“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation. (Pause.) Such a change in your waking and sleeping patterns very nicely helps cut through your habitual ways of looking at the nature of your own personal world, and so alters your conception of reality in general.

To some extent, there is a natural and spontaneous merging of what you would think of as conscious and unconscious activity. This in itself brings about a greater understanding of the give-and-take that exists between the ego and other portions of the self. The unconscious is no longer equated with darkness, or with unknown frightening elements. Its character is transformed, so that the “dark” qualities are seen as actually illuminating portions of conscious life, while also providing great sources of power and energy for normal ego-oriented experience.

There are many other natural and spontaneous kinds of comprehension that can also result from the waking and sleeping rhythms that I have suggested. The unconscious, the color black, and death all have strongly negative connotations in which the inner self is feared; the dream state is mistrusted and often suggests thoughts of both death and/or evil. But changed wake-sleep habits can, again, bring about a transformation in which it is obvious that dreams contain great wisdom and creativity, that the unconscious is indeed quite conscious, and that in fact the individual sense of identity can be retained in the dream state. The fear of self-annihilation, symbolically thought of as death, can then no longer apply as it did before.

(Quite forcefully:) A certain beneficial and natural situation is arrived at, in which the conscious and unconscious minds meet. This occurs spontaneously whatever your sleep patterns, but is very brief and seldom remembered. The optimum state is so short because of the prolonged drugging of the conscious mind.

Animals follow their own natural waking-sleeping schedules, and in their way derive far greater benefits from both states than you, and use them with greater effectiveness — particularly along the lines of the body’s built-in system of therapy. They know exactly when to alter their patterns to longer or shorter sleep periods, therefore adjusting the adrenaline output and regulating all of the bodily hormones.

Many of your misconceptions about the nature of reality are directly related to the division you place between your sleeping and waking experience, your conscious and unconscious activity. Opposites seem to occur that do not exist in actuality. Myths, symbols and rationalizations all become necessary to explain the seeming divergences, the seeming contradictions between realities that appear to be so different.

In the natural body-mind relationship the sleep state operates as a great connector, an interpreter, allowing the free flow of conscious and unconscious material. In the kind of sleep patterns suggested, optimum conditions are set up. Neurosis and psychosis simply would not occur under such conditions. And in the natural back-and-forth leeway of the system, exterior dilemmas or problems are worked out in the dream situation, and interior difficulty may also be solved symbolically through physical experience.

(Long pause at 10:24.) You did not simply come upon your sleep patterns. They are not the result of your technology or industrial habits. Instead they are a part of those beliefs that caused you to develop your technological, industrial society. They emerged as you began to categorize experience more and more, to see yourselves as separate from the spring or fountainhead of your own psychological reality. In natural circumstances the animals, while sleeping at night, are still partially alert against predators and danger. There is within the innate characteristics of the mammalian brain, then, a great balance in which complete physical relaxation can occur in sleep, while consciousness is maintained in a “partially suspended, passive-yet-alert” manner. That state allows conscious participation and interpretation of “unconscious” dream activity. The condition gives the body its refreshment, yet it does not lie inert for such long periods of time.

(Pause.) Mammals have also changed their habits to accommodate those conditions you have thrust upon them, so the behavior studied in laboratories is not necessarily that shown by the same animals in their natural state.

Taken alone, this statement can appear deceptive. The alterations in behavior are themselves natural, of course.

The natural experiences of what you think of as time distortion, for example, occurring in childhood and old age alike, represent quite normal experiences of your basic “time environment” — much more so than the clock time with which you are so familiar.

Now: The long period of continuous waking conscious activity is to some extent at variance with your natural inclinations.

Sexual behavior obviously will be considered depraved by those most afraid of their own sensual natures. They will ascribe it to primitive or evil or unconscious sources, and even attempt to censor their dreams in that regard. They will then project the greatest sexual license upon those groups they choose to represent their own repressed behavior. If sex is equated with evil, the other group will of course be considered evil.

(11:12.) The wisdom of the child and of the aged are both available. Lessons from “future experience” are also at hand. There are quite natural physical mechanisms in the body that provide for such interaction. You deny yourself many of these advantages however through the artificial alienation that you have set up by your present wake-sleep patterns, to which, again, your ideas of good and evil are intimately connected.

You must give up any ideas that you have as to the unsavory nature of unconscious activity. You must learn to believe in the goodness of your being. Otherwise you will not explore these other states of your own reality.