“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, it is involved with the trial-and-error method. It sets up hypotheses (pause), and its very existence is dependent upon a lack of available knowledge—knowledge that it seeks to discover.

(Long pause.) Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of the reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. The physical eyes cannot see today the dawn that will come in the morning. The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow’s street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses’ domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. It must rely upon observation to make its deductions accordingly. In a fashion, it must divide to conquer. It must try to deduce the nature of the whole it cannot perceive from the portions that are physically available.

Now, some of those children went on to become great musicians, while others lost their abilities along the way, so what are we dealing with in such cases? We are dealing with direct knowing. We are dealing with the natural perceptions of the psyche, at least when we are speaking in human terms. We are dealing with natural, direct cognition as it exists before and after (pause) man’s experience with the reasoning mind.

(9:33.) Man’s reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and deduction, and for observation, rests upon (pause) a direct cognition—a direct cognition that powers his thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He thinks because he knows how to think by thinking (intently), even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind.¹

(Long pause.) In dreams the reasoning mind loosens its hold upon perception. From your standpoint you are almost faced with too much data. The reasoning mind attempts to catch what it can as it reassembles its abilities toward waking, but the net of its reasoning simply cannot hold that assemblage of information. Instead it is processed at other levels of the psyche. Dreams also involve a kind of psychological perspective with which you have no physical equivalent—and therefore such issues are most difficult to discuss.

Your dreaming self possesses pyschological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. You must, again, realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity—an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own. You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. (Long pause.) I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware.