“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I will here repeat an old definition of many sessions back: Consciousness is the direction in which the self looks.

In sleep, when the ego is quieted, then the self looks in other directions. In sleep the self becomes conscious of its dreams, but this does not mean that the dreams have not existed while you were not conscious of them. Nor does it mean that they cease to exist when you are no longer conscious of them, for they have their own sort of molecular and electrical construction. But the ego cannot tune into that perceptive range.

(Among others, Seth talked about the direction of focus of consciousness in the 94th session. Volume 3.)

Nor is the dream itself a chaotic action, but a complicated and unique action by which symbols are chosen with such precise and careful attention that they have meaning to all levels of the inner self, and various levels of the subconscious. Here you will find clues as to many of your own conscious problems. Here with study and attention you will find information concerning your own previous lives, which the ego is not familiar with.

Through dreams the self communicates with the self, and with all layers of the self. For the self is not one concrete thing. The self has no boundaries, the self is not limited. Consciousness is the direction in which the self looks, again, but the ego is not aware of the whole self. The ego is not even familiar with the context or the meaning of your own dreams.

The ego cannot make your heart beat. Why then do you find it difficult to believe that you are more than the ego, for in dreams you meet portions of yourself. You construct realities, and you are indeed familiar with the dream universe that consciously you ignore. And your experience within the dream universe is as vivid and as valid and as real, in every respect, as your waking experience.

Nor are you indeed fully conscious, in your terms, even in your waking state.

You shut off stimuli to concentrate on other stimuli. This is a simplified example of how in the dream state you shut out stimuli usually accepted by the ego, and become conscious of other realities that you usually ignore in the waking state.

You do not hold them. They are indeed transmitted without your conscious knowledge, and the self expands. Nor is the self limited physically. Again, this idea is the result of your own habit of perception, for chemicals and air and nutrients that you consider not your self, enter the self constantly from the physical environment; and that which you consider yourself, leaves through the pores of the body.