“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It “sings” with the quality of its own life. It cooperates with other cells. It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in a way it lends itself to that formation. (Pause.) The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. In the old terms of evolution. I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

(10:20.) Give us a moment… Now many of the characteristics you consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species. It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species. (Intently:) You learned to dream differently than other creatures. I thought you would like that quotation.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact. You would not have had (pause) any way (pause) of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations. You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

Using the intellect alone, man did not simply learn through daily experience over the generations, say, that one season followed the other. He lived too much in the moment for that. In one season he dreamed of the others, however, and in dreams he saw himself spreading the seeds of fruits as he had seen the wind do in daily life.

His dreams reminded him that a cold season had come, and would come again. Most of your inventions came in dreams, and, again, it is the nature of your dreams that makes you so different from other species.

(10:35.) Give us a moment… The creativity of the species is also the result of your particular kind of dream specialization. It amounts to — amounts to — a unique state of existence by itself, in which you combine the elements of physical and nonphysical reality. It is almost a threshold between the two realities, and you learned to hold your physical intent long enough at that threshold so that you have a kind of brief attention span there, and use it to draw from nonphysical reality precisely those creative elements that you need. Period.

Animals, as a rule (underlined) are less physically-oriented in their dreaming states. They do dream of physical reality, but much more briefly than you. Otherwise, they immerse themselves in dreams in different kinds of dreaming consciousness that I hope to explain at a later date (louder).

(She paused. Then: “I seem to get things that are different toward the ends of books, like where one is leading into the next one. Take the idea of the book Seth mentioned on therapy and value fulfillment, and so forth, and what you said today about body consciousness. Everything’s related.”

(See the brief references to the therapy of value fulfillment in the opening notes for Session 862, with its Note 1. Today I’d mentioned to Jane how I remembered Seth’s saying — perhaps a couple of years ago — that still untouched in his material is the whole question of the body consciousness, and its role in health and many other fields. Seth had indicated that he had available a vast amount of material on the body consciousness, and that he could give it to us at any time. I’ve been curious about the subject ever since.

(Now, however, when I remarked that I like tonight’s material on dreaming and language, Jane replied: “I wish you hadn’t said that. As soon as you did, I felt a circle of information open up — a lot of it — about when ancient man had a series of mass dreams in which he learned how to speak. The dreams were like glossolalia — you know, speaking in unintelligible speech sounds — yet they made sense, and man began to speak….”

(Then a minute later: “Another thing I just got was that when man was with other men in the physical world, he could point to stuff to share descriptions with others, but that he learned to really speak when he tried to describe dreams. It was the only way — speech — by which he could share data that couldn’t be seen. He could point to a tree and grunt, but there wasn’t anything in a dream he could point to. He had to have a method of expression to describe invisible things. Inventions could have come about when he tried to tell others what he saw in his dreams, too.”)