“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have a mass psychological environment that forms your worldly culture, and corresponds to a worldly stage set in which experience then occurs. Certain psychological conventions act as props. There are, then, more or less formal psychological arrangements that are used as reference points, or settings. You group your experience within those arrangements. They serve to shape mental events as you physically perceive them.

The last sentence is important, for in your lifetimes your experience must be physically felt and interpreted. Despite this, however, events spring from a nonphysical source. As mentioned earlier, your recalled dreams are already interpretations of other nonphysical events.

Putting this as simply as possible, your actual experience is far too vast for you to physically follow. Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area. You imagine it to be “absolute,” in that it seems to involve an all-exclusive state that includes your identity as you think of it — only you give it boundaries like a kingdom. It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousnesses, with their own points of focus. Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.

There are organizations of consciousness, however, that leapfrog the species, that produce no arts or sciences per se — yet these together form the living body of the earth and the physical creatures thereon. Their products are the seas upon which you sail your ships, the skies through which your airplanes fly, the land upon which your cities sprawl, and the very reality that makes your culture, or any culture, possible.

Man is a part of that trans-species consciousness also, as are the plants and animals. Also, part of man’s reality contributes to that trans-species organization, but he has not chosen to focus his practical daily consciousness in that direction, or to identify his individuality with it. As a result he does not understand the greater natural mobility he himself possesses, nor can he practically perceive the natural psychological gestalts of which he is a part, that form all of your natural — meaning physical — world.

It has been truthfully said that the “unconscious” is intimately aware of the most minute details of your health, state of mind, and relationships. “It” is also aware of the state of the earth’s health — even of the environmental conditions on the other side of the planet. It is familiar with the cultural climate also. Your recognized consciousness operates as it does because of immense information-gathering procedures — procedures that unite all species. Biologically such information is coded, but that physical information, such as in the genes and chromosomes, can be altered through experience and mental activity in other species as well as your own.

(11:23.) On the one hand, dreaming on the part of animals — and men in particular — involves not only information processing, but information gathering. Dreaming prevents life from becoming closed-ended by opening sources of information not practically available in the waking state, and by providing feedback from other than the conventional world. Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data, colon: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity. These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

In such ways each individual maintains a picture of the everchanging physical and psychological mass environment. Physical events as you understand them could not exist otherwise. (Long pause.) Basically, information is experience. In dreams you attain the necessary information to form your lives. That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.

In nature nothing is wasted, so the luxurious growth of man’s dream landscapes are also utilized. Whether or not these are physically actualized, they have their own reality. Your own personalities are to some extent the result of your waking experience. But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception. Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes. Dreams of walking and running occur in infants long before they crawl, and serve as impetuses.

Cities, therefore, existed in dreams before the time of tribes. The dream state provides the impetus for growth, and opens up to the earth-tuned consciousness avenues of information for its physical survival.