Rest of the Preface of Dreams, "Evolution" and Value Fulfillment

Private Session 10 September 1979

The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a writer – or rather a poet – and an artist before your sessions began.  I would like to clear up some important points.

You identified, primarily now, as a poet and an artist because those designations, up to that time, seemed most closely to fit your abilities and temperaments.  Ruburt’s writing set him apart.  Your painting set you apart.  These were recognizable, tangible proofs of creativity.  You therefore identified with elements, characteristics, and traditions that seemed to suit you best.

To some extent you had your own niches, recognizable by society even if they were relatively unusual.  You did not know that there was a deeper, older, or richer tradition – a more ancient heritage – to which you belonged, because you found no hint of it in your society.  It seemed at different times since our sessions began that there were disruptive conflicts.  For example: Was Ruburt a writer or was he a psychic?  Were you an artist, or weren’t you?  What about the writing you did – both for our books, and the writing that you sometimes plan to do on your own?

Those kinds of conflicts can only exist in a society in which the entire concept of creativity is segmented, in which the creative processes are often seen as inner assembly lines leading to specific products: a society in which the very nature of creativity itself is largely ignored unless its “products” serve specific ends.

Ruburt was correct … about the poet’s long-forgotten abilities, and his role.  Ruburt has been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term.  For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain as methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.

Early artists hoped to understand the very nature of creativity itself as they tried to mimic earth’s forms.  Poetry and painting were both functional in ways that I will describe in our next book and “esthetic”, but poetry and painting have always involved primarily man’s attempt to understand himself and his world.  The original functions of art – meaning poetry and painting here specifically – have been largely forgotten.  The true artist in those terms was always primarily – in your terms again – a psychic or a mystic.

His specific art was both his method of understanding his own creativity and a way of exploring the vast creativity of the universe – and also served as a container or showcase that displayed his knowledge as best he could.

That is the heritage that both of you follow, and have followed faithfully.  It has an honored tradition.  Also involved is, as Ruburt correctly picked up from me, a group of accomplishments that we will call the psychological arts.  You are involved in those also.

I want you to specifically understand that there is and can be no conflict, for example, between your writing and painting, for in the most basic of ways they represent different methods of exploring the meaning and the source of creativity itself.

The sessions I give you, in usual terms, are a new extension of that creativity – but again, that extension has an ancient heritage.  Your own writing, of course, is art.  It is also a method of perceiving and understanding creativity.  It is a method of learning that redoubles upon itself, and you are uniquely equipped to discover comprehensions from a standpoint that is most unusual.

Explore, for example, your own feelings toward me: whether or not they have changed through the years, how much I seem to be myself, or part Jane, or part Ruburt, or part you, or part Joseph, or whatever.  Realizing that you are in the position you wanted to be [in], and realizing that your abilities are not in conflict with each other, nor you with them, will automatically fulfill and develop all of those abilities, in a new kind of overall creativity that is itself beyond specifics.

When Ruburt begins to trust himself, as he has, the physical armor loosens.  The creative abilities become even more available, hence his new creativity, and the new physical steps he has taken.  They all go together.

He believed in the specific nature of the creative self, so that it could only be trusted in certain areas.  He believed he needed strong mental barriers as well as physical ones, set up against his own spontaneity.  He is beginning to understand that the spontaneous and creative aspects of personality are the life-giving ones.  They can and must be trusted.  He knows now he does not have to slow down, and that relaxation leads to motion.

He did indeed pick up from me a partial list of the subject matters to be covered in our new book – which will be called Dreams, “Evolution”, and Value Fulfillment.

The book will necessarily of course include much material on the true nature of creativity and its uses and misuses by civilizations.  You do not have to fight to trust the thrust of your own life.  That thrust is always meant to lead you toward your own best fulfillment, in a way that will benefit the species as well.

When you trust the thrust of your own life, you are always supported.  Tell Ruburt that.

I want you both, then, to understand that in the greater light of creativity, understanding its true meaning, you have taken the right course, and therefore drop from your minds any lingering ideas of conflict and doubt.  Such a stand will automatically clear up all problems involving things like taxes, sex roles, or whatever – on both your parts.

You (both) are studying the nature of creativity as few others have done or can do – and that is bound to make possible new creative frameworks, and to offer new solutions to situations that cause difficulty within smaller frameworks.

Session 881

This book will be my most ambitious project thus far.

It may be said by some that any book at all is an ambitious endeavor, when it originates from a psychological source so far divorced from your ordinary ideas of creativity.  It is one thing, for example, for a physical writer to produce a manuscript – and even that kind of creativity involves vast and hidden psychological maneuvers that never appear in the manuscript itself.

As most of my readers know, I make no claims of now having a physical personhood.  I do claim an independent reality at another level of existence.  My status and origins seem strange only because you have understood so little about your own origins.  I am beginning this book this evening.  I have already given the title, and at another level of consciousness Jane Roberts was able to perceive some glimpses of some of the subject matter that will be included here.  So far, however, physically there is only the page of paper upon which Robert Butts is writing down these words I speak.

Someday, in terms of time, there will be a thick book.  Although the manuscript does not yet exist in a physical book, the book itself, the ideas and words, are in the most important fashions quite real now.  Certain qualities are implied in all kinds of creativity that are generally overlooked, and so they are not apparent.  The kind of creative procedures we are involved in can serve to bring some of those qualities to light, and to shed illumination upon many aspects of the human psyche that usually remain hidden.

I speak through Ruburt – or through Jane Roberts, if you prefer.  Ruburt has his own creative abilities, and uses them well, and it is to a large extent because of those abilities that our contact first took place (in December 1963).  Scientists like to say that if you look outward at the universe, you look backward in time.  That statement is only partially true.  When you move inward through the psyche, however, you do begin to thrust, in your terms, “backward” toward the origins of existence.  Your creative abilities do not simply allow you to paint pictures, to tell or write stories, to create sculpture or architecture.  They do not simply provide you with a basis for your religions, sciences, and civilizations.  They are your contact with the source of existence itself.

They provide the power that allows you to form a belief system to begin with.

While you believe that consciousness somehow emerges from dead matter, you will never understand yourselves, and you will always be looking for the point at which life took on form.  You will always have to wonder about a kind of mechanical birth of the universe – and it will indeed seem as if your own world was made up of the spare parts that somehow fell together in just such a fashion so that life later emerged.

You are filled with questions about when and where the various species appeared, and how the rocks were formed, when some reptiles grew wings, when some fish emerged from the oceans and learned to breathe air, and you are bound to wonder what happened in the times in between.

How many reptiles tried for wings, for example, and failed, or could not fly – or how many millions of reptiles did it take, and how many trials, before the first triumphant bird flew above the landscape?  How many fish died with only half-formed lungs, who were too far from the water’s edge to dip again beneath the waves?  Or how many fish flopped backward to the water, finding themselves in such an in-between stage that they could no longer live in the water nor breathe the air?

So in those terms, how many water dwellers died before the first mammal stood securely with fully completed lungs, breathing earth’s early air?

In this book, then, we will look at the origin of the universe, the origin of the species, the origin of life from another viewpoint.  This viewpoint will, I hope, provide another framework through which you can understand and study physical reality, your part in it, and sense the immense creative complexity that unites each individual with the source of consciousness itself.

To do this, I hope to explore a more meaningful concept of evolution – and that concept must involve a discussion of subjective reality and its effect upon the “evolution” of man’s consciousness.

The universe did not originate from what you like to think of as an external, objectified source.  Your own physical body provides you with sturdy corporal images, exterior presentations.  Your dreams do not suddenly appear exteriorized upon your images in place of your features, for example.  They remain hidden.  Your dreams appear on the interior screen of your mind.

I never want any of my remarks to be construed in such a fashion that it seems I am in any way negating the fullness, validity, and magnificence of physical existence.  I do want to point out, however, that a state you usually call dreaming is but a dim indication of an inner reality of events, an inner order of events from which the physical world emerges.  I hope to show how the nature of dreams has helped shape man’s consciousness.  I hope to show that consciousness forms the environment, and not the other way around.

I hope to show that all species are motivated by what I call value fulfillment, in which each seeks to enhance the quality of life for itself and for all other species at the same time.

This further unites all species in a cooperative venture that has remained largely invisible because of beliefs projected outward upon the world by both your sciences and religions, generally speaking.  All of your grandest civilizations have existed first in the world of dreams.  You might say that the universe dreamed itself into being.

Generally speaking, the states of waking and sleeping are the only levels of consciousness with which you have been primarily concerned.  It seems to you that this is the result of your evolutionary progress – but there have been civilizations upon the earth that specialized in the use of many focuses of consciousness, as for example you are focused upon the use of tools.

Dreams can be highly specific.  They can be used to provide sources of information.  I hope to show their practical importance, both as a part of man’s “evolutionary development” and their possibilities in what you think of as modern life.  The answers are where you have least looked for them.  The universe is still being created, even as each person is in each moment.

Chapter 1: Before the Beginning

Session 882

The universe will begin yesterday.  The universe began tomorrow.  Both of these statements are quite meaningless.  The tenses are wrong, and perhaps your time sense is completely outraged.  Yet the statement: The universe began in some distant past”, is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.