she eventually agrees to be reborn as the child of a person in the family of selves that Oversoul 7 is supervising. She will take up residence of a baby that will be born in the seventeenth century. Her past life will be her future life. By my own experience and observation, by the way, such things are entirely possible.

     There are profound and perennial lesson here. 

      This is fiction, right? Yes and no. For one thing, it is grounded in Jane's long engagement with the entity called Seth who dictated a series of books that - to my mind - contain one of the best working models of the multidimensional self. Jane, a brilliant original thinker and writer as well as a gifted psychic medium, shows here that she knows how to bring ideas to vivid life, in many voices.

       Here she gives a marvelously animated version of some of Seth's central propositions including this: "You have other centuries to play with. In the dream state, you meet and interact with our own reincarnational selves. I prefer that you think of them as simultaneous selves. In the dreaming condition, there's a great interchange of information with these other portions of your selves." (Seth Speaks)
      Then again, when I consider genres, I remember a young boy who was once in line ahead of me for a library sale. His mother asked him if he knew the difference between fiction and nonfiction. This was his response: "Nonfiction is what you think in your head. Fiction is what you see."
      The Oversoul 7 stories are books through which we see. For me, the idea of reincarnation in a "previous" time is entirely plausible. But don't let's just sit on the sidelines discussing these things. Like Jane Roberts' "Seth" books, the Oversoul 7 novels are an incitement to gather first-hand knowledge of these matters by dreaming on them.

I write about the impact of the Seth material and the Oversoul 7 books in a critical phase of my own life in chapter 13 of The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Digital image: "Window for Oversoul 7" by RM

What’s Going On in Your Dream House?

 

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday.

Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self.

It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors.

I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony.

I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days.

By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams. 

The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife. Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts in Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness  "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” 

Graphic: Dream House by RM

 

Seth and the Dream Department of Literary Production

I love first-hand stories of how writers are inspired and spurred to action by dreams. In an old journal, I found notes I made while reading Susan M. Watkins' account of the classes she took with Jane Roberts and Seth in the early 1970s. She reported that a dream pushed her to jettison her doubts about turning her journals into a book. She dreamed she saw a print shop growing out of her backyard garage, “literally growing, like a time-lapse garden film – out of the garage walls and floor”. She knew this print shop contained everything she needed to produce her book and get it circulating to an audience.
    She proceeded to put together and publish her book, Conversations with Seth, a treasury for those of us who are drawn to the Seth material and its wonderfully clear description of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self and the vital importance of dreaming in all of this.

    Susan compared the mobilizing effect of this dream to the kind of experience described by Jane Roberts in Adventures in Consciousness, when a surge of creative energy is given to us by the psyche at exactly the right moment.
    As a writer myself, I assign such episodes (devoutly to be wished) to the Dream Department of Literary Production.

My rediscovery of the Watkins story made me open her book again, at random. I found precious thoughts from Seth on two very important themes: how absence of dream recall may be caused by fear of the inner self, and how the dream world s not only a real world but may be the source of events in the physical world.

    In a session of Jane Roberts class in June 1973 Seth had this to say to a participant who wanted to know why, if dreams are important, she could not remember hers:

    “You are still afraid of the inner self. You still do not trust your dreams, and you are afraid of them. You do not want to remember them. When you give yourselves the suggestion that you will remember your dreams…you do not mean it. You are afraid or what you might meet, and you are still afraid of one particular dream, and you know the one to which I am referring.

     “You can change the ending of the dream by understanding the nature of reality: that you form it….You must believe in the power and energy and strength and glory of your being, and know that problems are challenges for you to solve…Then face them joyfully [with] your entire self….

    “Stop cowering! Do not cower before your own belief that the inner self is frightening, or that you are a bad person, or that while you are good, there are bad things hidden down there. Tell yourself, and convince yourself, that since you area part of All That Is, you are in your own way, now, a unique expression of All That Is, and there is nothing in All That Is to be afraid of and there  is nothing in you to be afraid of.”

     Later in that session Seth comes to his favorite theme:

    “How real is a dream? What makes you think that there is any difference between what you think of as a dream and what you think of as reality? You assume that a dream is less real; yet through what you think of as your dreaming life, you make your physical life…You choose in the dream state the probable realities that you will then make physical.”

The inner psychic combustion that gave us a great multidimensional teacher

There is one God, but within that God are many. There is one self, but within that self are many. There is one body, in one time, but the self has other bodies in other times. All “times” exist at once.

The voice is that of Seth, the "energy personality essence" channeled by Jane Roberts. We are near the beginning of the third of the Seth books, titled The "Unknown" Reality. I see from my note on the flyleaf that I purchased this book on 8.8.88.
    I came to the Seth materials reluctantly, even after I moved to upstate New York, not so far from where Jane Roberts had lived and practiced (in the Saratoga area and later in Elmira). I was wary around psychic mediums, perhaps because my great-aunt, the opera singer, had foreseen my death in the tea leaves when I was three years old. She was entirely accurate, by the way; in the words of a doctor in a hospital in the winter that followed, I was a boy who died and came back.
    Then, too, I winced at the slovenly or overly portentous verbiage of much of the channeled material that had come to my attention. Much of it seemed quite lacking in humor or wordcraft.
    It took an intervention to get me to start reading the Seth books. The intervention came embodied by a lively, intelligent woman from Caracas named Romelia. I had met her the previous year in Brazil, where we had investigated the mixology of caipirinhas. On a visit to New York, she called me at the farm to which I had recently moved. Naturally, I invited her to visit. At the end of the long drive to the farm house, she could not wait to cross my threshold before she shouted, "Robert, you must read Jane Roberts!"
    And I did, and I did. I started with Seth Speaks. I was stunned. Here was the clearest model I had so far found for the nature of the self and the conditions for reality creation in the multiverse. I could have done without all the interruptions to the text (as we are told that Jane paused to smoke a cigarette, for example) but nonetheless the voice came through, bold and clear. 

Who is Seth? In describing himself, he prefers not to use the word “spirit”. He jokes that he is a “ghost writer”. He says, “I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter...     To write this book…I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem most appropriate.” He can communicate through Jane Roberts because she is a "window". Within her psyche is “what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived.”

    Where is Seth based? Not in what we think of as the afterlife. “You must die many times before you enter into this particular plane of existence.”

    The plot thickens when Seth starts speaking of an entity called, for convenience, Seth Two, a personality operating on a level above his. Jane Roberts speculates  that “Seth may be as much of a creation as his book is.” A form of the Speaker generated by a multidimensional intelligence to communicate in her time, and ours.
     As a former journalist, I am trained and disposed to check on the reliability of any source. But the true test for a source of this kind is the quality of the material that comes through. And the Seth material is extraordinary. 

    Seth is one of the really great dream educators. He is crystal clear about the important things that go on in dreaming. Consciousness travels outside the body, every night, in dreams. Dreaming, we travel to other realities, no less real (maybe more so) than the physical world.  Dreaming, we choose from an infinity of probable events those which will become physical. As we become conscious dreamers, we can not only shape reality on other planes, but can engage in reality creation on the physical plane. Thus:

“You can learn to change your physical environment by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment.” 

“Each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states” 

“This sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.” 

“As there is continuity in your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life...Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your waking life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned. You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams.” 

Before long I was dreaming my own version of Seth. He looked like a knobby Dutch or Scandinavian publican, who might have spent time at sea, and I drew him looking like that. Years later, when I saw a picture of Seth by Jane Roberts’ husband Rob Butts, I was struck by the strong resemblance.

     I became content to respond to the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts according to its inherent quality, without asking many questions about the source.
     As I listen to Seth again, I am again thrilled by the simplicity and vital importance of his key statements. Re-read the one that opens this post. This goes to the heart of what it means to be a conscious citizen of the multiverse.
     I was interested to find a detailed account by Jane Roberts in a 1976 essay of what it was like to be speaker for The "Unknown" Reality. She described the book as the product of “an inner psychic ‘combustion’ – the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine – or vice versa." She said that in her trance of transmission she entered "a higher state of wakefulness rather than the sleep usually associated with trance – but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be sleeping.” This type of trance brought "a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom.” In a striking attempt to define her relationship with Seth, she added, “I think I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body.” 

Portrait of Seth by Robert F. Butts
    

What's going on in your dream house?

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday. Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self. It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors. I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony. Last night I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days. By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams. The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife. Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts: "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” [Seth: Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness by Jane Roberts]

Art: "House of Light", drawing from Robert Moss journal.

At home in winter with the Muse

When my schedule is entirely my own, as it mostly is when I am at home on cold winter days, I do whatever I feel like at any time. I don't think about sleep until it falls upon me. When that happens, I let my body fall into bed. Very frequently, I then find myself engaged in a marvelous adventure in another reality, where other players are waiting for me.

      In the Hittite language, you don't say "I fell asleep". You say, "sleep fell upon me" or even "sleep seized me." I learned this from Alice Mouton's excellent work Rêves hittites. My relationship with sleep is sometimes like that of one who is willing to be seized. I notice that when sleep falls upon me like a lion on a goat, what follows is often a powerful and numinous experience, sometimes an encounter with a greater being.    

     Who are those beings who are lions as well as humans who I so often find waiting for me, as if I am late for lunch or the theater, when I am seized by the need to lie down?
     What was that instrument I was playing after sleep fell on me and obliged me to take an early evening nap? It looked a bit like a set of pan pipes, but I strummed it with my fingers. It seemed to be organic, vegetal, like a dried gourd with multiple tubes, orange and yellow in color. The music it made was enchanting. I was playing it in a jungle setting, near where a river joined the sea, maybe somewhere along the coast of Brazil.     
     I write scenes and questions like these in my journal at any hour. Its what writers do. It's what active dreamers must do if they are going to get really good at dreaming. 

     At 1:00 a.m. on one of these winter nights I sit down to a plate of linguine with home-made bolognaise sauce, heavy on garlic, fresh-grated romano and a glass of fine St. Emilion. Since I skipped dinner and this followed an early evening nap, does it count as breakfast or a late supper? My body is thankful either way.

    If the Muse is looking for me she will almost always find me prowling around indoors between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. On winter days at home I often take an early evening nap and then stay up until after lunch. I grab a couple of sleep periods - rarely more than a couple of hours each - in a 24 hour cycle. Sleep researchers call me a "biphasic sleeper". Few of them seem to grasp that it is not necessary to sleep in order to dream. I am a biphasic sleeper and an omniphasic dreamer.
    One of my favorite ways to dream is to laze in bed in a state of horizontal meditation after waking. It is in this liminal place between sleep and awake that marvelous things become available. I find myself looking at a parade of faces, or a kind of travel video, offering multiple itineraries and destinations for lucid dream expeditions.
    I check in with my dreaming family at any hour. There are hundreds of them gathered for my new virtual course in Active Dreaming for The Shift Network, sharing fabulous narratives of mystery and adventure,or terror and beauty, inviting each other to play dream detective and shaman of the breakfast table or the supper club. Who was that African princess with gold dust on her face? Who was that tall young Irish lady, regal as one of the lordly ones of the Sidhe, who showed me an illustrated book filled with magic and ancestral tears?
    I flit like a hummingbird from book to book in my personal library, drinking from different styles and visions. I am reminded by Marguerite Yourcenar, in Dreams and Destinies, that a dream report can be written as a prose poem, without need of developing the story or adding commentary or analysis. I am dazzled, again, by the crazy-brilliant mind of Philip K. Dick, as he follows his own manic encounters with God (or the Archon), pre-Socratic philosophy, a Roman Empire that never ended, and mind-incinerating quantities of dope in his autobiographical Valis. I consider Seth's insistence in The Nature of the Psyche that each of us is both male and female and picture him in conversation about this with Jung. 

     I leaf through old journals, choosing passages to develop as stories or use as teaching examples, noting recurring and evolving themes. I find evidence on every other page that I am leading continuous lives beyond my present body. I am amazed by all that would be lost to memory, had I not made it my practice, over all these years, to keep a detailed journal. Did I really have so many dreams of sheep; of a gray sheep as big as an elephant who led me to a spiritual guide, of blue sheep who alerted me to the fact that I possessed unclaimed riches in a place I thought I had left behind? 

     An unavoidable and perennially fascinating theme is the importance of the house in dreams. Often the dream house seems to provide a structure within which we can meet and grow our relationship with many aspects of the self, I take a sip of Bachelard's Poetics of Space (I can't swallow too much of this at one sitting in English translation) on the houses of imagination:

1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.

In all of this, of course, I am putting out lures for the Muse. One of these winter nights I may again write a love poem for her. I did this in seeking fair winds and caresses for The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world...

     I come upon my notes from Mircea Eliade on theophany, the moment of revelation when a divine agency shines its light through the ordinary world and you cannot fail to notice because everything is different. I remember how when I last landed at Bucharest, Eliade's city, a woman previously unknown to me, a literary translator, greeted me at the baggage carousel by crying out. "You are a writer!" I allowed that I was, and we had a heady conversation while waiting for our bags. When we parted company, she gave me this blessing: "May the Muses kiss you." 

     I hope this will happen again soon. I like my body when my creative writer is at home and the Muse is with him. Muscles better and nerves more. She is a glorious, ardent and insatiable lover. She keeps this body up for whole nights before she lets it drop for a couple of hours of regenerative sleep. I don't complain, any more than you would complain after a perfect night of love, as you watch the stars go to bed over Copacabana, or the dreaming spires of an Old World City, or the Mountains of the Moon. 

    I have seen writers complain that their work involves sweating blood. Maybe, but when the creator is home, in the arms of the Muse, what you sweat isn't ordinary blood. It is ichor.

Graphic: Muse reading from a scroll. Boeotia, 5th century bce. In the Louvre.

You Walk in Many Worlds

Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves - with all the baggage train of their separate lives - may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.    

It is possible that every choice we make spins off a parallel event track with different outcomes. This is becoming the mainstream view of physics, as in the theory of Many Interactive Worlds. In this multidimensional universe, in our multidimensional self, we are connected to many counterpart personalities living in other times, other probable realities, other dimensions. According to the choices that we make and the dramas that we live, we sometimes come closer to them, and sometimes, in a sense, we step through a portal, we step through an opening between the worlds, we step through an interdimensional membrane, and our issues and our lives and our dramas and our gifts and our karma are joined.    

Then there is our relationship to other personalities, living in the past or future, whose dramas are connected to our own and may all be going on simultaneously. I think of a Mongolian warrior shaman who appeared in a recent dream, standing at a threshold. Behind him is a vast plain—a plain of battle, a plain of struggle. He is wearing a long, heavy coat of skins and furs. His headdress is a helmet with furs. He has bronze shaman’s mirrors and metal charms all over him. I look at this man in my dream, standing in the threshold between his reality and mine. I know that he is living at least eight centuries ago, yet we are connected now. We know each other. We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern.   

Such connections may be triggered by travel. You go to a new place, and you encounter the spirits of that land – including personalities that may be part of your own multidimensional story.     

Jane Roberts’ version of how this works, in the Seth books that she channeled and in her own Oversoul Seven novels, is the clearest and most coherent account of how this works that I have so far discovered.    Part of the secret logic of our lives is that we are all connected to counterpart personalities—Seth calls them “probable souls”—living in other times and other probable universes. Their gifts and challenges can become part of our current stories, not only through linear karma but through the interaction now across time and dimensions. The dramas of past, future or parallel personalities can affect us now. We can help or hinder each other.    

In the model of understanding I have developed, this family of counterpart souls is joined on a higher level by sort of hub personality, an “oversoul”, a higher self within a hierarchy of higher selves going up and up. The choices that you make, the moves that you make, can attract or repel other parts of your larger self.     The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.

Adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing by RM

Back to Seth

There is one God, but within that God are many. There is one self, but within that self are many. There is one body, in one time, but the self has other bodies in other times. All “times” exist at once.

The voice is that of Seth, the "energy personality essence" channeled by Jane Roberts. We are near the beginning of the third of the Seth books, titled The "Unknown" Reality. I see from my note on the flyleaf that I purchased this book on 8.8.88.
    I came to the Seth materials reluctantly, even after I moved to upstate New York, not so far from where Jane Roberts had lived and practiced (in the Saratoga area and later in Elmira). I was wary around psychic mediums, perhaps because my great-aunt, the opera singer, had foreseen my death in the tea leaves when I was three years old. She was entirely accurate, by the way; in the words of a doctor in a hospital in the winter that followed, I was a boy who died and came back.
    Then, too, I winced at the slovenly or overly portentous verbiage of much of the channeled material that had come to my attention. Much of it seemed quite lacking in humor or wordcraft.
    It took an intervention to get me to start reading the Seth books. The intervention came embodied by a lively, intelligent woman from Caracas named Romelia. I had met her the previous year in Brazil, where we had investigated the mixology of caipirinhas. On a visit to New York, she called me at the farm to which I had recently moved. Naturally, I invited her to visit. At the end of the long drive to the farm house, she could not wait to cross my threshold before she shouted, "Robert, you must read Jane Roberts!"
    And I did, and I did. I started with Seth Speaks. I was stunned. Here was the clearest model I had so far found for the nature of the self and the conditions for reality creation in the multiverse. I could have done without all the interruptions to the text (as we are told that Jane paused to smoke a cigarette, for example) but nonetheless the voice came through, bold and clear.
    Before long I was dreaming my own version of Seth. He looked like a knobby Dutch or Scandinavian publican, who might have spent time at sea, and I drew him looking like that. Years later, when I saw a picture of Seth by Jane Roberts’ husband Rob Butts, I was struck by the strong resemblance.
     I became content to respond to the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts according to its inherent quality, without asking many questions about the source.
     As I listen to Seth again, I am again thrilled by the simplicity and vital importance of his key statements. Re-read the one that opens this post. This goes to the heart of what it means to be a conscious citizen of the multiverse.
     I was interested to find a detailed account by Jane Roberts in a 1976 essay of what it was like to be speaker for The "Unknown" Reality. She described the book as the product of “an inner psychic ‘combustion’ – the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine – or vice versa." She said that in her trance of transmission she entered "a higher state of wakefulness rather than the sleep usually associated with trance – but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be sleeping.” This type of trance brought "a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom.” In a striking attempt to define her relationship with Seth, she added, “I think I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body.” 
    

Photo collage; Jane Robert with portrait of Seth by her husband Robert Butts

Egyptian bird in the sky

I am driving in the countryside with my friend Wanda, a world-class dreamer who was for 30 years the curator of Sir William Johnson's last home in the Mohawk valley.

She is trying to describe patterns she sees in the sky - perhaps in the play of lightning. I am not content with her descriptions. She switches similes and tells me that one of the sky patterns resembles the movements of a graceful young Thai woman.

Suddenly I see one of these patterns for myself, filling the sky above the treeline in the other direction. Etched by lightning against a dark sepia backdrop, I see a bird-figure from an Egyptian hieroglyph, either falcon or owl. The shape of the head is indistinct, but I sense this is the owl, perhaps the eagle-owl.

I rose from this dream outing during an evening nap just now, to find a lengthy email letter from another friend speculating about my possible connections - within a multidimensional family of selves - to ancient Egyptian initiates who were trained in the art of "far memory", and specifically with Sir William Johnson, the central figure in two historical novels I felt compelled to write after moving to a home in what was his neighborhood (in the 18th century) and dreaming into his life. I was not entirely happy with her descriptions of how these things work, and realized I need to write more about the workings of far memory and the relations between personalities living in different times and a central Self or Oversoul.

And my mind slips a way (the break in the word was unintended, but I'll leave it; "away" can be "a way")...to another scene, and a this-life connection with the eagle owl, the Old World cousin of the North American great horned owl.

I am in Prague, which I visited two years ago. The city is lovely, but the crowds of tourists are exhausting. I take refuge from the crowds in a quiet shady garden next to the Hradčany castle and give myself over to reflections on our connections with other personalities across time, how these "past lives" or "other lives" open to us in dreams and how far memory can be triggered by travel to a certain place, or handling a certain object, or an encounter with someone you are certain you know very well, in a different world.

"Have you met Arthur?" It's a woman's voice that interrupts my musings. I turn to find an eagle-owl on the gloved wrist of a beautiful young falconer. She explains that her vocation is to help rescue injured raptors, and walks me with Arthur into a preserve where there are other birds, including a tiny merlin falcon.

Egypt, Johnson, the eagle-owl. Echoes of Arthur and Merlin. You have other centuries to play with, as Seth reminded us. In dreams of the night and dreams of the day, we meet and interact with our reincarnational selves. It is vital to remember (as Seth also instructed) that these are also simultaneous selves, in the play of the multiverse.

You stand at the center of all times

I'm on my way to open a new workshop on exploring the multidimensional self, in a wonderful airy studio in the woods just outside Mystic, Connecticut, under the full moon of October.

My travel reading includes Seth Speaks. I see from the flyleaf that I first read this book, channeled by an entity named Seth by Jane Roberts, back in 1988, when I was trying to make sense of some profound, indeed revolutionary, experiences of my own in the universe beyond the five senses. Though generally resistant to channeled material, I found here a very clear and helpful model for reality creation and for understanding relations between the ordinary self, personalities in other times and places, and the self on a higher level. I went on to read everything I could find in print by Jane Roberts and Seth, including Jane's wonderful Oversoul 7 trilogy.

So I start the day (after noting some dreams from the night) by opening Seth Speaks at random for a thought for the day. I find this:

Knowing your reincarnational background, but not knowing the true nature of your present self, is useless. You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, "This is because of something I did in a past life," for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences.

Yes. And this can be applied to the lives we may lead within one single span of years. As a matter of fact, if we want to grasp the nature of reincarnation we would do well to study how we can rebirth ourselves several times within our present lifetimes.

When you change your life utterly - as I did in the period when I first read Seth Speaks (and was dreaming of an ancient native "woman of power" who required me to learn Mohawk in order to understand her) - you may find you have some karma to deal with, bequeathed by your former selves. You may be distracted by "bleed-throughs" from "probable selves" (as Seth would call them), parallel versions of you who made different choices and are walking not far from you, on paths you abandoned.

Your power is now. You stand now at the center of all times and dimensions. Your challenge is to explore how much it is possible to influence for the good of all through the choices you now make.

-

Hindu vision of a chain of reincarnation. Image from Himalayan Academy Publications, Kauai.

You have other centuries to play with

You have other centuries to play with...In the dream state you meet and interact with your own reincarnational selves...I prefer that you think of them as simultaneous selves. In the dreaming condition there is a great interchange of information with these other portions of your selves.

The speaker is the entity named Seth, as channeled by the remarkable medium and author Jane Roberts in The Nature of Personal Reality. I first read this important book nearly quarter of a century ago. I came to it reluctantly, because I find I often have resistance to channeled material. Maybe that's related to the fact that my great-aunt was a gifted psychic medium, as well as an opera singer, who foresaw my death when I was three years old. She was right; the following winter, I developed pneumonia and "died and came back" - as a physician put it - in a hospital in Tasmania. What spurred me to read Jane Roberts was the arrival of a lively woman from Venezuela at the farm where I was then living. I had met her on a boat on the Amazon river, drinking caipirinhas, which were then unknown in the United States. Before she crossed my threshold, Romelia said urgently, "You must read Jane Roberts."

It was excellent advice. In the Seth books and in her novels - the Oversoul Seven trilogy - Jane Roberts and her source intelligence provide one of the clearest models of the multidimensional self, and of the role of dreaming in awakening to our connections with personalities in other times and dimensions. As in the passage quoted above, Seth invites us to go beyond simplistic, linear approaches to reincarnation. When we step outside chronos time (as we do constantly in dreams) we find that everything is going on now. If I am connected to the druid in Scotland circa 600, or that young priestess-scientist of 2300, then choices I make now can affect them in their own times, as choices they make can affect me, sending influences both ways through the skeins of the web that connects us.

In the Oversoul Seven stories, Jane Roberts dramatizes how all of this may operate, with a lively depiction of a supervising intelligence ("oversoul") that is watching over personalities whose life dramas are unfolding in very different places and times, from the Stone Age to the present. The oversoul is very far from infallible. It is on probation, being supervised by an intelligence on a higher level. It can lose its perspective when it is drawn too deep into the adventures of one of its family of personalities, and even forget that its responsibilities go beyond one life situation.

To know more about such things, Jane Roberts and Seth remind us over and over, we must tune into our dreams, and never forget the correct time, which is always Now. "Realize that now is your point of power."

The portrait of Seth was painted by Rob Butts, Jane Roberts' husband. In one of their sessions, Seth declared that the likeness was "excellent". Before I had access to this picture, I dreamed of a Seth who looked very much like this, and appeared to be a publican in a Northern European fishing port.