“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Dreaming two at once led me to write down a second question for Seth. I wanted him to enlarge upon the statement he’d made at 11:29 in the 690th session: “Further developments in your concepts will lead to greater activation in portions of the brain now not nearly utilized, and these in turn will trigger expansions in both psychic and biological terms.” I wondered what connection, if any, might exist between the capacity to have [and/or to remember] more than one dream at a time, and those “portions of the brain now not nearly utilized.”

At certain levels the brain can handle simultaneous material, of course, even though you may be conscious of only a smattering of it. The body is aware of multitudinous simultaneous stimuli that consciously escape you, and is able to act on the information. This includes all kinds of sense data that are not consciously pertinent. (Intently:) Because of the particular kind of ego-orientation that the race decided upon, however, many probabilities of development inherent in the species have been latent. Inherently the physical brain is capable of dealing with more than one main line of consciousness. This does not mean the development of dual personality, by the way. It means the further expansion of the concept of identity: “You” would not only be aware of the you that you have always known, in the same way that you are now, but a deeper sense of identity would also arise.

(To me:) You are, in a rudimentary fashion, beginning to open up those unused areas of the brain, or you would not have even been aware of the fact of two simultaneous dreams. Language and your verbal thought patterns make such translations highly difficult, however, even in the best of circumstances. A multilingual individual, in that regard at least, might have some idea of how concepts are structured through verbal pattern, and hence possess some additional freedom in such translations — provided of course that he or she was aware of the possibilities to begin with.

Now (quietly): In the waking state you would find such an experience highly threatening without some suitable preparation — and I must be very cautious in my treatment of your concepts of the self and your ideas of one-personhood.⁴

I am not speaking of you personally, Joseph, so much as I am emphasizing that the race at present identifies its individual being with highly limited concepts of the self. Those ideas are vigorously protected, and indeed must be understood and given honor even while attempts are made to expand them. Period. Certainly the quality of consciousness has changed through the centuries in many different ways, and sometimes in what would appear to be contradictory ones; but in your present you have nothing against which to compare your current consciousness of experience.

Give us a moment … (Still in trance, Jane lit a cigarette.) Your stratified concepts of one-personhood overlook all such inherent differences, however, and you have a tendency to transpose your own concepts whenever you come in contact with those whose ideas you cannot understand. Even now in some “tribal societies,” for example, the self is experienced far differently; so that, while so-called individuality as you understand it is maintained, each self is also experienced as a part of others in the tribe, and the natural environment. To some, this seems to mean that individuality is stillborn or undeveloped. You protect your ideas of selfhood at all costs — even against the evidence of nature, which shows you that all are related.