“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I nodded, but I’d had a particularly interesting dream experience last night, and I also hoped that Seth might discuss that. As you’ll see, he managed to do both, winding a discussion of my dream into his own material about the psyche.)

You may believe in an afterlife to some extent or another, or you may or may not be convinced by the general theory of reincarnation. But certainly most of you are united in the seemingly irrefutable belief that you are definitely alive now, and not dead. Dead people do not read books. Period.

In a strange manner I am telling you that your “life” is simply the only portion of your existence of which you are presently aware. In greater terms, you are alive and dead at the same time, even as I am. My focus, however, is in an area that you do not perceive. Again: Existences are like notes played along certain frequencies. You are tuned in to an earth song, following this analogy, but you are only following your own melody, and usually you are unaware of the greater orchestration in which you also take part.

Sometimes in dreams you do tune in to a greater picture, but again, certain things appear to be facts, and against these so-called facts even definite experiences can appear ludicrous or chaotic.

There is little use in trying to discover other levels of your own reality if you insist upon applying the laws of physical life to your own larger experience. Then you will always be in a quandary, and no facts will fit. You cannot, however, insist that the laws of your vaster existence, as you discover them, supersede the physical conditions of known life — for then no facts would apply either. You will expect to live forever in the same physical body, or think that you can levitate with your body at will. You can indeed levitate, but not with your physical body, practically speaking in operational terms. You accepted a body, and that body will die. It has limitations, but these also serve to highlight certain kinds of experience. The body in which our friend, Joseph, viewed his relatives (in the dream mentioned earlier) was not operationally physical. It was quite real, however, and at another level of reality it was operational, suited to its environment.

The “true facts” are that you exist in this life and outside it simultaneously. You are “between lives” and “in lives” at once. The deeper dimensions of reality are such that your thoughts and actions not only affect the life you know, but also reach into all of those other simultaneous existences. What you think now is unconsciously perceived by some hypothetical 14th-century self. The psyche is open-ended. No system is closed, psychological systems least of all. Your life is a dreaming experience to other portions of your greater reality which focus elsewhere.

You may ask how real are those other existences, but if so you must ask in whose terms. Existence has a physical version. In that framework you are born and die, and in a definite sequence. Death is a physical reality. It is real, however, only in physical terms. If you accept those terms as the only criterion of reality then surely it appears that death is an end to your consciousness.

(11:07.) You can learn to vastly enrich your own experience. Theoretically, you can even become aware of other existences to some degree. You can travel in the dream state into levels of reality separated from your own. You can learn to use and experience time in new fashions. You can obtain knowledge from other portions of your own being, and tap the psyche’s resources. You can improve the world in which you live, and the quality of life. But while you are physical, you will still experience birth and death, dawn and dusk, and the privacy of the moments, for this is the experience you have chosen.

Even within that context, however, there are surprises and enchantments waiting, if you simply learn to expand your awareness, exploring not only the dream state, but your waking reality in more adventuresome ways. Your dreaming psyche is awake. Many of you have allowed your normal waking consciousness to become blurred — inactive, relatively speaking, so that you are only half aware of the life that you have. You are your psyche’s living expression, its human manifestation. (Pause.) Yet you allow yourselves often to become blind to brilliant aspects of your own existence.