“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause, eyes closed.) While you believe, for example, that technology as you understand it (underlined) alone means progress, and that progress necessarily requires overriding physical manipulation of the environment that must forever continue, you will judge past civilizations in that light. This will blind you to certain accomplishments and other orientations to such an extent that you will not be able to see evidence of achievement when it appears before your eyes.

I have said (as at 9:48) that the body can indeed carry on, performing necessary maintenance activities while the main consciousness is detached from it. To some extent it can even perform simple chores. (Pause.) In sleep, in fact, it is not at all necessary that the main consciousness be alert in the body. Only in certain kinds of civilizations, for that matter, is such a close body-and-main-consciousness relationship necessary. There are other situations, therefore, in which consciousness ordinarily strays much further, returning to the body as a home station and basis of operation, relying upon it for certain kinds of perception only, but not depending upon it for the entire picture of reality. Physical life alone does not necessarily require the kind of identification of self with flesh that is your own.

This also has to do with pulsations of energy in which consciousness as you know it, now, exercises itself, using native abilities that cannot be expressed through physical orientation alone.