“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(10:43. Jane took a few moments to come out of a deep trance. Her delivery had been steady, almost fast. “I have a pretty good idea of what was said,” she told me. “And just before the session, I knew what Seth would say about your dream experience. Not that I could tell you now what he did say — but still I contained that knowledge somehow …” She also knew that the dream event tied in with my question about the “unused” portions of the brain.

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.

Uniqueness, private experience, and individuality attain their dimensions of being and their true grandeur only when the inherent relationships among all elements of being are understood. You fight against your own greater individuality, and the spacious dimensions of your own being, when you overprotect your ideas of selfhood by limiting the experience of the self.

I wrote in the Introductory Notes that I thought Jane’s speed in producing the Seth material was “a close physical approach to, or translation of, Seth’s idea that basically all exists at once — that really there is no time …” I’ll add here that the phenomenon of double dreaming can be another way of approximating the idea of simultaneous time (or lives), about which we as physical creatures always have so many questions.