“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.)

Dictation. Again: Your dreaming psyche is awake.

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.

(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.

In that framework the so-called living and the so-called dead can mix freely. In such circumstances you are literally becoming aware of other perspectives of existence. You are turning corners of being and discovering multidimensional depths of the psyche.

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.

I often speak of you and the psyche as if they were separate, yet of course this is not the case. You are that portion of the psyche that you presently recognize. Many people say: “I want to know myself,” or “I want to find myself,” when the truth is that few really want to take the time or effort. (Pause.) There is one place to begin, however: Try becoming better acquainted with the self you are now. Stop telling yourself that you do not know yourself.

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.

(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.

Again, the dimensions of the psyche must be experienced, to whatever degree. They cannot be simply defined. In the following chapter, then, I will suggest some exercises that will allow you direct experience with portions of your own reality that may have escaped you thus far.

Association or no, physically you will remember events in time, with present moments neatly following past ones. The psyche deals largely with associative processes, however, as it organizes events through association. Time as such has little meaning in that framework. Associations are tied together, so to speak, by emotional experience. In a large manner, the emotions defy time.