“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

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.

There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. Species have come and gone of which you have no knowledge. There are parallel developments. That is, there were “apes” who attained their own “civilizations,” for example. They used tools. They were not men-to-be, nor did they evolve into men.

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.

(11:40 P.M. I was surprised at Seth’s remark, since it seems to me that my energy has been “good” for as long as I can remember. And it developed that I did quote portions of Seth’s material on evolution and time in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. See Appendix 12.)