“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The brain organizes activity and translates events, but it does not initiate them. Events have an electromagnetic reality that is then projected onto the brain for physical activation. Your instruments only pick up certain levels of the brain’s activity. They do not perceive the mind’s activity at all, except as it is imprinted onto the brain.

Even dreams are so imprinted. When one portion or one half of the brain is activated, for example, the corresponding portion of the other half is also activated, but at levels scientists do not perceive. It is ridiculous to call one side or the other of the brain dominant, for the full richness of the entire earth experience requires utilization of both halves, as does dreaming.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself. Otherwise, in fact, its smooth synchronicity would be impossible. The brain has abilities you do not use consciously because your beliefs prevent you from initiating the proper neural habits. Certain portions of the brain seem dominant only because of those neural habits that are adopted in any given civilization or time. But other cultures in your past have experienced reality quite differently as a result of encouraging different neural patterns, and putting experience together through other focuses.

You are bringing into your consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are (emphatically) by the brain. The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events. Dreams can provide you with experience that in a manner of speaking, at least, is not encountered in time. The dream itself is recorded by the brain’s time sequences, but in the dream itself there is a duration of time “that is timeless.”

Theoretically, certain dreams can give you a lifetime’s experience to draw upon, though the dream itself can take less than an hour in your time. In a way, dreams are the invisible thickness of your normal consciousness. They involve both portions of the brain. Many dreams do activate the brain in a ghostly fashion, sparking responses that are not practically pertinent in ordinary terms. That is, they do not require direct action but serve as anticipators of action, reminders to the brain to initiate certain actions in its future.

There are also what I will call body dreams. No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter. There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases. Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream. These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

In double dreams and triple dreams consciousness shows its transparent, simultaneous nature. Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically translated; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops with itself. Such dreams involve other sequences than the ones with which you are familiar. They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to you, for you actually form your own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of your brain.

Take a very simple event like the eating of an orange. Playfully imagine how that event is interpreted by the cells of your body. How is the orange perceived? It might be directly felt by the tip of your finger, but are the cells in your feet aware of it? Do the cells in your knee know you are eating an orange?

The feel and practice of these exercises are their important points — the manipulation of a creative consciousness. You exist outside of your present context, but such statements are meaningless, practically speaking, unless you give yourself some freedom to experience events outside of that rigid framework. These exercises alter your usual organizations, and hence allow you to encounter experience in a fresher fashion.

While each person generally follows a given strand of consciousness, and identifies with it as “myself,” there are other alternate lines beneath the surface. They are also quite as legitimately the same identity, but they are not focused upon because the body must have one clear, direct mode of action.

(11:49 P.M. By now it should be obvious that this session is an excellent example of the way Seth often winds our questions and concerns into book dictation, couching his answers so that they also fit the larger framework he has in mind. But even if our private lives do sometimes influence the way Seth delivers his material, we’ve discovered that he still pretty much covers the subject matter he wants to.)