“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced. The body ages its 20 minutes of time, and that is all. In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time. Dream experience is ordered in a circular fashion. Sometimes it never touches the hub of your present moment at all, as you think of it, as far as your memory is concerned; yet the dream is, and it is registered at all other levels of your existence, including the cellular.

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.

On cellular levels the body has a picture not only of its own present condition, but of all those aspects of the physical environment that affect its own condition. In its own codified fashion it is not only aware of local weather conditions, for example, but of all those world patterns of weather upon which the local area is dependent. It then prepares itself ahead of time to meet whatever challenges of adjustment will be necessary. It weighs probabilities; it reacts to pressures of various kinds.

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.

Generally speaking, the psyche has the same kind of instant overall comprehension of psychological events and environments as your body has of physical ones. It is then aware of your overall psychological climate locally, as it involves you personally, and in world terms.

I use the word “cordella” to express the source out of which such languages spring. There are many correlations of course between your language and your body. Your spoken language is dependent upon your breath, and even written language is dependent upon the rapidity with which messages can leap the nerve endings. Biological cordellas then must be the source for physical languages, but the cordellas themselves arise from the psyche’s greater knowledge as it forms the physical mechanism to begin with.

Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s nature merges in time and out of it. He has sense experiences. He runs, though he lies in bed. He shouts, though no word is spoken. He still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms. He deals with events, yet they do not happen in his bedroom, or necessarily in any place that he can find upon awakening.