“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With many pauses to start:) Dictation: During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions took place as the “structure” of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of “the self.”

(Long pause.) In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion—or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.

Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self—composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

[Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet. It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.

(Very rapidly:) “Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” A twist on an old quote, I believe—but the fact is, you are physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides.

(All very intently:) That environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind—for the life of the body provides you, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range.