“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) The sleepwalkers, as we will call them, were not asleep to themselves, and would seem so only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. Their [overall] primary experience was outside of the body. The physical corporal existence was a secondary effect. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli, the most focused experience, the most maintained purpose, the most meaningful activity, and the most organized social and cultural behavior. Now this is the other side of your own experience, so to speak. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. The main activity, then, involved consciousness apart from the body. In your terms, physical culture was rudimentary.

In some of their own private dreams, many of my readers will have discovered a reality quite as vivid as the normal one, and sometimes more so. These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. Under certain conditions, for example, consciousness can leave the corporal mechanism while it remains intact — functioning, but at a maintenance level. When optimum conditions return, then the consciousness reactivates the body. Such behavior is possible not only with the animals. In systems different from your own, there are realities in which physical organisms are activated after what would seem to you to be centuries of inactivity¹² — again, when the conditions are right. To some extent your own life-and-death cycles are simply another aspect of the hibernation principle as you understand it. Your own consciousness leaves the body almost in the same way that messages leap the nerve ends.¹³ The consciousness is not destroyed in the meantime.

Some individuals find themselves with memories of other lives, which are other days to the soul. Such persons then become aware of a greater consciousness reaching over those gaps, and realize that earthly experience can contain [among other things] a knowledge of existence in more than one body. Inherently then consciousness, affiliated with the flesh, can indeed carry such comprehensions. The mind of man as you know it shows at least the potential ability for handling a kind of memory with which you are usually not acquainted. This means that even biologically the species is equipped to deal with different sequences of time, while still manipulating within one particular time scheme. This also implies a far greater psychological richness — quite possible, again, within corporal reality — in which many levels of relationships can be handled. Such inner knowledge is inherent in the cells, and in ordinary terms of evolution is quite possible as a “future” development.