“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.

(10:10.) There are affiliations of a most “sophisticated” fashion that leap even the boundaries of the species. You look upon your cultural world with its art and manufacture, its cities, technology, and the cultivated use of the intellectual mind. You count your religions, sciences, archeologies, and triumphs over the environment, and it seems to you that no other consciousness has wrought what man’s has produced. Those “products” of your consciousness are indeed unique, creative, and form a characteristic mosaic that has its own beauty and elegance.

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.

Any section of the land has an identity, so to speak, and I am not talking symbolically. Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions. (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity — stamped, as it were, with your identity.

Using an analogy, its “particles” could be dispersed throughout the universe, with galaxies between, yet the identity would be retained. So unknowingly, now, portions of your consciousness mix and merge with those of other species without jarring your own sense of individuality one whit — yet forming other psychological realities upon which you do not concentrate.

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.

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.

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.)