“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.)

Last night our friend, Joseph, had a dream experience that intrigued him, and yet seemed highly distorted. He found himself greeting a large number of people. He believed them to be family members, though he only recognized some. His parents, known to be dead, were there. A brother and a sister-in-law, who are alive, were also present. The brother was definitely himself, yet somehow altered in appearance, his features having an Oriental cast. The entire dream was very pleasant, and seemed to be like a home coming.

(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.

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.

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.