“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Under certain conditions, therefore, the body can maintain itself while the “main consciousness” is away from it. The body consciousness is quite able, then, to provide the overall equilibrium. At certain levels of the sleep state this does in fact happen. In sleepwalking the body is active, but the main consciousness is not “awake.” It is not manipulating the body. The main consciousness is elsewhere. Under such conditions the body can perform tasks and often maneuver with an amazing sense of balance. This finesse, again, hints at physical abilities not ordinarily used. The main consciousness, because of its beliefs, often hampers such manipulability in normal waking life.

It is equipped, as an animal is, to perform beautifully in its environment. You would call it mindless, since it would seem not to reason. For the purpose of this discussion alone, imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not diseased for any reason or defective by birth, but one without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that you have. There have been species of such a nature. In your terms they would seem to be like sleepwalkers, yet their physical abilities surpassed yours. They were indeed as agile as animals — nor were they unconscious.¹⁰ They simply dealt with a different kind of awareness.

(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.

(11:00. Jane’s trance had been excellent. She vaguely remembered that Seth had talked about “sleepwalkers.” I described the material briefly, then added, “It would be a joke if that information applied to our own ancestors, our cavemen, as we think of them.” Whereupon Jane said she thought it did at one level, but she didn’t elaborate.

As you become more expert at it, then purposely do something else at the same time — a physical activity, for instance. When most of you begin this exercise it will almost seem as if you were a sleepwalker yesterday. The precise, fine alignment of senses with physical activity will seem simply lost; yet as you progress the details will become clear, and you will find that you can at least hold within your mind certain aspects of yesterdays reality while maintaining your hold in today.

To other portions of yourself you would seem to be a sleepwalker. Full creative participation in any moment, however, awakens you to your own potentials, and therefore allows you to experience a unity between your own consciousness and the comprehension of your physical cells. Those cells are as spiritual as your soul is.

10. This material immediately reminded me that before the session tonight Jane and I had discussed Seth’s promise to answer the two questions I’d posed for him before sessions 698–99, in Volume 1. The question of interest here (I summarized them both in the notes following the 699th session) had to do with my inability to comprehend an “unconscious” species state. Not that I thought Seth was going out of his way to deal with such concepts tonight, but by the time he was through with his material on the sleepwalkers, I thought he’d considered at least one possible facet of my inquiry.