“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I told you that dreams played an important part in what you think of (underlined) as evolution. In a way, this is an extension of last evening’s session, but the art connection is important.

The dream state is (underlined) a statement of perception and communication. Men in one section of a continent dreamed of animals they had never physically seen, that inhabited other geographical areas. They dreamed of more fertile lands, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles in the distance. Their dreams incited them, then, toward physical exploration of their world.

Art was often used in the way you are using it now—at least to some extent in your case—as a method of defining such dream images, which were not necessarily to be found in the immediate environment at all. Some cave drawings are an example.

Art as painting or drawing was then an important element in what you think of as man’s evolution. When several different persons of a given tribe, say, dreamed of and drew similar animal images, then the people began to look for the physical materialization. Men dreamed their own maps in the same fashion, one man dreaming perhaps a certain portion, and several dreamers contributing their versions, drawing in sand in the waking state, or upon cave walls.

Drawing and painting during such periods was considered both sacred and immensely useful at the same time. There is indeed a kind of communal dream life, then, in which each individual contributes—a dream life in which both living and dead play a part, in your terms.

Now: in a fashion, for the sake of this discussion (underlined), the blacks as slaves partially represented the great creative, exuberant, unattached, unconscious powers that were to be restrained, at least for a while. Their belief in dreams, love of music and song, even a certain mystical feeling of connection with the land—these elements were allowed the Negroes only because they were not considered fully human. White men and women were not supposed to act like that.

In many past societies, soothsayers, dream experts, poets and artists were the most revered members, for they constantly replenished man’s creative abilities, allowed him to see his position within society and in the natural world with fresh eyes. He, or she, helped form the pattern for the society’s future developments, for its growth, for its give-and-take with nature.