“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.