“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

In dreams this relationship often is revealed. The truth behind such relationships is inherent in all God-Man, God-Woman, Animal-Man, or Animal-Woman legends and mythology. There are connections, then, between man and the animals and the so-called gods (in small letters), that hint at psychological and natural realities.

The natural structures of the earth are formed as the result of the biological cooperation of all species, and consciousness itself is independent of any of the forms that it may at one time or another assume.

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.

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.

In rudimentary form children’s dreams also involve mathematical concepts, so that formal mathematical training falls on already fertile ground. The arts, sciences, agriculture — all of these reflect natural contours and tendencies inherent in man’s mind, as general rather than specific attributes emerging first in the dream state, and then sparking specialized intellectual tendencies in the waking state.

(12:18 A.M. We laughed. Seth’s remarks about Willy Two, or Billy, as we sometimes call him now, were obviously made in response to the funny annoyance we’d felt before the session, when the kitten had been in great form; jumping all over the furniture, pawing at the curtains — as well as Jane and me — getting in our papers, and so forth.)