“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 does not mean that an alienation results in those realities — simply a relationship in which the body and consciousness relate to other events. Only your beliefs, training, and neurological indoctrination prevent you from recognizing the true nature of your consciousness while you sleep. You close out those data. In that period, however, at an inner order of events, you are highly active and do much of the interior mental work that will later appear as physical experience.

(Slowly at 11:43:) While your consciousness is so engaged, your body consciousness performs many functions that are impossible for it during your waking hours. The greatest biological creativity takes place while you sleep, for example, and certain cellular functions¹⁰ are accelerated. Some such disengagement of your main consciousness and the body is therefore obviously necessary, or it would not occur. Sleeping is not a by-product of waking life.

In greater terms you are just as awake when you are asleep, but the focus of your awareness is turned in other directions. As you know, you can live for years while in a coma, but you could not live for years without ever sleeping. Even in a coma there is mental activity, though it may be impossible to ascertain it from the outside. A certain kind of free conscious behavior is possible when you are not physically oriented as you are in the waking state, and that activity is necessary even for physical survival.

(With many pauses:) Give us a moment … Such a performance actually means that physical reality clicks off and on.¹¹ In your terms, it exists only in your waking hours. The inner work that makes it possible is largely done in the sleep state. The meeting of body consciousness and your main consciousness requires an intense focus, in which the greatest manipulations are necessary. Perceptions must be precise in physical terms. To some extent, however, that exquisite concentration means that certain limitations occur. Cellular comprehension is not tuned into by the normally conscious self, which is equally unaware of its own free-wheeling nature at “higher” levels. So a disengagement process must happen that allows each to regenerate. The consciousness then leaves the body. The body consciousness stays with it.

10. Perhaps I should have asked Seth to be more specific about those “certain cellular functions” that are accelerated in the sleep state, but I didn’t; I was tiring. It’s well known that parts of the brain are much more active when we sleep than when we’re awake, for instance, but I doubt that Seth was referring to such phenomena here.

The brain itself never sleeps, of course, since it’s endlessly involved in running the vastly complicated physiological functions of the body. Sleep for the conscious mind results when neural activity in the reticular activating system (the RAS), which screens the sensory information reaching consciousness, falls below a minimum level.