“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your journey through time, however, seems to go smoothly, colon: The wheel rolls ever forward. It can roll backward as well, but in your intentness you have a forward direction in mind, and to go backward would seem to divert you from your purpose.

You could not die unless you were the kind of creature who was born, nor could you have a present moment as you consider it. Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth, and of its birth at its death, for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between. Death is therefore as creative as birth, and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.

(Pause at 9:40.) It is not quite that simple, however, for you live in the midst of multitudinous small deaths and births all of the time, that are registered by the body and the psyche. Consciously you are usually unaware of them. Logical thought, using usual definitions, deals with cause and effect, and depends upon a straight sequence of time for its framework. It builds step upon step. It is woven into your language. According to logical thought and language you may say: “I am going to a party today because I was invited last week, and said I would attend.” That makes sense. You cannot say: “I am going to a party today because I am going to meet an individual there who will be very important to my life five years from now.” That does not make sense in terms of logical thought or language, for in the last example cause and effect would exist simultaneously — or worse, the effect would exist before the cause.

On all other-than-normally conscious levels, however, you deal very effectively with probabilities. The cells maintain their integrity by choosing one probability above the others. The present hub of the wheel, therefore, is but one prominent present, operationally valid. Cause and effect as you think of them appear only because of the motion, the relative motion, of the wheel in our analogy.

(Long pause.) You always translate experience into terms you can understand. Of course the translation is real. The dream as you recall it is already a translation, then, but an experienced one. As a language that you know is, again, dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences, so the dream that you experience and recall is also one statement of the psyche, coming into prominence; but it is also dependent upon other events that you do not recall, and that your consciousness, as it now operates, must automatically translate into its own terms.

Now: On a physical level your body reacts to information about the environment with which you are not consciously concerned. That same information is highly important to the body’s integrity, however, and therefore to your own mental stance.

You are aware of pressure through touch, for instance, but in another version of that sense entirely, the cells react to air pressure. The body knows to the most precise degree the measurements involving radiation of all kinds. At one level, then, the body itself has a picture of reality of its own, upon which your conscious reality must be based — and yet the body’s terms of recognition or knowledge exist in terms so alien to your conscious ones as to be incomprehensible. Your conscious order, therefore, rides upon this greater circular kind of knowledge.

Your actions take place with such seeming smoothness that you do not realize the order involved. A volcanic eruption in one corner of the world will ultimately affect the entire earth in varying degrees. An emotional eruption will do the same thing on another level, altering the local area primarily but also sending out its ripples into the mass psychological environment. The psyche’s picture of reality, then, would be equally incomprehensible to the conscious mind because of the intense focus upon singularity that your usual consciousness requires.