“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the dream state the actors become aware to some extent of the parts they play, and sense the true personal identity that is behind the artist’s craft. I have spoken of this before, but it is important to remember that you impose a certain kind of “artificial” sense of exaggerated continuity even to the self you know. Your experience changes constantly, and so does the intimate context of your life — but you concentrate upon points of order, in your terms, that actually serve to scale down the context of your experience to make it more comprehensible. There are no such limits naturally set about your consciousness.

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.

Death operates in the same fashion. The animals in particular realize this because they organize time differently from you. Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore — a fact that often frightens the waking self. But here is a creative mixture: the perceptive organizations from which prosaically tuned conscious life emerges. Here are the raw materials for all the daily events you recognize privately and on a world scale.