“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Though you may not realize it, you really manage your subjective lives in a rather circular fashion. Pretend that the present moment is like a wheel, with your concentration at the hub. To maintain what you think of as time momentum, the hub is connected by spokes to the exterior circular framework. Otherwise the hub alone would get you nowhere, and your “moment” would not even give you a bumpy ride.

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.

(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.

When your eyes are on the road of time, therefore, you forget the circular motion of your being. When you dream or sleep, however, the world of cause and effect either vanishes or appears confused and chaotic. Normal daytime images are mixed and matched, so that combinations are formed quite different from those seen in the daylight. The known rules that govern the behavior of creatures and objects in dreams seem no longer to apply. Past, present, and future merge in a seemingly bizarre alliance in which, were you waking, you would lose all mental footing. The circular nature of the psyche to some extent makes itself known. When you think of dreams you usually consider those aspects of it only, commenting perhaps upon the strange activities, the odd juxtapositions and the strange character of dream life itself. Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

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.

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.