“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Events seem to happen to you. Often it seems that you have no more control over the drama of your own life than you have over the outcome of a television program. Sometimes, however, your own dreams or inspirations startle you by giving you information that is usually not available in the recognized order of events. It becomes very difficult to explain such occurrences in the light of the plots and scenes provided by your usual mental programming. You are so conditioned that even when you sleep you try to monitor your experiences, and to interpret dream events according to the habitual frequency that you have learned to accept as the only criterion of reality. Quite literally, however, when you are dreaming you are tuning in to different frequencies and biologically your body responds to those on many levels.

You are social creatures, as the animals are. Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings. To be ostracized is no laughing matter. The comfort of social discourse represents one of the great building blocks of families and civilizations. The set criteria of reality, therefore, operate as organizing, psychic, and physical frameworks. There is still more flexibility within those frameworks, however, than is recognized. You still try to carry your own cultural versions of reality into the dream state, for example, but the natural heritage of both body and mind escapes such repression — and despite yourselves, in your dreams you come in touch with a greater picture of reality that will not be shunted aside.

(9:39.) There is nothing inherent in the waking state that causes it to be so limited. The boundaries set are your own. The body naturally heals itself, for example. Many give lip service to such a belief. In actuality, however, most of you believe — and experience — a far different picture, in which the body must be protected at all costs from a natural leaning toward disease and poor health. Viruses must be warded off, as if you had no protection against them. The natural healing that often occurs in the dream state is undone in the waking state, in which any such cure is seen as “miraculous” and against “the rules.”

(Pause.) Yet in your dreams, you often see quite correctly the reasons for your physical difficulties, and begin a therapy that you could consciously take advantage of. Waking, however, you forget — or you do not trust what you remember.

On occasion, definite physical cures happen in the dream state, even though you may think that you are intellectual and knowing when you are awake, and ignorant or half-insane in your dreams. If you were that “dumb” in the waking state, then you would be in far better health.

In such dreams you tune in to other frequencies that are, indeed, closer to your biological integrity, but there is no reason why you cannot do so in the waking state. When such seeming miracles occur, it is because you have transcended your usual official beliefs about your body and its health, and disease, and so allowed nature to take its course. Often in the dream state you become truly awake, and grab ahold of your spirithood and creaturehood with both hands, so to speak, understanding that each has a far greater reality then you have been led to suppose.

More often, however, there are instead only blurred glimpses and tantalizing views of a more expansive kind of experience. To make matters more confusing you may automatically try to interpret the dream events according to your usual picture of reality, and switch channels, so to speak, as you waken.

Each character, however, or portion of a scene, would represent in fragmented form another quite valid program [or reality, in brackets]. In the dream state, then, you are sometimes aware of too many stations. When you try to make them fit into your recognized picture of reality, they may seem chaotic. There are ways to bring the picture into focus: There are ways to tune into those other quite-natural frequencies, so that they present you with a more expansive view both of the world as you define it, and of its greater aspects. Period. The psyche is not encased, in your case (amused), within a frame too fragile to express it. Only your beliefs about the psyche and about the body limit your experience to its present degree.

In dreams you are so “dumb” that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so “irrational” as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. You are so “unrealistic” that it seems to you that you visit old houses, long ago torn down, or that you travel in exotic foreign cities that you have actually never visited.

In dreams you are so “insane” that you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning.

The physicists have their hands on the doorknob. If they paid more attention to their dreams, they would know what questions to ask.

(Long pause.) Your dead relatives survive. They often appear to you in the dream state. You usually interpret their visitations, however, in terms of your own station of reality. You see them as they were, confined to their relationship with you, and you usually do not perceive or remember other aspects of their existences that would not make sense in terms of your own beliefs.

So, often such dreams are like programmed dramas, in that you clothe such visitations in familiar props. The same sort of thing frequently occurs when you experience extraordinary flashes of inspiration, or perceive other unofficial data. Quickly you try to make sense of such material in usual terms. An out-of-body experience into another level of reality becomes a visit to heaven, for example; or the heretofore-unrecognized voice of your own greater identity becomes the voice of God, or a spaceman or prophet.

Your dreaming experience, however, gives you a guideline that will help you understand the nature of your own psyche, and the deeper reality in which it has its being. Again: The dreaming psyche is awake.