“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The various levels of consciousness discussed here may appear to be very divorced from ordinary waking ones. The divisions are quite arbitrary. These various stages all represent different attributes and directions inherent within your own soul; clues and hints of them, shadows and reflections appear even in the consciousness that you know. Even normal waking consciousness, then, is not innocent of all other traces of existence, or devoid of other kinds of awareness. It is only because you usually use your waking consciousness in limited ways that you do not encounter these clues with any regularity.

Again, you even do this in your sleep. If you do not do it in the waking state, it is because you have held your consciousness in too tight a rein. Now you may take your break.

Now: As mentioned somewhat earlier in this book, while your normal waking consciousness seems continual to you, and you are aware usually of no blank spots, nevertheless it has great fluctuations. To a large extent it has memory only of itself and its own perceptions. In normal consciousness, then, it seems as if there are no real other kinds of consciousness, no other areas or levels. When it encounters “blank spots” and “returns,” it blots out awareness that the moment of nonfunction occurred.

In these lapses you are perceiving other kinds of reality — with other than normal waking consciousness. When you return, you lose the thread. Normal waking consciousness pretends there was never any break. This happens with some regularity, and to varying degrees, from fifteen to fifty times an hour, according to your activities.

At various times many people do catch themselves, the experience being so vivid that it leaps the gap, so to speak, with perception so intense that even normal waking consciousness is made aware of it. These intervals are quite necessary to physical consciousness. They are woven through the fabric of your awareness so cleverly and so intimately that they color your psychic and feeling atmosphere. (Pause.)

Normal waking consciousness weaves in and out of this infinite supportive webwork. Your inner experience is so intricate that verbally it is almost impossible to describe. Normal waking consciousness, while having memory of itself, obviously does not retain all memory all of the time. It is said that memory of past events drops back into the subconscious. It is still intensely alive, and by alive I mean living and active, although you do not focus upon it.

Now: Periods of reverie and creative moments of consciousness both represent excellent entryways into these other areas. In the usual creative state of consciousness, the regular waking consciousness is suddenly supported by energy from these other areas. Waking consciousness alone does not give you the creative state. Indeed, normal waking consciousness can be as afraid of creative states as it is of blank states, for it can feel that the I is being thrust aside, can feel the upthrust of energy that it may not understand.