“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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….