“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Although we hated to do it, Jane and I have finally arranged to have an unlisted telephone number. Up to twenty calls a day have been coming in — and sometimes many more, day and night. It can be quickly calculated that such a rate adds up to 600 or so messages a month. Jane was the one who took most of the calls, for she was usually the one people wanted to talk to. She enjoyed the personal interactions most of the time, and often spent a half hour or so trying to help someone in that way. But finally she reached the point where there just wasn’t enough time for her to answer the telephone that often and get her own work done too.)

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.

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.

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 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.