“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

So Ruburt’s dream made possible a conscious emotional realization of fear — but more, it provided for that fear’s release, or gave the solution to a deep emotional equation. In this case it was the realization emotionally that life is not given by the parent, but through the parent — by LIFE (in capitals) itself, or All That Is, and “with no strings attached.”

The second part of the dream, the solution, had not come consciously and emotionally to Ruburt before. Intellectually he had that solution, but it did not become part of the emotional equation until the dream put the two together. You cannot logically, mathematically explain such emotional reality.

That is, dreams are the best preventative medicine. Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding. Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind. As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.

You could not physically handle anything like complete dream recall. (With a small laugh:) You are not consciously capable of dealing with the psychological depths and riches that activity reveals. For one thing, your concepts of time, realistically or practically speaking, as utilized, would become more difficult to maintain in normal life. This does not mean that far greater dream recall than you have is not to your advantage, because it certainly is. I merely want to explain why so many dreams are not recalled.

While the large proportion remain relatively hidden, however, the average person often meets with dream fragments just below the normal threshold of consciousness — not recognizing them as what they are — experiencing instead the impulse to do this or that on a given day; to eat this or that, or to refrain from something else. An easy enough example is the case where an individual with no memory [of such a dream] decides to cancel a plane trip on a given day, and later discovers that the plane crashed. The impulse to cancel may or may not seem to have an acceptable, rational explanation; that is, for no seeming reason, the individual may simply, impulsively, feel a premonition. On the other hand the impulse might appear as a normal, logical change of plan.

(10:17.) We are taking it for granted that a forgotten dream stated the probable catastrophe. This information was unconsciously processed, the probability considered and rejected: Psychologically or physically, the person was not ready to die. Others with the same knowledge found that death was the accepted probability. This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions — or could board that plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

Nor is such an inner decision forced upon the conscious personality, for in all such instances, the conscious personality has at various times come close to accepting the idea of death at the particular time in life.

The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much. Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms. The sweet parcel of physical existence, I have told you, exists as much by merit of what it does not include as it does by merit of your experience. In important ways your dreams make your life possible by ordering your psychological life automatically, as your physical body is ordered automatically for you. You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree. But you cannot become completely aware of your dreams in their entirety, and maintain your normal physical stance.

As a civilization you fail to reap dreams’ greater benefit, and the conscious mind is able to handle much more dream recall than you allow. Such training would add immeasurably to the dimensions of your life. Dreams educate you even in spatial relationships, and are far more related to the organism’s stance in the environment than is realized. The child learns spatial relationships in dreams.

This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter. There is no point at which consciousness emerged. Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them. The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that you do not perceive, sometimes because your time sequences are too different. Before the smallest cell appeared, in your terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.

(Long pause.) Words do nearly forsake me, the semantic differences are so vast. If I say to you: “Life came from a dream,” such a statement sounds meaningless. Yet as your physical reality personally is largely dependent upon your dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.

In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination — that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible — and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged. That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence. In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.

Indeed: Afghanistan comes to mind here, as a particularly lucrative environment.

Your own kind of conscious mind is splendid and unique. It causes you, however, to interpret all other kinds of life according to your own specifications and experience. The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes you completely. And when you compare your technologies, learning, logical thought, cultures and arts with what you understand of animal experience, there seems no doubt that you are superior and “the Flower of Evolution” — that all other kinds of life are topped by your existence.

You are a part of that also, but the conscious mind, with its own specifications, cannot manipulate with that kind of knowledge.

I hesitate in many instances to say what I might, because it is so easy to misinterpret meanings; but when you ask what is the purpose of consciousness you take it for granted there must be one purpose — where the greater truth and creativity must be that consciousness itself cannot be aware of all of its own purposes, but ever discovers its own nature through its own manifestations.

To those who want easy answers, this is no answer, I admit. There is, I know, in heroic terms a love, a knowledge, a compassion, a creativity that can be assigned to All That Is, which is within each creature. I know that each smallest “particle” of consciousness can never be broken down, and that each contains an infinite capacity for creativity and development — and that each is innately blessed.