“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It deals with a different kind of experience than the one with which you are physically familiar, although that experience is also a part of the psyche. Daily life is a focus taken on the part of that portion of the psyche you call you, and there are many other such focuses. The psyche is never destroyed. Nor is that unique individuality of your own ever minimized. The psyche’s experiences straddle your ideas of time, however. It seems to you quite definitely that you come alive and die. At your particular focus of consciousness, no arguments will suffice to convince you otherwise, for you are everywhere presented with the physical evidence of “fact.” Period.

Now in the dream state, you suddenly become aware on occasion of greater perspective. This perspective cannot “work” at your usual level of consciousness, any more than the artist’s perspective will work for the ant’s — though there is much you could learn from an ant’s consciousness (intently). Say that I smiled.

(10:07.) Your own waking consciousness deals specifically with certain kinds of distinctions. These help form the very structure of physical existence. They highlight your lives, providing them also with a kind of frame. Quite simply, you want to experience a certain kind of reality, so you put boundaries about events, that allow you to concentrate upon them. When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination. He or she chooses one area of concentration. Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

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.

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.

You normally organize your experience in terms of time. Your usual stream of consciousness is also highly associative, however. Certain events in the present will remind you of past ones, for example, and sometimes your memory of the past will color present events.