“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Consciously, then, your world view is affected by the language of your culture or country. Certain sounds, inflections, and expressions, taken together, have a more or less precise meaning. The meaning is usually quite specific, and often directional. Words in a language function not only by defining what a specific object is, for example, but also by defining what it is not.⁴

(10:05.) To some extent in the dream state, you are freed of such cultural leanings. In the most effective of dreams experience is actually more direct, in that it is less limited by language concepts. Waking, you generally become familiar with your thoughts through words that are mental, automatically translating your thoughts into language. Your thoughts therefore fall, or flow, into prefabricated forms. In the dream state, however, thoughts are often experienced directly, colon: “You live” them out. You become what they are. They are projected instantly and in such a fashion. They escape the limitations that you often place upon them. That is why it is frequently difficult to remember your dreams in a verbal fashion, or squeeze them back into the expression of usual language. Period. Your language often purposely inhibits meaning.

Give us a moment … To some extent language does make the unknown known and recognizable. It sets up signposts that each person in a culture recognizes. To do this, however, it latches upon certain significances and ignores others. You might know the word for “rock” for instance. Knowing the word might actually prevent you from seeing any specific rock clearly as it is, or recognizing how it is different from all other rocks.

The freshness of dream experience lies in its direct nature. Your cultural world view does not have any clear understanding of the nature of dreams, so that their direct, clear expression is not recalled often in the morning. (Pause.) At night you tune in to dreaming reality simply by closing out so-called waking reality, but the same kind of dream experience continues beneath your focus in waking life. Dreaming, you are still aware of your daily experience, but it is seemingly peripheral. Waking, your dream experience is peripheral also, but you are less aware of that condition. Both together represent the dimensions of your consciousness, and they exist simultaneously. You can and often do work out in dreams the challenges of daily life. In waking life you are also working out challenges set for yourselves in the dream state. Obviously, then, your consciousness is equipped to function in the known and unknown realities, and the divisions that you have set up are quite arbitrary.

There are no basic dangers involved in alterations of consciousness without drugs, but artificial dangers can occur because of your cultural beliefs. These result because such individuals find themselves with no acceptable framework in which to correlate or understand their experiences. They try to fall back upon religious or scientific or pseudoscientific explanations.⁸