“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All That Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make more sense.

For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity.Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition, [of] structure and design.

You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now—but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance (underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

(Long pause.) There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice versa. Each form of life is created along with each other form—environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other.

Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness (long pause), each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time [had to be] impeccable.

In the beginning, man’s dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man information—a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man’s dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh.

(9:30.) Now (underlined): When he dreamed—when he dreamed (underlined)—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. “They remembered how it was.” They remembered that they formed each other.

This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance—and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” Each portion has its own identity and validity—and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.

The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.

(9:47.) You “timed” yourselves—but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know (louder).