“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.”

Now, to begin with your dream: The entity is aware of the experiences of all of its personalities. Give us a moment …

There is a correlation here with something Ruburt said in [ESP] class last evening. He said that writing can be, first, a method of standing apart from life to some extent — in order to capture life, and preserve the unutterable uniqueness of any given day. But, he said, you can then discover that the writing itself becomes the day’s experience. You are then “lost” in the writing as much as you feared being lost in normal living, with no way to step aside and view the experience. My addition, now, to those remarks is this: You would need the creation then of another “self,” who stood aside from the writing self in order to preserve the original intent.

Now: In the same way you could not, practically speaking, experience such other-consciousness (with a hyphen) unless you learned to stand somewhat aside, like the writer in Ruburt’s remarks. Period. But even if you did, the very experience of other-consciousness itself would supersede your living space. You would need another self, able to hold both lines of consciousness at once, lost in neither but maintaining footing in each. This would be a very difficult achievement in normal life in any sustained fashion.

Now: In the dream state your specialized focus need not be as precise or time-oriented as in the waking state.

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.

That identity would contain the you that you have always known, and in no way threaten it. The new you would simply be more than you are now. You would just have another expansion of consciousness, another self-who-is-aware-of-being in the same way that — using an analogy, granted — the writer is aware of the self who lives, in those terms; is the self who lives while being in a position of some apartness, able to comment upon the life being lived.

Now in a very small way, admittedly, that analogy hints at the kind of deeper events that occur as selves are born out of selves to operate in various levels of activity. In the case of entities, each such self dwells entirely in its own dimension or system of reality.

Now: One experience was a dream of your own, in usual terms. The other “dream” experienced simultaneously was, instead, your muddled interpretation of vital experienced reality on the part of another portion of yourself, in another reality entirely; a dimensional bleed-through. Once you are aware of such experience, most likely you will also have others in “your” dream state.

Now: Take a break or end the session as you prefer.

(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.

(Jane was still very relaxed, so I asked her again if she wanted Seth to say something about her state. She decided to see what developed. Her head kept dipping down; she yawned, blinking; her hands, she said, felt “like water.” At times such signs have marked the beginning of a pronounced altered state of consciousness for her, but she added that she wasn’t going into “a psychedelic experience” now.

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

(11:08.) There are even now in your species a number of different kinds of consciousness; different in that the physical life-situation is qualitatively experienced in ways that are not native to you in your culture; different in that the entire fabric of meaning, interpretation, experience, and life itself is “alien” to the kind of experience with which you are familiar. This does not mean that such differences occur as the result of cultural backgrounds or situations, for some such individuals exist within your own culture, and some with your kind of consciousness exist in cultures where they are a minority. I am simply saying that on your earth now there are species of consciousness, though that is probably not the best term. You have been so obsessed with exterior differences, especially of color and nationality, that you have completely ignored these other far more important variations in the form that consciousness takes in relation to physical life within your race — the race of man.

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.

Now: That is the end of the session. My heartiest regards to you both.

2. A note added a month later: My surprise over the double-dream phenomenon continues, for by now I know of nine people (including Sue Watkins and myself), who have experienced either the same thing or closely related versions of it. Six people on the list attend ESP class; one is a close personal friend of Jane’s and mine; and two are strangers. Actually, we’ve heard of the strangers but haven’t met them. Both are professional writers, and their experiences with double dreams were relayed to me by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor.