“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The regularly scheduled session for last Wednesday night wasn’t held because of Jane’s very relaxed state. She’s been enjoying this letting-down often during the past couple of weeks. On Friday, however, while in an altered state of consciousness, she tuned into some material on Seth, dreams, and other species of consciousness; she calls it The Wonderworks, and excerpts from it are presented as Appendix 11.

These arts are useless if they are not practiced — useless in that they lie ever latent, that they are not brought out into the exterior framework of your world. To use these arts requires first of all the knowledge that beneath the world you know is another; that alongside the focus of consciousness with which you are familiar there are other focuses quite as legitimate.

You dream, each of you, but there are few great dream artists. Many of the true purposes of dreams¹ have been forgotten, even though those purposes are still being fulfilled. The conscious art of creating, understanding, and using dreams has been largely lost; and the intimate relationship between daily life, world events, and dreams almost completely ignored. The “future” of the species is being worked out in the private and mass dreams of its members, but this also is never considered. The members of some ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, knew how to be the conscious directors of dream activity, how to delve into various levels of dream reality to the founts of creativity, and they were able to use that source material in their physical world.²

Give us a moment … I said earlier in this book that the world you know arises from basic unpredictability, from which significances then emerge. ⁴ No system of reality is closed. The particular string of probable actions that you call your official experience does not just dangle, then, out in space and time — it interweaves with other such strands that you do not recognize. In the waking state the conscious mind must focus rather exclusively upon that one particular point of concentration that you call reality, simply so that it can direct your activities properly in temporal life. It is quite equipped, however, also to direct you to some extent in other levels of reality when it is not needed for specific survival duties.

Because you have in the past convinced yourselves that the conscious mind must of necessity be cut off from inner reality, you think that it must be alienated from the dream state. Following such beliefs, you find yourselves thinking of dreaming as chaotic, unreasonable, and as completely divorced from normal conscious direction, purpose, or function. It often seems that sleep is almost a small death, and psychologists have compared dreaming with controlled insanity.⁵ You have so divorced your waking and dreaming experience that it seems you have separate “lives,” and that there is little connection between your waking and dreaming hours. The rich tapestry of probable actions from which you choose your official life becomes just as invisible. This is quite needless.

(Seth’s last statement had to do with his contention that “hormones are also automatically released into the system, encouraging either periods of activity or tranquilizing periods, according to the specific portions of the overall process [of healing]. The dreams provide a steady give-and-take between conscious and so-called unconscious activity. This is also a time of deep unconscious creativity….”

“This point is extremely important. As you know, animals dream. What you do not know is that all consciousnesses dream. We have said that to some degree even atoms and molecules have consciousness, and each one of those minute consciousnesses forms its own dreams, even as on the other hand each one forms its own physical image. Now, as in the physical field individual atoms combine for their own benefit into more complicated structure gestalts, so do they also combine to form such gestalts, though of a somewhat different nature, in the dream world.

“It is essential that you realize that the dream world is a byproduct of your own existence. And because it is connected to you through chemical reactions, this leaves open the entryway of interactions, in animals as well as men. Since dreams are a by-product of any consciousness involved within matter, this leads us to the correct conclusion — that trees have their dreams, that all physical matter, being formed about individualized units of consciousness of varying degrees, also participates in the involuntary construction of the dream universe.”

5. Seth’s statement reminded me of an article I read in a newspaper a few years ago. Actually I’ve never forgotten it because of the negative impression it made upon me; I remember bringing it to Jane’s attention at the time. The piece was about a European psychologist, and included his considered opinion that “dreams are the junk of the mind.” Jane and I still think it amazing that a man in such a position could make a statement displaying so little insight….