“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.”

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.

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.

This does not mean that those people are committing suicide in the same way that a person does who takes his life — but that in a unique psychological manipulation they no longer hold the same claim to life as they had before. They “throw their lives to the Fates,” so to speak, saying not as they did before: “I will live,” but: “I will live or die as the Fates decide.”

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.

Ruburt had to know what he was afraid of, and his dream interpretation gave him that knowledge so that he could deal with it. It was the fear of death — not chosen, of course — the fear that if he did not deliver, work hard, and pay his mother back for a life magically given, grudgingly given, then in a magical equation she, the mother, could take it back. But the mother did not give the life. The life came from All That Is, from the spirit of life itself, and was freely given — to be taken away by no one, or threatened by no one or no force, until that life fulfills its own purposes and decides to travel on.

Ruburt did feel that it was not safe to let go, lest relaxation mean death. Life is expression. It comes to be out of the force of itself, and no force stands against it or threatens it. Death in your terms certainly seems an end, but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

First of all, there are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life. It appears that there is living matter and nonliving matter, leading to such questions as: “How does nonliving matter become living?”

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions — a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

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.

Give us a moment… If we must speak in terms of continuity, which I regret, then in those terms you could say that life in the physical universe, on your planet, “began” spontaneously in a given number of species at the same time. I am going slowly in order to get the material as clear as possible.

(11:01. Jane’s delivery was very slow with this material. She took many pauses, some of them long. Her eyes remained closed for the most part. What Seth had to say about the spontaneous beginnings of life, in our terms, surprised me….)

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.

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 closed to the intricate, voluptuous, sensuous, social experience of the animals, or even of the plants — not being able to perceive that different kind of biological emotion and belonging, that rich, sensual identification with earth, and cut off from a biologically oriented culture that is everywhere part and parcel of both plant and animal life.