“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must again realize that we speak of the self as being so divided only for simplicity’s sake. While the self is whole, it is however compartmentalized for efficiency’s sake, but beneath consciousness the doors are open. Again, the conscious self is most necessary. However it cannot be stressed too strongly that consciousness is merely a state of focus, and not a self.

Consciousness is the direction in which the self looks at any given time.

That is perhaps the most important sentence of this session, and many others. For the direction or the focus of the self does indeed change, and even in your own daily lives you experience the fact that what is conscious today may not be tomorrow.

The self, in this manner, looks about. The direction in which the self looks is not the self. In dreams the self looks elsewhere, and the “I” is a conscious “I”, and the working ability is tremendous. The inner self perceives realities that it observes in many directions, being free from the intense focus within limited directions of camouflage existence.

Without dreams the whole self would have no way of holding its various manifestations together, and the so-called conscious present personality would soon falter. Imagine if you will now a band of men, some in cars with the high beams of the headlights gleaming, so that some generalized conditions can be seen; and some with low beams showing only the road that the automobiles directly pass. The men can be compared to personified areas of the subconscious, with partial vision of existing conditions.

Only in this case the man in the airplane, instead of a radio message, would radio directly into the mind mechanism of the men below, a dream drama in the coded symbols which would be interpreted automatically by the men below.

Now. The conscious self responds without knowing it, often changing course and direction, to these dreams of which he is often not aware. The ego, the conscious ego, the so-called conscious self, is only the front man in the front lines, supported by multitudinous areas or portions of himself that he does not know, and whose messages come to him only through the correspondence of dreams.

I am, again, not minimizing the practical necessity for the conscious self as it appears to be. But man is much more than the conscious self, and what he calls the conscious self is merely the whole self as seen through the direction in which the whole self chooses to direct its energies and focus.

A man stands in the center of a room. When he looks to the right you say “This is my conscious self.” When he looks to the left, we have something else again. You say “This is the dreaming self.” The dreaming self, or if you will, the left-handed self, indeed is as important as the so-called conscious self. The whole self merely changes direction and viewpoint, and focuses its energies along a particular line.

Our friend Ruburt prides himself that his conscious self, before the sessions began, started a book called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. Ha ha, did he really now?

Intellectually he followed the ideas, but his inner self gave him the all-important initial message. His poetry does not spring from the conscious self, yet he would not disinherit it for that reason. Intuition represents the directions of the inner self, breaking through conscious barriers.

Messages from the inner self if strong enough will pass through the conscious barriers, and the conscious ego is only too happy to receive them. But such intuitions have usually first appeared in dream form, appearing to the ego later; and many such messages appear in dreams ahead of time, to be released to the conscious mind when situations demand it.

(Jane well remembers the evening when she first consciously conceived Idea Construction, and so do I. Checking her manuscripts yields the date of September 10,1963, as when she made her first notes. I remember walking out to the living room where she writes her poetry, having finished my own work in my studio in the back of the apartment at about 9 PM; Jane’s first words were “Boy, have I got a great idea,” or to that effect. She then told me about idea construction, which I didn’t go for very much. Checking with her while writing this up, she said that she never did do any poetry that night; the idea came to her as she sat down to write poetry after supper, and she spent the evening on it.

Now. The conscious mind perceives matter. Yet even then it does not perceive matter directly, but by a very indirect path, and only because the whole self directs a certain portion of its energies in that direction.

The conscious self does not perceive, or the so-called conscious self does not perceive, the equally valid dream constructions. You will discover that the whole self is composed of many so-called conscious selves. But neither of those conscious selves are aware of the existence of the others.

The dreaming self, dear friends, is not aware of the conscious self. The whole self, the entire inner self alone, holds knowledge of the direction in which it moves. The directions can be likened to conscious selves. Any individual on the physical level who has achieved great things has done so because his so-called conscious self was intuitively (and underline the word intuitively) aware of the selves of which he could not be consciously aware.

Now, in any dream you will find a unifying image that will seem as diverse as this to the conscious mind. But it will speak to various portions of the self. In that dream you found the word tub referring to many various meanings, but in many cases you will find various other images, all cunningly connected so that it seems most unfortunate to you that the conscious mind cannot interpret them.

However, I have said that the conscious mind is but a small portion of the whole self, and the information thus received through dreams is automatically acted upon or assimilated, regardless of conscious cognition.

It is not as important as you may think, since oftentimes you act with more wisdom automatically, and the conscious mind is extremely slow to assimilate knowledge that the intuitions know by heart.