“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Instead events are built up, so to speak, from significances. But let us forget that term for a moment and consider association, with which you are already familiar, since your stream of consciousness operates in that fashion. By its very nature each consciousness is a particular, peculiar, and unique focus of awareness which will experience any possible realities through its own characteristics.

Significances fall or happen in certain patterns, and when these become very obvious they appear as cause and effect. They are simply heavy-handed significances. Your associative processes and habits are perhaps the closest examples that can give clues of how significances operate. Even then, however, associations deal with the passage of time, and basically significances do not. You might think of your Aunt Sarah, for example, and in a few moments the associative process might bring you images of periods in the past when you visited your aunt, of her friends and neighbors, the articles in her house, and episodes connected with your relationship.

To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time. Your dream perceptions seem physical — you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. There are actually many other conditions of existence, but for now we will speak of a predream state, which is actually composed of several conditions of actuality. Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking, the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality. It would seem to you that experience becomes broader but less specific, but such is not the case. Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

Now: All of this sounds very complicated. Yet in a different way the same processes occur at other levels, as in its way cellular consciousness perceives all of the probabilities concerned with physical survival in its most far-reaching complications. At this moment the cells within your body know the life conditions of any place on the planet, and compute these, ascertaining the ways in which they require action on the body’s part. Your cells are aware of the motion of the planets and of all circumstances regarding the body’s equilibrium, stability, and survival. The body is then formed constantly as the result of these computations.