“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(9:50.) Joseph wondered, however, at this mixture of the living and the dead. It would be easy to think that the dream foresaw Joseph’s own death, and that of his brother and sister-in-law. You follow your own time sequences, however. The psyche is not so limited. To it, your death has already occurred, from your standpoint. Yet it is also true that from its standpoint, your birth has not yet happened. You have a greater experience, then, of your recognized time and existence frameworks.

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.

The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well. So the psyche holds equally lives in progress, lived or not yet lived, and deals with a greater perspective from which your ordinary perspective emerges.

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.

In Joseph’s dream, his brother’s features had an Oriental cast. Joseph knew that his brother lived as himself, and also as an Oriental, unknown to Joseph in his present life. If Joseph had seen two people — one his brother and one an Oriental — he would not have recognized the stranger, so in the dream his brother’s known appearance dominated, while the Oriental affiliation is merely suggested. In your own lives you will use such psychic shorthand, or utilize symbols in which you try to explain the greater dimensions of one reality in terms of the known one.