“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

In a way, the one-line kind of consciousness that you have developed can be correlated with your use of any one language. Experience is programmed, highly specialized, and attains a seemingly tight organization only because (intently) it limits so much of reality. In those terms, if you are bilingual you are somewhat better off, for your thoughts have a choice of two paths. Biologically, you are physically capable of speaking any language now in use on the face of the earth. You would consider it an achievement if you learned to speak many languages. You would not find it frightening or unnatural, though you would take it for granted that some training was involved. In the same way, your one-line kind of consciousness is but one of many “languages.” The others are as native, as natural, as biologically feasible.

Many theories have been advanced throughout history to explain the origins of speech. Prior to the 17th century, extensive searches and studies were made for a “natural” or Adamic language, a basic form of human communication that was supposed to underlie all racial languages; no such universal protolanguage was ever isolated. As science now reaches back into human beginnings, the already scanty evidence gradually disappears, until finally it seems highly unlikely that the species will ever really know how or when its language and/or speech started.

5. As an artist I’m so used to observing our physical world in terms of forms, colors, shadows, shapes, and “negative shapes” — the patterns formed by areas between and around shadows or objects — that I sometimes have to remind myself of the obvious: that each individual in the world perceives it from his or her own viewpoint. How strange, I’ve found myself thinking, that Joe, say, doesn’t see our environment in artistic terms, since what I see is so plain to me. But then, I tell myself, Joe has a method of cognition that’s quite natural to him. If he loves flowers, for instance, he may enjoy more of a sheer emotional reaction through the appreciation of a rose than I can.