(See Appendix 6 for the material on parallel man, alternate man, and probable man that Jane began dictating to me shortly after last mid-night.

Over a period of time, this can bring about some conscious experience with probable realities. In the beginning the glimpses may be very brief, and the sense experience misty. Nevertheless, new patterns and cognitive endeavors are being set up between the neurological structure and the consciousness that you know.

Take any remembered scene from your own past. Experience it as clearly as possible imaginatively, but with the idea of its probable extensions. Sometime, immediately or after a few tries, a particular portion of the scene will become gray or shadowy. It is not a part of the past that you know, but an intersection point where that past served as an offshoot into a series of probabilities that you did not follow.

Instead of a shadowy element, you yourself may feel unsubstantial — “ghostly,” as Ruburt did. Period. Instead of any of those things, the imagined dialogue — if there is any — may suddenly change from the dialogue that you remember; or the entire scene and action may quickly alter. Any of these occurrences can be hints that you are beginning to glimpse the probable variations of the particular scene or action. It is, however, the subjective feeling that is the important clue here, and once you experience it there will be no doubt in your mind.

Some people will have little trouble with the exercise, and others will need to exert persistence before finding any success at all. (Pause.) This method is even more effective if you choose from your past a scene in which a choice was involved that was important to you.

In such a case, begin imaginatively, following through with the other decision or decisions that you might have made. At one point a shadowy effect — grayness, or other characteristics just mentioned — will occur. One or several of these may be involved, but again your subjective feeling is the most important clue. Imagination may bring you a clear picture, for example, that may then become fuzzy, and in that case the blurred quality would be your hint of probable action.

Until you have tried the exercise and become fully acquainted with it, you will not understand its effectiveness. You will know, for instance, when the remembered event and imagination intersect with another probability. Whether or not you have any great success, the exercise will begin a neurological reorientation that will be most important if you hope to glimpse realities that are outside of your present neurologically accepted sense-reality.

(Pause at 10:01.) This exercise is a mental and biological doorway that can expand both your concepts of yourself and reality. There may be instances in which it seems that little progress is made during the exercise itself. During the day, however, having made an important decision in one direction, you may begin to feel the reality of the opposite decision and its ramifications. The exercise may also result in a different kind of a dream, one that is recognized within the dream state, at least, as an introduction to a probable reality. You deal directly with future probabilities in the dream state in any case. (Pause.) For example, in a series of dreams you may try out various solutions to a given problem, and choose one of these.¹ That choice becomes your physical reality.

According to the intensity of the situation, now, another also desirable solution may be worked out in a probable reality. On an unconscious level you are aware of your probable selves, and they of you. You share the same psychic roots, and your joint yet separate dreams are available to “all of you.” This does not mean that you are dreaming someone else’s dream, any more than it means that twins, for example, do. It does mean that your probable selves and you share in a body of symbolism, background, and ability. The multistructured nature of the dream state allows for dream dramas in which probable selves do appear. They may appear as symbolically representing strong characteristics upon which they have focused, though you have ignored them.

(Slowly:) The dream state, however, does operate as a rich web of communication between probable selves and probable existences. All probabilities spring from inner reality, from the psyche’s own inner activity and structure. (Long pause.) The consciousness that you know can indeed now emerge into even greater realization of itself, but not by obsessively defending its old position. Instead it must recognize its power as the director of probable action, and no longer inhibit its own greater capacities.

In your terms, until now your consciousness has specialized in neurological patterning. As mentioned (in Session 682), this was extremely important while it learned the art of specialized focus. Now, however, it must begin to recognize that it can indeed expand, and bring into its awareness other quite legitimate realities. The nature of probabilities must be understood, for the time has come in the world as you experience it where the greatest wisdom and discrimination are needed. Your consciousness and neurological prejudice blind you to the full dimension of physical activity. The true implications of physical action are not as yet apparent to you.

(A one-minute pause at 10:23.) You are beginning to understand the reality of your planet. You cannot plunder it, for example — something you are only beginning to learn. Opening up your consciousness to previously denied messages would bring you in direct contact with other life-forms on your planet in a way that you have formerly denied yourselves. Your cellular knowledge of past and future probabilities alone would teach you a spiritual and corporal courtesy.

(Another one-minute pause.) Give us a moment … The “unknown” reality sustains you and the web of life as you understand it. Your conscious concepts must enlarge so that the conscious self can understand its true nature. As you think of it, consciousness is barely — barely — half developed. It has learned to identify with one small group of neurologically accepted responses. Portions of the brain not used lie latent, waiting for the recognition that will trigger them into activity (intently). When this happens, the mind will become aware of the rich bed of probabilities upon which the ego now rides so blindly.

The great latent-but-always-sensed dimensions of spiritualized creaturehood will then begin to flower. A few great men have glimpsed those abilities, comma, and their love of the race and their integrity had caused them to trigger the unused portions of the brain.² In their way they sensed the great probable future and its ramifications.

In centuries past they saw your present, though through their own vision, and so it was only partially the present as you know it. Your emotional reality truly leaps into its own only now and then, for your very concepts of yourselves deny the multidimensional aspects of your being. The need and the yearning to love and to know are both biologically present within you. They are present within the animals, and within a blade of grass.

In your probability you did allow the inner self some freedom. Therefore, the so-called egotistical consciousness was not given complete sway. It remained flexible enough so that even hidden in its god concepts⁴ there were symbols of greater reality. Your system deals with physical manipulability, again, and the translation of creativity into physical form. An exterior separation had to occur for a while, in which consciousness forgot, egotistically speaking, that it was a part of nature, and pretended to be apart.

You have put yourselves in a position where your consciousness must now become aware of the probable pasts and probable futures, in order to form for yourselves a sane, fulfilling, and creative present.

(11:26.) This does not mean that you will not endure, or that in another probability the race will not — but that in your terms of historical sequence, the race will not endure.

(Pause.) Speaking now in those historic terms that you understand, let me say that there was no single-line development from animal to man, but parallel lines, in which for centuries animal-man and man-animal coexisted cooperatively. In the same way now, unknown amongst you, many species of what you may call probable man⁶ dwell in embryo form.

Because of the ego’s particular line of development, you have experimented with artificial drugs and chemicals, both in foods and for medicinal purposes, as well as for “religious” enlightenment. Some of the effects of LSD⁷ and other artificial psychedelic drugs give you a hint of other probable directions your consciousness might have followed, or might still follow. As the experiments are conducted, however, and in the ignorance of the framework, the conscious mind takes a subordinate position. Instead, using methods other than drugs, it could be taught to expand its knowledge far more safely, to organize it in ways that could be most advantageous. Still, some of the experiments do give hints of certain aspects of one of the species’ probable developments.

(Very intently:) You cannot do anything, literally, that is not natural. Nevertheless, over a period of time “artificial” chemicals taken with food into the body will form a new kind of nature, in your terms. Your bodies are beautifully equipped, and will turn almost anything to their advantage. According to many schools of thought, artificial drugs, so-called, or chemicals, are considered in a very negative light, cutting you off from nature. Yet such experiments represent a strong line of probability only in its “infancy,” in which man could sustain himself without draining the earth, live without killing animals, and literally form a new kind of physical structure connected to the earth, while not depleting its substance.

This does not mean that some biological confusion might not result in the meantime. It does mean that even in those terms, and consciously unknowing, mankind is experimenting with a probable species and working out quite spiritual issues. Your probable futures and your probable pasts, in larger terms, exist at once. I will begin by explaining your history to you, at least to some extent, in the historical terms you recognize. To that degree, I hope to make your unknown reality consciously known.

(Pause at 11:58.) As I describe some of early man’s past in historic terms, I will also show how that “heritage” is alive in your daily experience with the world as you know it. Period.

The archaeology of the soul and the blood is not buried, but alive in your experience. A photograph is no more a relic than a fossil is. Each is filled with the energy of being. Neither is buried in a past beyond your knowing. A photograph lives in the present of your psyche, and a fossil in the living vitality of your cells (spelled).

PARALLEL MAN, ALTERNATE MAN, AND PROBABLE MAN: THE REFLECTION OF THESE IN THE PRESENT, PRIVATE PSYCHE.

(12:01.) Now: Section 2: “Parallel Man, Alternate Man, and Probable Man,” colon: “The Reflection of These in the Present, Private Psyche.” That is the heading.

2. I’d say that when he talks about the “unused portions of the brain,” that physical organ, Seth means qualities of nonphysical mind as well. We still have much to learn about the brain (let alone the mind); even though by now all sections of the brain have been probed down to the molecular level, no trace or imprint of a thought has ever been found within its tissue. As an analogy, the innate knowledge of probabilities that Seth postulates here may be related to the brain in the same way that memory evidently “happens” throughout its parts, instead of being localized in just one of them.

For material on mental and psychic expansions in old age, and the hemispheres of the brain, see the 650th session in Chapter 13 of Personal Reality. And in Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks, Seth briefly mentions the eventual activation of “new areas” in the brain to “physically take care of” past-life memories. See the 586th session at 11:02.

4. For material on probabilities, the god concept, and religion, see chapters 14–17 and 21 in Seth Speaks, and Chapter 17 in Adventures in Consciousness.