“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the dream state you range beyond your waking world view. You are able to bring into focus other interests and activities. These can remain in the background during waking life — or you can decide to enlarge your world view by taking advantage of your dreaming activities. Many of the exercises given here are geared in that direction.

You are not alone in physical reality, so obviously your picture of the world is also affected by the world views of others, and you play a part in their experiences. There is a constant waking give-and-take. The same give-and-take occurs in the dream state, however. You affect your world through your dreams, then, as much as you do through your waking activities. In terms of time, lapses had to occur as various species physically matured and developed. They did so in response to inner impetus. The many languages that are now known originated in what you can call, from your point of view, nonwaking reality. Words, again, are related to the neurological structure, and languages follow that pattern. In the dream state many kinds of communication occur, and there are inner translations. Two people with different languages can speak together quite clearly in certain dreams, and understand each other perfectly. They may each translate the communication into their familiar language.

(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.

The play of sunlight or shadow upon any given rock may utterly escape you.⁵ You will simply pass it by under the category of “rock.” In the dream state you might find yourself sleeping on a sunwarmed rock, or climbing on icy ones. You might feel yourself encased in a rock, with your consciousness dispersed. You might have any number of different experiences involving rocks, all quite liberating. After such an experience you might look at rocks in an entirely different fashion, and see them in ways that escape your language. Rocks give forth sounds that you do not hear, for example, yet your language automatically limits your perception of what any rock is. To some extent words come between you and your direct expression. They should and can express that experience instead.

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.

(Pause at 11:01.) You may understand that many of your dreams have a symbolic meaning. It may escape you, however, that the objects with which you surround yourself in physical life also have symbolic meanings — only these are three-dimensional. You may spend time trying to understand the nature of dreams and their implications, without ever realizing that your physical life is to some extent a three-dimensional dream. It will faithfully mirror your dream images at any given time.

Your physical life and your dreaming life are so intimately connected that it can be misleading to say what I am about to say, colon: that waking experience springs from the unknown dream reality. On the one hand the statement is indeed true. On the other hand, the intricate inner workings make it impossible to separate one from the other. “Reality” operates basically, however, in a way that is perceived more clearly in the dream state. Freedom from time and place, the wider kind of communication, the great mobility of consciousness — all of these experiences under dreaming conditions are characteristic of the basic nature of reality — whereas your waking experience provides limitations that are indicators of certain conditions only. Period.

To some extent the greater expression of consciousness can be experienced under usual waking conditions, but only when a personality is flexible enough and secure enough to alter the focus of consciousness. This way, other unperceived data become available. The unknown reality is not beyond your experience, therefore. Any of your scientific or religious disciplines could benefit from a study of the dreaming consciousness, for there the basic nature of reality exists as clearly as you can perceive it. The inner condition of dreaming is valid. You find yourselves in other times and places because basically neither time nor space exists as you suppose.⁷

The English itself, however, then becomes charged, freshened with new concepts, carrying within a strangeness that itself alters the relationship of the words. This is a dream or trance language. It is as native to its level of consciousness as English is to your own — or Indian, or Chinese, or whatever. The various focuses of consciousness will have their own “languages.” Ruburt has discovered that beneath the Sumari there are deeper meanings.¹¹ He has become aware of what he calls long and short sounds. Some come so quickly that he cannot keep track, or speak them quickly enough. Others are so slow that he feels a sentence would take a week to utter.¹² These are the signatures of different focuses of consciousness as they are transposed in your space-time system.

(Pause at 11:43.) Languages express certain kinds of reality, usually by organizing experience verbally and mentally. In your case, again, a certain neurological prejudice occurs. If you experienced greater instances of out-of-body consciousness, for example, then your verbal expressions of space and time would automatically change. If you became aware of more of your dreaming experience, your language would automatically expand. Again automatically, you would also become aware of other neurological patterns than those you use. These (intently), activated, would then be picked up by your scientific instruments, and therefore change your ideas in such fields.

7. Seth has said all of this in various ways before, of course, since he began coming through Jane almost exactly 11 years ago — yet to my mind the four paragraphs just given contain some of his most important material in the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality. Certainly it buttresses any of his dream information in Volume 1.