“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On Friday morning March 29, I told Jane that sometime during the previous night I had awakened with the certain knowledge that I’d just finished having two dreams at once. I retained conscious memory of one of them for just a moment before it irrevocably faded. Neither Jane nor I remembered hearing of, or experiencing, what I’ll call double dreaming. I wrote an account of the phenomenon while wondering if I’d distorted some quite ordinary dream happening — and while knowing at the same time that I hadn’t. I decided to ask Seth to discuss the two dreams when we went back to having sessions again, then forgot about them until I got around to rereading my first rough version of these notes last week. [When Seth discusses my “dreams” in this session, however, it turns out that from his perspective he’s able to be more accurate about labeling them than I was.]

To the entity, your own consciousness could be likened to one stream of consciousness, in your terms. The greater part of your own identity, then, is completely aware of all of your conscious and unconscious living material. It is also aware of the same kind of data from all of (its and your) parts.

Because you identify your experience with the regular line of consciousness with which you are familiar, you are rarely able to “bring in” any “other-self” material and hold it while retaining your own sense of identity. Such material may at times bleed or intrude into your own thought, where it blends and is not recognized. In such cases, it takes on the coloration of your own thought patterns. It adds to the overall atmosphere of your being. Without understanding or training, you would have to “lose” your own consciousness in order to perceive the “other-consciousness.”

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.

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.

(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.

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.

To a very limited extent, the different civilizations and cultures with which you are historically familiar represent a dim glimmering of the various qualities of consciousness and their varieties of experience. But as there are physical species, so there are what you may call species of consciousness also (intently).⁵

(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.

(Pause at 11:15.) In terms of your personal experience, the Sumari⁶ is a case in point. The members of each “species” — and you had better put that in quotes — of consciousness relate to physical experience in their characteristic ways, even viewing time, space, and action differently. They orient to their bodies in their own particular manners. Each group does possess a different relationship with the body, with nature, and with the world in general.

“As I walk into the kitchen the head of my dream self fills with vivid scenes, like other dreams, interpretations of each cell of this new awareness. I project all of this outward around me into literally hundreds of brilliant scenes; expressions, I knew, of probabilities, ‘past’ and ‘future’ events, sideways events I can’t even understand … all happening at once, with perfect comprehension of that by the ‘anchor’ dream self. I feel that while all of this is still coming from this anchor self, the selves in these dreams are equally as focused — each of them being dream selves, existing in their universes, and with each of their own connections expanding outwards in much the same way that mine do. I literally become the experience of being myself contained in all of these selves, while being these selves contained by me. In at least one of these selves, the knowledge of this entire event comes to consciousness like a half-recalled dream of its own, and the experience of recalling and being recalled is like liquid electricity in me, the anchor self.

“As for double dreams, yes, I do dream two at once sometimes. If you’ll go to page 144 of Strange Experience, you’ll find my account of two simultaneous dreams. In one of them I’m on a troop train [in World War II] traveling to Karachi, India, and in the other I’m asleep in a cold barrack. I wrote in the book that ‘I was conscious of every movement, sound, and odor on the train, yet conscious that I was in a barrack that was very chilly. I was also aware that both the train and the barrack were dreams, and that my body was in the chilly tent at Leesburg, Florida.’

5. Seth’s first use of “species of consciousness” came after 11:38 in the last session. And added later: He comes up with another evocative phrase, “civilizations of the psyche,” in the 715th session in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Much of that session can be taken as an extension of his material here on the qualities of consciousness that have existed on the earth. In the 715th session, Seth also lets fall some rather humorous comments on Jane’s own mixed reactions when she first encountered such hints of the “multidimensionality of your beings.”