“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The balance of the session is in response to a discussion of evolution that Jane and I had before the session. This came about because of a note I’m writing for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, and I may quote part of Seth’s material on the subject in that note.

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.

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.

They may use other terms than Fate, of course, but the vital, personal, direct, affirmative intent to live is not there. They are headed for another reality, and ready for it.

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.

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.

(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….)

It is erroneous to say that they did not develop, or that their progress was stunted, for it was not. Their reality explored the ramifications of animalhood in a completely different fashion. Their development paralleled man’s in many respects, in that they lived simultaneously upon the earth, and shared the environment.

(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.

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.

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.

(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.)