“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph: While your beliefs do structure much of your dream activity, other issues are also involved simply because the focus of your awareness is not acutely directed toward physical reality, but is only opaquely concerned with it.

(9:04.) Once again, thoughts and ideas have their own electromagnetic validity also. In waking life you test your ideas in the world of facts. Facts are only accepted fiction, of course, but the ideas must make sense and fit into the accepted “story.”

Beyond this there are experiences but seldom recalled, in which the usual identification of your consciousness with physical-life orientation is gone. (Pause.) Images as you think of them are based upon your own neurological structure, and your interpretations of these. When you consider survival after death, for instance, you imagine all the senses fully operating, though perhaps in a nonphysical body. Perception without images seems impossible in that context. Yet in some dream situations you enter a state of awareness quite divorced from that kind of sense data. Images as such are not involved, though later they may be manufactured unconsciously for the sake of translation. In those conditions you come close to an understanding of what your consciousness is when it is not physically oriented at all.

While you are physically connected you must interpret experience in sense terms, even that in dreams. At times your consciousness can range into other areas, but then the events must be physically translated in some way.

(Long pause at 10:20.) If you believe that you do not dream, however, you will inhibit memory of them — but you will still dream. Those rich experiences will not form a part of your conscious life because of your belief.

New paragraph: Your wars are fought, lost or won in the dream world first of all, and your physical rendition of history follows the thin line of only one series of probabilities. To you a given war was either lost or won by a particular side. In your skimpy (whispering humorously) comprehension of events there can be only one definite outcome of a battle, for instance. There will be certain hard facts; a fight with so many people involved, occurring on a particular day at a given place, culminating in a definite victory. Historically there will be treaties signed, yet in far greater terms you are perceiving but one small dimension, or one corner, of a much larger happening that quite transcends your ideas of the times or places involved.

(Seth caught me. I wanted book work to continue, yet I was sure that his unexpected digression would also be interesting. It was — very much so: In material covering several pages, he discussed my mother and her recent experiences with probabilities in her advanced old age. The complicated family situation involving Mother Butts isn’t gone into here, but Jane and I decided to include the more generalized parts of Seth’s information; we think it will help others in their relationships with old people.

…your mother is experiencing a mental and intuitive acceleration, a barrage of stimuli hereto withheld. She is perceiving probabilities quite clearly, but confusing them with the physical world of facts. This is only being done when her physical work is finished; not, for example, when disorientation could disrupt any necessary important physical purposes of her own.

She must experience such events in your time series, where to others they do not fit. I am giving you this material not only because of your personal concern but for its general application. The grappling with probabilities enables your mother to judge the circumstances of her physical life, and to program herself ahead of time, so to speak, for her next adventure.

Her very actions are serving as learning patterns for the entire family. Despite appearances there is not a dulling of sense impressions on her part, but an infusion. The difficulty in concentrating does result from this, but then she is concentrating elsewhere.

She will finally want to be independent of her body, but she is not cowering; she is struggling to free herself. There is much more…. In one way the family’s treatment of her like a child is accepted, for it provides the thrust for independence in the same way that a child wants to grow up and leave the house. So your mother’s independence is aroused. In a way she wants to be free of the house of life that she has literally formed, to find a new endeavor … to begin anew. In a teenager her remarks would seem legitimate. She also wants to begin a new life.