“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.

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.

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.

If, however, you learn to know yourself better in daily life to become more fully aware even of your earthly life, then you will indeed receive other information that hints of a deeper, more supportive reality, in which physical existence rests. You will find yourself having experiences that do not fit recognized facts. These can add up to an alternate set of facts, pointing toward a different kind of reality, and give evidence for an inner existence that takes precedence over the physical assumptions. A certain kind of discretion and understanding is necessary, however. Basically the inner reality is the creative source of the physical one. Yet to some extent, the physical rules are also inviolate — at their level.

(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.

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.