“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First, again, you have various stages of, say, pseudomatter, of dream images, that only gradually—in those terms—coalesce and become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of “matter” between the matter that you recognize and the antimatter of physicists’ theories.

Form exists at many other levels than those you recognize, in other words. Your dream forms are quite as real as your physical ones. They simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that you had in the beginning of [your] world.

While you and all of the other species were what I have called sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner of speaking, you did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now, from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, you had to learn to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest your food, and to perform all of the biological manipulations that now you take for granted (all most emphatically).

You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state (pause) the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earth-tuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body’s efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physically appear.

All of your manufactured objects also originated in the realm of dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same way man produced his first tools. He was born with (long pause) all of those abilities—abilities by which he is now characterized—and with other abilities that in your terms still wait for development. Not that he has not used them so far, but that he has not focused upon them in what you consider the main lines of civilized continuity. Hints of those abilities are always present in the dream state, and in the arts, in the religions, and even in the sciences. They appear in politics and business, but as the largely unmanifest intuitive background, which is largely ignored. We will return to these later in the book.

(10:12.) Man’s dreams have always provided him with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which to form his civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of man’s dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments.

They were responsible for the birth of agriculture, as well as industry, the rise and fall of nations, the “glory” that was Rome, and Rome’s destruction. (Pause.) Your present technological advances can almost be dated from the [invention of] the printing press, to Edison’s inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. But if what I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that your physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean something far different from the usual definition of dream reality. Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each person’s intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what you think of as the state of dreaming (all very intently).