“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It “sings” with the quality of its own life. It cooperates with other cells. It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in a way it lends itself to that formation. (Pause.) The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. In the old terms of evolution. I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact. You would not have had (pause) any way (pause) of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations. You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

His dreams reminded him that a cold season had come, and would come again. Most of your inventions came in dreams, and, again, it is the nature of your dreams that makes you so different from other species.

(Then a minute later: “Another thing I just got was that when man was with other men in the physical world, he could point to stuff to share descriptions with others, but that he learned to really speak when he tried to describe dreams. It was the only way — speech — by which he could share data that couldn’t be seen. He could point to a tree and grunt, but there wasn’t anything in a dream he could point to. He had to have a method of expression to describe invisible things. Inventions could have come about when he tried to tell others what he saw in his dreams, too.”)

There were “modern,” or highly sophisticated civilizations, utilizing some technology, long before the dates given for the invention of writing (about 3100 BC). Writing was invented and reinvented the art lost, then reemerging.

[...] Almost any of your modern inventions at one time or another existed on the face of the earth in the past, in your terms. [...]

Nor is the invention of clock time the only such mutilating device mistakenly invented and used to protect one part of the self from the other. [...]

[...] It is a human invention of which your animals are blissfully ignorant.

[...] The clock time idea was invented by the conscious ego of man for many various reasons, with fear in the foreground.

Physical time, or that is clock time, was invented by man’s ego to protect the ego itself, because of the mistaken conception of dual existence—that is, because man felt that a predictable conscious self did the thinking and the moving, and an unpredictable almost automatic self did the breathing and dreaming. [...]

[...] Man’s inventiveness, often a partner to his duplicity, has also invented, then, a method to insure that no crimes can be hidden, and has taken steps to shine a spotlight upon those areas of life that blot man’s experience. [...]

[...] Despite the perhaps deplorable conditions being televised—whether of wars, massacres, graft, or whatever—the great inventiveness of man’s mind is responsible for that technological achievement. [...]

[...] In your dream, that reincarnational self may appear as a minor character, quite on the periphery of your attention, and if the dream were to include an idea, say, for a play or an invention, then that play or invention might appear as a physical event in both historic times, to whatever degree it would be possible for the two individuals living in time to interpret that information. [...] Abilities and inventions were not dependent upon human migrations, but those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams, telling tribes of men the directions in which better homelands could be found.

[...] In Jane’s final class, Rob read Seth’s explanation having to do with family ‘mergings.’ Right away, right there in class, I knew what was behind the feeling I’d had about this family: Members of the Grunaargh, and I personally, were involved in the invention of movable type. [...]

[...] I know that Gutenberg is credited with this invention, and probably rightly so; but I also feel this as one of those discoveries that appeared in several places at once, and that my beefy fellow’s shop was in the general vicinity of Gutenberg’s — in Germany? [...]

[...] Yet many inventions occur in a strange fashion, as men do at times travel into their own futures and bring back the memory of, say, gadgets existing there, which then in this life they “invent.”

[...] (Pause.) Your present technological advances can almost be dated from the [invention of] the printing press, to Edison’s inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. [...]

[...] His imagination allowed him to develop the use of tools, and gave birth to his inventiveness. [...]

[...] If that were all, then there would be no inventions. [...]

Give us a moment … Your father’s inventiveness would also be used in the same manner, as source material, by whichever self you chose to become. [...]

You imagine, however, that the male is aggressive, active, logical-minded, inventive, outwardly oriented, a builder of civilizations. [...]

[...] Qualities of inventiveness, curiosity, ingenuity, could not be delegated to one sex alone. [...]

[...] A man if possible should own his own business, provide a service for the community—and, again, inventiveness or creativity were to be wedded to those pursuits. Your father’s inventiveness, again, dealt often with mechanics.

I wanted to go into the invention of the soul, using mankind’s own terminology, the soul and the spirit being thought of as one and the same thing. [...]

[...] Instead, and to the contrary, this sense of duality besieges man as he becomes more inventive in a purely mechanical fashion.

Nor is there anything wrong in inventiveness itself. [...]

[...] You could invent a completely different way of regarding human health by numbering and defining each of those stages. [...]

(Long pause.) The ideas for inventions, tools or products exist mentally, to be brought into activation whenever they are required, say, by circumstances, or by the environment.

[...] Early man was in that same position, and his inventions—his tools, his artistry, and so forth—came into being from the inner, ever-present realm of the mind, triggered by his unconscious but quite real estimation of his position within the universe at large, and in regard to his own environment.

[...] All of the inventions that you often think now happened quite by chance—the discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the coming of the Iron Age or whatever—all of that inventiveness was the result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. [...]

[...] In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions.

Your father was inventive, his creativity in that line you felt dwarfed by family responsibility. [...]

[...] This applies obviously in the case of inventions. [...]

“Why did we invent clock time to begin with?” Rob asked.

It was invented by the ego to protect the ego, because of the mistaken conception of dual existence; that is, because man felt that a predictable, conscious self did the thinking and manipulating, and an unpredictable self did the breathing and dreaming. [...]