“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not a matter, either, of there simply being one other category of knowledge, for there are numerous other such categories, many of them biologically within your reach. Various so-called esoteric traditions provide certain methods that allow an individual to set aside accepted modes of perception, and offer patterns that may be used as containers for these other kinds of knowledge. Even these containers must necessarily shape the information received, however. (Pause.) Some such methods are very advantageous, yet they have also become too rigid and autocratic, allowing little room for deviation. Dogmas are then set up about them so that only a certain body of data is considered acceptable. The systems no longer have the flexibility that first gave them birth.

One level of dream life deals particularly with the biological condition of the body, giving you not just hints of health difficulties, but the reasons for them and the ways to circumvent them. Information about the probable future is also given to help you make conscious choices. You have taught yourselves that you cannot be conscious in your dreams, however, because you interpret the word “conscious” so that it indicates only your own prejudiced concept. As a result, you do not have any culturally acceptable patterns that allow you to use your dreams competently.

Trance states, daydreaming, hypnotism — these give you some hint of the various differences that can occur from the standpoint of waking consciousness. In each, reality appears in another fashion, and for that matter, different rules apply. In the dream state far greater variations occur. The key to the dream state, however, lies in the waking one as far as you are concerned. You must change your ideas about dreaming, alter your concepts about it, before you can begin to explore it. Otherwise your own waking prejudice will close the door.

My remark has nothing to do with your accepted concepts of the unconscious portions of the self. Your ideas of the unconscious are so linked to your limited ideas of personhood as to be meaningless in this discussion. It is as if you used only one finger of one hand, and then said: “This is the proper expression of my personhood.” It is not just that there are other functions of the mind, unused, but that in those terms you have other minds. You have one brain, it is true, but you allow it to use only one station, or to identify itself with only one mind of many.

It seems evident to you that one person has one mind. You identify with the mind you use. If you had another, then it would seem as if you must be someone else. A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. You have physical limbs that you can see. You have minds that are invisible. Each one can organize reality in a different fashion. Each one deals with its own kind of knowledge.