“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Therefore, with such an unnatural division it seems to man that he does not know himself. He says “I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?” He says “I dream, but who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.” He cuts himself in half, then wonders why he is not whole. Even in my own lifetimes on your plane I sensed this basic contradiction. Man has consistently admitted to the evidence only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear, and in so doing he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half of himself I exaggerate. He is aware of only a third of himself, because two-thirds of himself exists in that realm to which he will not admit.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one who acts in the physical world and one completely separate who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing. This is not the case on all planes. It is not even the case on planes that you might consider lower than your own, nor is it the case with some portions of life that you consider beneath you on your own plane.

The part of you who dreams is the “I” as much as the part of you that operates in any other manner. The part of you who dreams is the part of you who breathes. And this part is certainly as legitimate and actually more necessary to you as a whole unit, as far as survival on your physical plane is concerned, than the part that also plays bridge or Scrabble. It would seem ludicrous to suppose that such a vital matter as breathing would be left to a subordinate and almost completely divorced poor-relative sort of a lesser personality.

Because you know that somehow you breathe, without consciously being aware of the actual mechanics being involved, you are forced despite your inclinations to admit that you do do your own breathing. When you cross a room you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to cross the room, even though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move or of stimulating one muscle or another; and yet even there, though you admit these things, you do not believe them. In your quiet unguarded moments you still say who breathes, who dreams, and even who moves? How much easier it would be to admit freely and wholeheartedly the simple fact that you are not consciously aware of important vital parts of yourself, and that you are more than you know you are.

You, or the part of you that you are pleased to call yourself, refuse to admit as part of yourself the “I” that is aware of every breath you breathe, every move you make, and every dream that you dream. In other words breathing and dreaming are not automatic, nor do they operate without your knowledge. Mankind simply refuses to admit the breather and the dreamer.

It is true that as a rule you are not aware of your whole entity, which as a rule does not reside within your boundaries. But there is no reason why you must be blind to the whole self of your present personality, which is part of your entity, and which can be glimpsed on your plane in terms of the breathing and dreaming self of which I have spoken.

Nor do I know all the answers. It is however a fact that even mankind, in his blundering manner, will discover that he himself creates his own physical universe, and that the mechanisms of the physical body have more functions and varieties than he knows. Nor in the sleeping state are these functions stilled. They continue in an even more direct form than they do when he is awake. He creates when he dreams in a truer and less distorted fashion, and his physical world is much more the product of his dreaming self than it is of his waking state.

This is one of the reasons why breathing seems automatic, and why dreaming seems to confound your physical camouflage idea of time. It is perfectly within your present capabilities to understand that time, to your dreaming self, is very much like time to your waking inner self. But you must first disconnect the physical concept of time and watches.

This concept is one of the easiest to explore, since as I have said your clock time is one of the most artificial of your camouflages. The time concept in dreams may seem far different than your conception of time in the waking state, when you have your eyes on a clock and are concerned with getting to some destination by, say, 12:15. But it is not so different from time in the waking state when you are sitting alone in a room with your thoughts, and with no particular need to get anywhere.

You will I am sure see the similarity now between this inner, alone sort of psychological time, experienced very often in waking hours, and the sense of time experienced in dreams. This is meant to show you but one more point of similarity between the waking and sleeping selves. In other words it is meant as another proof that they are indeed but one self, and that any divisions between them are artificial.