JUST SETH

DREAMS, “EVOLUTION,” AND VALUE FULFILLMENT, VOLUME I

    This book will be my most ambitious project thus far. Period.
    It may be said by some that any book at all is an ambitious endeavor, when it originates from a psychological source so far divorced from your ordinary ideas of creativity. It is one thing, for example, for a physical writer to produce a manuscript—and even that kind of creativity involves vast and hidden psychological maneuvers that never appear in the manuscript itself.
    As most of my readers know, I make no claims of now having a physical personhood. I do claim an independent reality at another level of existence. My status and origins seem strange only because you have understood so little about your own origins. I am beginning this book this evening. I have already given the title, and at another level of consciousness Jane Roberts was able (12 days ago, for example) to perceive some glimpses of some of the subject matter that will be included here. So far, however, physically there is only the page of paper upon which Robert Butts is writing down these words I speak.
    Someday, in terms of time, there will be a thick book. Although the manuscript does not yet exist in a physical book, the book itself, the ideas and words, are in the most important fashions quite real now. Certain qualities are implied in all kinds of creativity that are generally overlooked, and so they are not apparent. The kind of creative procedures we are involved in can serve to bring some of those qualities to light, and to shed illumination upon many aspects of the human psyche that usually remain hidden.
    I speak through Ruburt—or through Jane Roberts, if you prefer. Ruburt has his own creative abilities, and uses them well, and it is to a large extent because of those abilities that our contact first took place (in December 1963). Scientists like to say that if you look outward at the universe, you look backward in time. That statement is only partially true. When you move inward through the psyche, however, you do begin to thrust, in your terms, “backward” toward the origins of existence. Your creative abilities do not simply allow you to paint pictures, to tell or write stories, to create sculpture or architecture. They do not simply provide you with a basis for your religions, sciences, and civilizations. They are your contact with the source of existence itself.
    They provide the power that allows you to form a belief system to begin with.
    Now: While you believe that consciousness somehow emerges from dead matter, you will never understand yourselves, and you will always be looking for the point at which life took on form. You will always have to wonder about a kind of mechanical birth of the universe—and it will indeed seem as if your own world was made up of the spare parts that somehow fell together in just such a fashion so that life later emerged.
    You are filled with questions about when and where the various species appeared, and how the rocks were formed, when some reptiles grew wings, when some fish emerged from the oceans and learned to breathe air, and you are bound to wonder what happened in the times in between.
    How many reptiles tried for wings, for example, and failed, or could not fly—or how many millions of reptiles did it take, and how many trials, before the first triumphant bird flew above the landscape? How many fish died with only half-formed lungs, who were too far from the water’s edge to dip again beneath the waves? Or how many fish flopped backward to the water, finding themselves in such an in-between stage that they could no longer live in the water nor breathe the air?
    So in those terms, how many water dwellers died before the first mammal stood securely with fully completed lungs, breathing earth’s early air?
    Scientists say now that energy and matter are one. They must take the next full step to realize that consciousness and energy and matter are one.
    In this book, then, we will look at the origin of the universe, the origin of the species, the origin of life from another viewpoint. This viewpoint will, I hope, provide another framework through which you can understand and study physical reality, your part in it, and sense the immense creative complexity that unites each individual with the source of consciousness itself.
    To do this, I hope to explore a more meaningful concept of evolution¹—and that concept must involve a discussion of subjective reality and its effect upon the “evolution” of man’s consciousness.
    The universe did not originate from what you like to think of as an external, objectified source. Your own physical body provides you with sturdy corporal images, exterior presentations. Your dreams do not suddenly appear exteriorized upon your images in place of your features, for example. They remain hidden. Your dreams appear on the interior screen of your mind.
    I never want any of my remarks to be construed in such a fashion that it seems I am in any way negating the fullness, validity, and magnificence of physical existence. I do want to point out, however, that a state you usually call dreaming is but a dim indication of an inner reality of events, an inner order of events from which the physical world emerges. I hope to show how the nature of dreams has helped shape man’s consciousness. I hope to show that consciousness forms the environment, and not the other way around.
    I hope to show that all species are motivated by what I call value fulfillment, in which each seeks to enhance the quality of life for itself and for all other species at the same time.
    This further unites all species in a cooperative venture that has remained largely invisible because of beliefs projected outward upon the world by both your sciences and religions, generally speaking. All of your grandest civilizations have existed first in the world of dreams. You might say that the universe dreamed itself into being.
    Generally speaking, the states of waking and sleeping are the only levels of consciousness with which you have been primarily concerned. It seems to you that this is the result of your evolutionary progress —but there have been civilizations upon the earth that specialized in the use of many focuses of consciousness, as for example you are focused upon the use of tools.
    Dreams can be highly specific. They can be used to provide sources of information. I hope to show their practical importance, both as a part of man’s “evolutionary development” and their possibilities in what you think of as modern life. The answers are where you have least looked for them. The universe is still being created, even as each person is in each moment.

1. Recently, I bought two books written by “scientific creationists.” The authors strongly disagree with ideas of evolution. I’ve read halfway through one of the books, and have discussed it with Jane to some extent. After the session I suggested that she start reading it also, in order to acquaint herself with theories radically different from the “ordinary” scientific ones espoused by evolutionists. Very briefly: The creationists believe that God created the universe (including the earth, obviously) around 10,000 years ago. They maintain that all of the earth’s living forms have remained essentially unchanged since that prime creative event; they can account for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, for example, and the vast number of other life forms we no longer see around us. On the other hand, evolutionary science believes that the universe came into being between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago; that the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old, and that according to the fossil record and other evidence, its living organisms first arose and began evolving at least 3.5 billion years ago. Science also believes, however, that the study of a “first cause” involves not scientific but philosophical and theological questions. For instance, why did the universe we think we know so well come into existence at all, and what was the cause of that beginning?
    I know that Jane is interested in the book in question, but also a bit afraid of it: “I don’t want to be so influenced by it—or by any other book—that it starts coming out in the material,” she’s said more than once recently. I agree, since I think that in their own ways the views expressed by the scientific creationists are just as limited as those held by the conventional scientific establishment. But Jane has an excellent critical mind. I’m not concerned that anything she reads will unduly influence her—or Seth.

    Now. The universe will begin yesterday. The universe began tomorrow. Both of these statements are quite meaningless. The tenses are wrong, and perhaps your time sense is completely outraged. Yet the statement: “The universe began in some distant past,” is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.
    In fact, the first two statements, while making no logical sense, do indeed hint of phenomena that show time itself to be no more than a creative construct. Time and space are in a fashion part of the furniture of your universe.
    The very experience of passing moments belongs to your psychological rooms in the same way that clocks are attached to your walls. Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe, they search for it in the past. The universe is being created now. Creation occurs in each moment, in your terms. The illusion of time itself is being created now. It is therefore somewhat futile to look for the origins of the universe by using a time scheme that is in itself, at the very least, highly relative.
    Your now, or present moment, is a psychological platform. It seems that the universe began with an initial burst of energy of some kind (the “big bang”). Evolutionists cannot account for its cause. Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger dimension of reality, and that he created the universe while being himself outside of it. He set it into motion. Many individuals, following either persuasion, believe that regardless of its source, the [universe]^1[882] must run out of energy. Established science is quite certain that no energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed (as stated in the first law of thermodynamics). Science sees energy and matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under varying circumstances.
    In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with the idea of an objectively created universe. Either God “made it,” or physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.
    Instead, consciousness formed matter. As I have said before, each atom and molecule has its own consciousness. Consciousness and matter and energy are one, but consciousness initiates the transformation of energy into matter. In those terms, the “beginning” of your universe was a triumph in the expansion of consciousness, as it learned to translate itself into physical form. The universe emerged into actuality in the same way, but to a different degree, that any idea emerges from what you think of as subjectivity into physical expression.
    The consciousness of each reader of this book existed before the universe was formed—(in your terms)— but that consciousness was unmanifest. Your closest approximation —and it is an approximation only—of the state of being that existed before the universe was formed is the dream state. In that state before the beginning, your consciousness existed free of space and time, aware of immense probabilities. This is extremely difficult to verbalize, yet it is very important that such an attempt be made. Your consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative process.
    I will purposely avoid using the word “God” because of the connotations placed upon it by conventional religion. I will make an attempt to explain the characteristics of this divine process throughout this book. I call the process “All That Is.” All That Is is so much a part of its creations that it is almost impossible to separate the “creator from the creations,” for each creation also carries indelibly within it the characteristics of its source.
    If you have thought that the universe followed a mechanistic model, then you would have to say that each portion of this “cosmic machine” created itself, knowing its position in the entire “future construction.” You would have to say further that each portion came gladly out of its own source individually, neatly tailored to its position, while at the same time that individual source was also as intimately the source of each other individual portion.
    I am not saying that the universe is the result of some “psychological machine,” either, but that each portion of consciousness is a part of All That Is, and that the universe falls together in a spontaneous, divine order—and that each portion of consciousness carries within it indelibly the knowledge of the whole.
    The birth of the world represented a divine psychological awakening. Each consciousness that takes a part in the physical universe dreamed of such a physical existence, in your terms, before the earth was formed. In greater terms than yours, it is quite true to say that the universe is not formed yet, or that the universe has vanished. In still vaster terms, however, the fact is that in one state or another the universe has always existed.
    Your closest approximation of the purpose of the universe can be found in those loving emotions that you have toward the development of your children, in your intent to have them develop their fullest capacities.
    Your finest aspirations can give you some dim clue as to the great creative thrust that is behind your own smallest act, for your own smallest act is possible only because your body has already been provided for in the physical world. Your life is given. In each moment it is renewed. So smoothly and effortlessly do you ride that thrust of life’s energy that you are sometimes scarcely aware of it. You are not equipped with a certain amount of energy that then wears out and dies. Instead you are, again, newly created in each moment.
    Now: You cannot prove scientifically that [your] world was created by a god who set it into motion, but remained outside of its dominion. Nor can you prove scientifically that the creation of the world was the result of a chance occurrence—so you will not be able to prove what I am going to tell you either. Not in usual terms.
    I hope however to present, along with my explanations, certain hints and clues that will show you where to look for subjective evidence. Period.
    You live your lives through your own subjective knowing, to begin with, and I will try to arouse within your own consciousnesses memories of events with which your own inner psyches were intimately involved as the world was formed—and though these may appear to be past events, they are even now occurring.
    Before the beginning of the universe, we will postulate the existence of an omnipotent, creative source. We will hope to show that this divine subjectivity is as present in the world of your experience as it was before the beginning of the universe. Again, I refer to this original subjectivity as All That Is. I am making an attempt to verbalize concepts that almost defy the edges of the intellect, unless that intellect is thoroughly reinforced by the intuition’s strength. So you will need to use your mind and your own intuitions as you read this book.
    All That Is, before the beginning contained within itself the infinite thrust of all possible creations. All That Is possessed a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings, dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what?
    The experience, the subjective universe, the “mind” of All That Is, was so brilliant, so distinct, that All That Is almost became lost, mentally wandering within this ever-flourishing, evergrowing interior landscape. Each thought, feeling, dream, or mood was itself indelibly marked with all of the attributes of this infinite subjectivity. Each glowed and quivered with its own creativity, its own desire to create as it had been created.
    Before the beginning there existed an interior universe that had no beginning or ending, for I am using the term “before the beginning” to make matters easier for you to assimilate. (That same infinite interior universe exists now, for example.)
    All That Is contained within itself the knowledge of all existences, with their infinite probabilities, and “as soon as” All That Is imagined those numberless circumstances, they existed in what I will call divine fact.
    All That Is knew of itself only. It was engrossed with its own subjective experiences, even divinely astonished as its own thoughts and imaginings attained their own vitality, and inherited the creativity of their subjective creator. [Those thoughts and imaginings] began to have a dialogue with their “Maker” .
    Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts—and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to respond to these “generations” of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also. There was no time, so all of this “was happening” simultaneously. The order of events is being simplified. In the meantime, then, in your terms, All That Is spontaneously thought new thoughts and dreamed new dreams, and became involved in new imaginings—and all of these also related to those now-infinite generations of interweaving and interrelating thoughts and dreams that “already” existed.
    So beside this spontaneous creation, this simultaneous “stream” of divine rousing, All That Is began to watch the interactions that occurred among his own subjective progeny. He listened, began to respond and to answer a thought or a dream. He began to purposefully bring about those mental conditions that were requested by these generations of mental progeny. If he had been lonely before, he was no longer.
    Your language causes some difficulty here, so please accept the pronoun “he” as innocuously as possible. “It” sounds too neutral for my purpose, and I want to reserve the pronoun “she” for some later differentiations. In basic terms, of course, All That Is is quite beyond any designations having to do with any one species or sex. All That Is, then, began to feel a growing sense of pressure as it^{1 [883]} realized that its own ever-multiplying thoughts and dreams themselves yearned to enjoy those greater gifts of creativity with which they were innately endowed.
    It is very difficult to try to assign anything like human motivation to All That Is. I can only say that it is possessed by “the need” to lovingly create from its own being; to lovingly transform its own reality in such a way that each most slight probable consciousness can come to be; and with the need to see that any and all possible orchestrations of consciousness have the chance to emerge, to perceive and to love.
    We will later discuss the fuller connotations of the word “love” as it is meant here, but this chapter is a kind of outline of other material to come.
    All That Is, then, became aware of a kind of creative tumult as each of its superlative thoughts and dreams, moods and feelings, strained at the very edges of their beings, looking for some then-unknown, undiscovered, as of then unthought-of release. I am saying that this mental progeny included all of the consciousnesses that [have] ever appeared or will appear upon your earth—all tenderly couched: the first human being, the first insect—each with an inner knowledge of the possibilities of its development. All That Is, loving its own progeny, sought within itself the answer to this divine dilemma.
    When that answer came, it involved previously unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All That Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible progeny to see what conditions were needed for this even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity. What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner realm? When All That Is, in your terms, put all of those conditions together it saw, of course, in a flash, the mental creation of those objective worlds that would be needed—and as it imagined those worlds, in your terms, they were physically created.
    [All That Is] did not separate itself from those worlds, however, for they were created from its thoughts, and each one has divine content. The worlds are all created by that divine content, so that while they are on the one hand exterior, they are on the other also made of divine stuff, and each hypothetical point in your universe is in direct contact with All That Is in the most basic terms. The knowledge of the whole is within all of its parts—and yet All That Is is more than its parts.
    Divine subjectivity is indeed infinite. It can never be entirely objectified. When the worlds, yours and others, were thus created, there was indeed an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity.
    The first “object” was an almost unendurable mass, though it had no weight, and it exploded, instantaneously beginning processes that formed the universe—but no time was involved. The process that you might imagine took up eons occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the initial objective materialization of the massive thought of All That Is burst into reality. In your terms this was a physical explosion—but in the terms of the consciousnesses involved in that breakthrough, this was experienced as a triumphant “first” inspirational frenzy, a breakthrough into another kind of being.
    The earth then appeared as consciousness transformed itself into the many facets of nature. The atoms and molecules were alive, aware— they were no longer simply a part of a divine syntax, but they spoke themselves through the very nature of their being. They became the living, aware vowels and syllables through which consciousness could form matter.
    But in your terms this was still largely a dream world, though it was fully fashioned. It had, generally speaking, all of the species that you now know. These all correlated with the multitudinous kinds of consciousnesses that had clamored for release, and those consciousnesses were spontaneously endowed by All That Is with those forms that fit their requirements. You had the birth of individualized consciousness as you think of it into physical context. Those consciousnesses were individualized before the beginning, but not manifest. But individualized consciousness was not quite all that bold. It did not attach itself completely to its earthly forms at the start, but rested often within its “ancient” divine heritage. In your terms, it is as if the earth and all of its creatures were partially dreaming, and not as focused within physical reality as they are now.
    For one thing, while individualized consciousness was within the massive subjectivity of All That Is, it enjoyed, beside its own uniqueness, a feeling of supporting unity, a comforting knowledge that it was one with its source. So in the beginning of [your] world, consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing urgently at the start, but not quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem.
    You had the sleepwalkers,^{2 [883]} early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms.
    For one thing, early man needed to rely upon his great inner knowledge.
    All of the species began by emphasizing a great subjective orientation that was most necessary as they learned to manipulate within the new physical environment.
    We are sitting here on a specific autumn evening. I am obviously dictating this book, speaking through Ruburt, while Joseph sits on the couch across from a very specific coffee table, taking down my words.
    This is the year 1979, and the idea of time and of dates seems to be indelibly mixed into [everyone’s] psychology. You can remember last year, and to some extent recall the past years of your lives. It appears to you that your present consciousness wanders backward into the past, until finally you can remember no longer—and on a conscious level, at least, you must take the very event of your birth under secondhanded evidence. Few people have conscious memory of it.
    For the purposes of our discussion, I must necessarily couch this book to some degree in the framework of time. I must honor your specifics. Otherwise you would not understand what I am trying to say. Even though this book is being dictated within time’s tradition, therefore, I must remind you that basically that tradition is not mine—and more, basically, it is not yours either.
    I used the term “before the beginning,” then, and I will speak of earth’s events in certain sequences. In the deepest of terms, however, and in ways that quite scandalize the intellect when it tries to operate alone, the beginning is now. That critical explosion of divine subjectivity into objectivity is always happening, and you are being given life “in each moment” because of the simultaneous nature of that divine subjectivity.
    We will nevertheless call our next chapter “In the Beginning,” laying certain events out for you in serial form. I hope that in other portions of this book certain mental exercises will allow you to leap over the tradition of time’s framework and sense with the united intellect and intuitions your own individual part in a spacious present that is large enough to contain all of time’s segments.
    Now: In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.^1[886] In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological gestalt—and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word “being,” since it is the source from which all being emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension, a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multiloving constant focus. Your conceptions of beginnings and endings make an explanation of such a situation most difficult, for in your terms the beginning of the [universe] is meaningless—that is, in those terms there was no beginning.
    The [universe] is, as I explained, always coming into existence, and each present moment bring its own built-in past along with it. You agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available data that compose any moment individually or globally. You accept only those data that fit in with your ideas of motion in time. As a result, for example, your archeological evidence usually presents a picture quite in keeping with your ideas of history, geological eras, and so forth.
    The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term “conscious mind” as you define it, for you allow it to accept as evidence only those physical data available for the five senses—while the five senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat² view of reality, that deals with the most apparent surface.
    The physical senses are the extensions of inner senses³ that are, in one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of communication. The cells, then, possess inner senses. Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your] world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases—nor was the world, again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you, and better models coming every geological season. The universe formed out of what God is.
    The universe is the natural extension of divine creativity and intent, lovingly formed from the inside out—so there was consciousness before there was matter, and not the other way around. In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.
    Your consciousness will survive your body’s death, but it will also take on another kind of form—a form that is itself composed of “units of consciousness.” You have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. The divine gestalt, however, is expressed in such a way that its quality is undiluted. It cannot be watered down, so that in basic terms one portion of existence is somehow up or down the scale from another. It is all Grade A.
    You limit the capacity of your conscious mind by refusing to allow it to use a larger scope of attention, so that you have remained closed and ignorant about the different, varied, but rich experiences of other species: They do appear beneath you. You have allowed a certain stubborn literal-mindedness to provide you with definitions that served to categorize rather than illuminate other realities beside your own.
    In the beginning, then, there was a subjective world that became objective. Matter was not yet permanent, in your terms, for consciousness was not yet as stable there. In the beginning, then, there was a dream world, in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality, and gradually became awake within that world.
    Mountains rose and tumbled. Oceans filled. Tidal waves thundered. Islands appeared. The seasons themselves were not stable. In your terms the magnetic fields themselves fluctuated— but all of the species were there at the beginning, though in the same fashion, for as the dream world broke through into physical reality there was all of the tumultuous excitement and confusion with which a mass creative event is achieved. There was much greater plasticity, motion, variety, give-and-take, as consciousness experimented with its own forms. The species and environment together formed themselves in concert, in glorious combination, so that each fulfilled the requirements of its own existence while adding to the fulfillment of all other portions of physical reality.
    That kind of an event simply cannot fit into your concepts of “the beginning of the world,” with consciousness arising out of matter almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a divine but mechanistic natural world.
    Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil, as I will explain later in this book. God, or All That Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the contradiction that seems to be presented to your minds. In a sense, however, a creative product, say, helps complete an artist, while of course the artist can never be completed. All That is, or God, in a certain fashion, now—and this is qualified—learns as you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. We must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too easily, but in a basic sense you all carry within yourselves the undeniable mark of All That Is—and an inbuilt capacity—capacity—to glimpse in your own terms undeniable evidence of your own greater existence. You are as close to the beginning of [your] world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the moment.
    I have a purpose in this book—for this is dictation—and that purpose is to change your ideas of yourselves, by showing you a truer picture of your history both in terms of your immortal consciousness and your physical heritage.
    When I speak of the dream world, I am not referring to some imaginary realm, but to the kind of world of ideas, of thoughts, of mental actions, out of which all form as you think of it emerges. In actuality this is an inner universe rather than an inner world. Your physical reality is but one materialization of that inner organization. All possible civilizations exist first in that realm of inner mind.
    In the beginning, then, the species did not have the kinds of forms they do now. They had pseudoforms— dream bodies, if you prefer—and they could not physically reproduce themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. In your terms, this meant that time could be quickened, or lengthened. It was a kind of psychological time.
    Again, forms appeared and disappeared. In your terms of time, however, the dream bodies took on physical forms. Physical reproduction was impossible. That did not happen to all of the species at once, however. For a while, then, the earth had a mixed population of species who had completely taken on physical forms, and species who had not. The forms, however, whether physical or not, were complete in themselves. Birds were birds, and fish fish.
    In the beginning there were also species of various other kinds: combinations of man-animal and animal-man, and many other “crossbreed” species, some of fairly long duration in your terms. This applies to all areas. There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that gradually became aware within that dream, turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees.
    There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more advantageous than the term, “the dream world.” I am emphasizing this dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless, precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality that dreams appear to be sta-ticky objective background noise, left over from when you sleep. But that is how physical experience would seem to someone not focused in it, or inexperienced with its organization.
    Again, the world came into being in the same way that any idea does. The physical world expands in the same way that any idea does. I am speaking for your edification of the world you recognize, of the earth you know, but there are probable earths, of course, as real as your own. They coexist with your own, and they are all in one way or another connected.
    Each one carries hints and clues about the others. In the terms used by science, there was no evolution in linear terms, but vast explosions of consciousness, expansions of capacities, unfoldings on the parts of all species, and these still continue. They are the inner manipulations with which consciousness presents itself. Later in the book I will discuss some of these, but they represent intuitive leaps of new understandings. The pattern of animal behavior, for example, is not at all as set and finished as you suppose. Your physical experience is a combination of dream events interlaced with what you call objective acts.
    Were it not for your myths, you would have discovered no “facts.”
    You can only locate or pinpoint an event that falls one way or another into the range of your perception. You cannot really locate or pinpoint microscopic or macroscopic events with any precision. You cannot pinpoint “invisible” events, for even as your sophisticated instruments perceive them, they have not met them in the same time scheme. I want to deal briefly with such ideas, so that later we can discuss the location of the universe.
    Any event that you perceive is only a portion of the true dimensionality of that event. The observer and the object perceived are a part of the same event, each changing the other. This interrelationship always exists in any system of reality and at any level of activity. In certain terms, for example, even an electron “knows” it is being observed through your instrument. The electrons within the instrument itself have a relationship with the electron that scientists may be trying to “isolate” for examination.
    Quite apart from that, however, there is what we will call for now the collective unconscious of all of the electrons that compose the entire seemingly separate event of the scientists observing the electron. In your range of activity you can adequately identify events, project them in time and space, only by isolating certain portions of much larger and much smaller events, and recognizing a highly specific order of events as real.
    Light can be defined as a wave or as a particle^{2 [888]}, and the same is true in many other instances. Consciousness, for example, can be defined as a wave or as a particle, for it can operate as either, and appear as either, even though its true definition would have to include the creative capacity to shape itself into such forms. You cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe—for that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be contained in any of your specifications. While everything seems neat and tidy within those specifications, and whole, you operate with brilliant nonchalance in the theater of time and space. Time and space are each the result of psychological properties. When you ask how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then you are taking it for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute qualities. You are asking for answers that can only be found by going outside of the context of usual experience—for within that experience you are always led back to beginnings and endings, consecutive moments, and a world that seems to have within it no evidences of any other source.
    The physical world as you know it is unique, vital to the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part of that universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. That reality is dependent upon the perceptions of each kind of life that composes it. It is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression from that divine gestalt of being— and that divine gestalt of being is of such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear within any one of its own realities, its own worlds. Space, again, is a psychological property. So is time. The universe did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular location in space—for it is true to say that all of space and all of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously. You cannot pinpoint the location of consciousness.
    When you are dreaming you cannot pinpoint your dream location in the same way that you can determine, say, the chair or the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which you dream. That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take place within it. Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it is a mass psychologically shared property—but at one “time” in the beginning this was not so.
    In the beginning, physical space had the qualities that dream space has to you now. It seemed to have a more private nature, and only gradually in those terms, did it become publicly shared.
    What was such a world like, and how can you possibly relate it to the world that you know?

1. Originally Jane said "world" here, where I’m sure Seth wanted her to say "universe." Anytime I make such a change in Seth’s copy, or insert a clarifying word or phrase as though it came from him, or might have, the alteration is in brackets [like this]. Occasionally Jane or I may recast a sentence of Seth’s, but this isn’t necessary even once per session. Our rule is that other wise we do not change or delete any of his material without noting it.
    Insertions I make in parentheses and italics, like "(as stated in the first law of thermodynamics)," are meant to be informative and obviously aren’t from Seth. 1.[883] Seth was/evidently experimenting here, for right away he went back to using “it,” instead of “he,” when referring to All That Is. “It” may not be entirely satisfactory either, but Jane and I didn’t question Seth about it: We prefer that designation because it encompasses any kind of sexual orientation and/or function within All That Is. (When Seth used “he” while talking about All That Is a couple of times later in the session, I substituted “it” in my notes and let it go at that.)

2.[883] Seth first discussed the “sleepwalkers” in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality—see Session 708 for September 30, 1974. Here’s a much-condensed version of that he told us that night after break ended at 9:56:

    “Imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not diseased or defective, but without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that you have. The sleepwalkers’ physical abilities surpassed yours. They were as agile as animals, their purpose simply to be. Their main points of consciousness were elsewhere, their primary focuses scarcely aware of the bodies they had created. Yet they learned ‘through experience,’ and began to ‘awaken,’ to become aware of themselves, to discover time, or to create it.
    “They were not asleep to themselves, only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli. This is the other side of your own experience. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. In what you would call the physical waking state, these individuals slept, yet they behaved with great natural physical grace. They did not saddle the body with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. They did not age to the extent that you do.”

    Once again, in terms of your equations, energy and consciousness and matter are one. And in those terms— (the qualifications are necessary)—consciousness is the agent that directs the transformation of energy into form and of form into energy. All possible visible or invisible particles that you discover or imagine— meaning hypothesized particles—possess consciousness. They are energized consciousness.
    There are certain characteristics inherent in energy itself, quite aside from any that you ascribe to it, since of course to date you do not consider energy conscious.
    Energy is above all things infinitely creative, innovative, original. Energy is imaginative. (Any scientists who might be reading this book may as well stop here.) I am not assigning human traits to energy. Instead, your human traits are the result of energy’s characteristics—a rather important difference. Space as you think of it is, in your terms, filled with invisible particles. They are the unstated portion of physical reality, the unmanifest medium in which your world exists. In that regard, however, atoms and molecules are stated, though you cannot see them with your [unaided] eye. The smaller particles that make them up become “smaller and smaller,” finally disappearing from the examination of any kind of physical instrument, and these help bridge the gap between unmanifest and manifest reality.¹
    For the terms of this discussion of the beginning of [your] world, I will deal with known qualities for now—the atoms and molecules. In the beginning they imagined the myriad of forms that were physically possible. They imagined the numberless ce1ls that could arise from their own cooperative creation. Energy is boundless. It is exuberant. It knows no limits. In those terms, the atoms dreamed the cells into physical being—and from that new threshold of physical activity cellular consciousness dreamed of the myriad organizations that could emerge from this indescribable venture.
    Again, in actuality all of this took place at once, yet the depth of psychological experience contained therein can never be measured, for it involved a kind of value fulfillment with which each consciousness is involved. That characteristic of value fulfillment is perhaps the most important element in the being of All That Is, and it is a part of the heritage of all species.
    Value fulfillment itself is most difficult to describe, for it combines the nature of a loving presence—a presence with the innate knowledge of its own divine complexity—with a creative ability of infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest, most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all possible variations—and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.
    In those terms, then, there was in the beginning an almost unimaginable time in which energized consciousness, using its own creative abilities, its own imagination, experimented with triumphant rambunctiousness, trying out one form after another. In the terms you are used to thinking of, nothing was stable. Consciousness as you think of it turned into matter, and then into pure energy and back again.
    Subjectivity still largely ruled. Like an adolescent leaving home for the first time, individualized consciousness was also somewhat homesick, and returned often to the family homestead—but gradually gained confidence and left finally to form a [universe].
    Now because All That Is contains within itself such omnipotent, fertile, divine creative characteristics, all portions of its subjective experience attained dimensions of actuality impossible to describe. The thoughts, for example, of All that Is were not simply thoughts as you might have, but multidimensional mental events of superlative nature. Those events soon found that a transformation must occur, if they were to journey into objectivity—for no objectivity of itself could contain the entire reality of subjective events that existed within divine subjectivity. Only in that context could their relative perfection be maintained. Yet they had yearned before the beginning for other experiences, and even for fulfillments of a different nature. They sensed a kind of value fulfillment that required of them the utilization of their own creative abilities. They yearned to create as they had been created, and All That Is, in a kind of divine perplexity, nevertheless realized that this had always been its own intent.
    All That Is realized that such a separation would also allow you to bring about a different kind of divine art, in which the creators themselves created, and their creations created, bringing into actuality existences that were possible precisely because there would seem to be a difference between the creator and the creations. All That Is is, therefore, within each smallest portion of consciousness.
    Yet each smallest portion of consciousness can uniquely create, bring into being, eccentric² versions of All That Is, that in certain terms All That Is, without that separation, could not otherwise create. The loving support, the loving encouragement of the slightest probable consciousness and manifestation—that is the intent of All That Is.
    All That Is knows that even this purpose is a portion of a larger purpose. In terms of time, the realization of that purpose will emerge with another momentous explosion of subjective inspiration into objectivity, or into another form. In deeper terms, however, that purpose is also known now, and to one extent or another the entire universe dreams of it, as once cellular consciousness dreamed of the organs that it might “form.”
    I want to stress that I am speaking here not so much about a kind of spiritual evolution as I am about an expansion.³ We will for now, however, confine ourselves to a discussion of consciousness in the beginning of the world, stressing that the first basis of physical life was largely subjective, and that the state of dreaming not only helped shape the consciousness of your species, but also in those terms served to provide a steady source of information to man about his physical environment, and served as an inner web of communication among all species.
    Many of the ideas in our current book will be accepted by scientists most dubiously, though some, of course, will grasp what I will be saying. It is of course very difficult for you, because the deepest truths cannot be physically proven. Science is used to asking quite specific questions, and as Ruburt wrote recently (in God of Jane) it usually comes up with very specific answers—even if those answers are wrong.
    “Wrong” answers can fit together, however, to present a perfect picture, an excellent construct of its own—and why not? For any answers that do not fit the construct are simply thrown away and never appear. So in a fashion we are dealing with what science has thrown away. The picture we will end up presenting, then, will certainly not fit that of established science.
    However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority for facts, then as you know science cannot prove its version of the [universe’s] origin either. It only sets up an hypothesis, which collects about it all data that agree, and again ignores what does not fit. Moreover, science’s thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart—and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident.⁵ The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices.
    There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man’s consciousness by which he ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity within him is never fooled.
    There is a part of man that Knows, with a capital K. That is the portion of him, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body’s “machinery,”⁶ so in our book we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people write, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material—and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. In a fashion, creative play is your human version of far greater characteristics from which your universe itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific, subjective evidence for the nature of your own reality—evidence that is readily apparent once you really begin to look for it, particularly by comparing the world of your dreams with your daily life.
    In other words, subjective play is the basis for all creativity, of course—but far more, it is responsible for the great inner play of subjective and objective reality.
    With all due respect, your friend [the psychologist] is, with the best of intentions, barking up the wrong psychological tree. He is very enthusiastic about his value tests, and his enthusiasm is what is important The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of mechanical psychology, as if you could break down human values to a kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try, but representative of psychology’s best attempt to make sense of a poor hypothesis.

1. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I wrote in Note 7 for Session 681 that atoms are “processes” rather than things. The classical conception of the typical atom as being composed of a neat nucleus of indivisible protons and neutrons circled by electrons is largely passe, although for convenience’s sake we may still describe the atom that way. (In those terms, the one exception is the hydrogen atom, which evidently consists of but one proton and one electron cloud, or “smear.”) For the simple purposes of this note, then, I’m leaving out considerations involving quantum mechanics, which concept repudiates the idea of “particles” to begin with. (And surely that notion involves more than a little of the psychic, or “irrational.” What a heretical thought from the scientific viewpoint!) But each atom of whatever element is an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail—one of the more basic examples of the unending and stupendous creativity, order, and design of nature, or consciousness, or All That Is.
    Through their work with particle accelerators, or “atom smashers,” physicists have discovered that protons and neutrons themselves are composed of forces and particles that in turn are almost certainly composed of forces and particles, and so on, in an ever-descending scale of smaller and smaller entities and concepts. Over 100 subatomic particles have been identified so far, and no one doubts now that many more will be found. The existence of a number of still-undiscovered specific particles has been predicted. All of which reminds me that almost 16 years ago, in only the 19th session he’d given us (on January 27, 1964), Seth remarked:

    “Your scientists can count their elements. . . . That is, they will create more and discover more until they are ready to go out of their minds, because they will always create [physical] ‘camouflages’ of the real [nonphysical] thing. And while they create instruments to deal with smaller and smaller particles, they will actually see smaller and smaller particles, seemingly without end.
    “As their instruments reach farther into the universe they will ‘see’— farther and farther, but they will automatically transform what they apparently ‘see’ into the camouflage patterns with which they are familiar. They are and they will be the prisoners of their own tools.
    “Instruments calculated to measure the vibrations with which scientists are familiar will be designed and redesigned. All sorts finally of seemingly impossible phenomena will be discovered with these instruments, until the scientists realize that something is desperately wrong. The instruments will be planned to catch certain camouflages, and since they will be expertly thought out they will perform their function. I do not want to get too involved. However, by certain means the instruments themselves will transform data from terms that you cannot understand into terms that you can understand. Scientists do this all the time.”

    Some of the “particles” the theoretical physicists have discovered— and/or created—in their gigantic particle accelerators have unbelievably short life-spans in our terms, vanishing, it seems, almost before they’re born. I like to think of such research from the particle’s point of view, though, a consideration I haven’t seen mentioned in the few scientific journals I read. Keep in mind that according to the Seth material the merest particle is basically conscious in its own way. Mesons are classes of particles produced from the collisions of protons. Did a meson, for example, choose to participate in an atom-smashing experiment in order to merely peek in on our gross physical reality for much less than the billionth of a second it exists with that identity, before it decays into electrons and photons? From its viewpoint, our reality might be an incomprehensible to it as its reality is to us—yet the two inevitably go together.
    In its way the meson may have all of the “time” it needs, or wants. It may look upon our world as one frozen or motionless, upon other subatomic particles as very slow-moving indeed, or even faster than it is. (As far as “time” goes, some particles live for far less than a trillionth of a second.) I’m quite sure, however, that the meson, or any short-lived particle, searches out its own kind of value fulfillment while here with us. Probable realities, which I haven’t even mentioned, must be deeply involved also.
    And of course there are all sorts of motion, some of them very stable, if still incomprehensible to us. But whereas the meson vanishes from our view after its exceedingly brief existence, the electron has an “infinite” life-span. Think of the unending varieties of value fulfillment it explores in just our world alone! Talk about motion: The average electron orbits its atomic-nucleus about a million times each billionth of a second (or nanosecond)!
    At this point in my speculations I’m usually led back to Seth’s EE (or electromagnetic energy) units, and his CU’s (or units of consciousness). These nonphysical entities—and many others of a like nature—are emanations of consciousness, or All That Is, and in “size” rank far below the tiniest particles ever observed in an atom smasher. According to Seth, each unit of consciousness “contains within itself innately infinite properties of expansion, development and organization; yet within itself always maintains the kernel of its own individuality. . . . It is aware energy . . . not ‘personified’ but awareized.” See Session 682 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.
    Seth came through with that session on February 13, 1974. Now let me close this note with an excerpt from a private session he gave on July 3, 1978:

“The varieties of consciousness—the inner ‘psychological particles,’ the equivalent, say, of the atom or molecule, or proton, neutron or quark—those nonphysical, ‘charmed,’ ‘strange,’ forms of consciousness that make experience go up or down (all with amusement), and around and around—are never of course dealt with (by science).
    “If physical form is made up of such multitudinous, invisible particles, how much more highly organized must be the inner components of consciousness, without whose perceptions matter itself would be meaningless. The alliances of consciousness, then, are far more vast than those of particles in any form.”

2. I’ve always liked the way Jane uses the word “eccentric” in relation to the abilities of any portion of consciousness to create new versions of itself; she’s added her own original interpretation of the word to the dictionary version of “eccentric” as meaning out of the ordinary, or odd, or unconventional.
    She began to refer to the eccentricities of consciousness in October 1974, following her first conscious experience with her “psychic library,” and a subsequent transcendental experience in which she suddenly began to see, with an astonishing clear vision, the great “model” of each portion of the world about her —each person, each building, each blade of grass, each bird, for example; our ordinary world suddenly appeared quite shabby by contrast. Jane wrote that “everyone was a classic model, yet each was also a fantastic eccentric. ... I saw that each of us is a beloved eccentric not only because we have inner models of the self, but also the freedom to deviate from them, all of which makes the model living and creative in our time.”
    In Psychic Politics, see chapters 2 and 3.
3. Now what, I wondered, as I typed this session from my notes, does Seth mean here, and in the paragraph above? Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint just what he’s saying. His material usually generates more questions than answers, but this time he’d outdone himself. I try to avoid reading too much into such brief passages, but I felt that if Seth answered all of the questions I could ask based upon this session, a book would result. Was he referring to another big-bang type of “momentous explosion” ? I doubted it. Without going into a lot of speculative detail, such an event would imply the obliteration of our probable physical universe as we know it. Instead, I thought, by “another form” he may mean an explosion of ideas or knowledge in our reality, with the tremendous objective results that would follow. Such results would stem even from “just” a spiritual explosion. (I could also see correlations here between Seth’s ideas about the primary nature of All That Is and the inflationary model of the universe. See Note 2 for Session 883.)
    Since it’s sometimes difficult to be sure of just what Seth is saying, in retrospect I wished that either he’d volunteered more information about his explosion-expansion, or that I’d been quick enough to ask him to do so. But if words are often necessarily limited and stereotyped, they can also be quite elusive— and this is an excellent thing, for it shows they’re still alive, charged with meanings that change. Basically, those meanings can never really be “put into words.”
5. By now, a number of the world’s leading scientists in the physical disciplines have publicly stated their beliefs that basically consciousness plays the primary role in our world and/or universe. For reasons too complicated to go into here, this attitude prevails even with some mathematicians who seek to penetrate to the core of our reality as they understand it.
    However, for every scientist bold enough to think this way, there are scores of others who vehemently disagree. For most scientific materialists only physical matter is real. For them consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon, the passive by-product of the brain’s physiology and chemical events. They believe that physical death is the end of everything, that ultimately all is pointless. They derisively call their rebellious colleagues “animists” —those who believe that all life forms and natural phenomena have a spiritual origin independent of physical matter. (Such heretics are also called “vitalists,” a term related to animism, and one which also has a long history of scientific contempt behind it.)
    Jane and I have often been most intrigued by the obvious contradictions involved here, for what can the materialistic scientists use other than mind—or consciousness, that poor epi-phenomenon—to study and dissect matter? (Not to mention that innumerable experiments have proven that “physical matter” isn’t solid or objective at all, but “only” energy!) We have, then, the paradox of mind denying its own reality, let alone its importance. As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures on earth who would seriously engage in such learned, futile behavior. It’s also very ironic, I think, that the materialists spend years acquiring their specialized educations, and prestige, both of which they then use to inform us of the ultimate futility of all of our endeavors (including their own, of course). But for the materialists, the mind-brain duality isn’t scientific in the orthodox sense. It isn’t falsifiable; that is, it cannot be stated under what precise conditions the mind-brain duality could be proven false. To which, understandably enough, those scientists who do accept the reality of mind reply that neither can the idea be falsified that only what is “physical” is real.
    Aside from anything Seth has said or ever may say about other probable realities, or even about human origins here on earth, I think it most risky at this stage in history for anyone— scientist or not—to dogmatically state that life has no meaning, or is a farce, or that attributes of our reality of which we can only mentally conceive at this time do not really exist. Discoveries in the “future” are quite apt to prove such limited viewpoints wrong. The history of science itself contains many examples of theories and “facts” gone awry. Moreover, why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as epipheno-menalism through which to comprehend our reality? Or better yet, why does it in large part? Truly, our individual and collective ignorance of just our own probable reality is most profound at this time in our linear history (in those terms). Jane and I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately, as a result of mankind’s restless search for meaning, we didn’t end up returning in a new official way to our ancient concepts of spirit within everything, animate and inanimate. Such an updated animistic/vitalistic view would take into account discoveries ranging from subnuclear events to the largest imaginable astronomical processes in our observable universe. Human beings do know their own worth, as Seth stated in this session. Jane herself commented on these questions in her own way recently (as Seth indicated a bit earlier this evening). Her notes will end up in one of the later chapters of God of Jane, which she’s still roughing out:

“There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning. That belief may well be a biological imperative. If we were as science maintains—only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos—then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?
    “Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness. But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily end up creating its own illusion. It ignores the reality of experience, the evidence of being, and in so doing it denies rather than reinforces life’s values.”

6. Seth’s passage reminded both of us of “If Toes Had Eyes,” a poem Jane wrote some four months ago, which she’s using in an earlier chapter of God of Jane. Here’s the first verse:

    You have taught yourselves to respond to certain neural patterns, and to ignore alternate ones that now simply operate as background activity. That background activity, however, supports a million forces: the neural stimuli that you accept as biologically real. Those other background stimuli are now quite difficult for you to identify, but they are always there in the [hinterland] of your waking consciousness, like dream chatter way beneath your usual associations.
    Neurologically, you tune into only a portion of your body’s reality and are ignorant of the great, tiny but tumultuous communications that are ever flying back and forth in the microscopic but vital cellular world.
    Electrons in your terms are precognitive, and so is your cellular consciousness. Your body’s relative permanence in time is dependent upon the electron’s magnificent behavior as it deals with probabilities. The cell’s stability, and its reliability in the bodily environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication with all others and is united with all others through fields of consciousness,³ in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.
    At one level your cells obey the rules of time, but on other levels they defy it. All of these communications are a part of the human parcel of reality, and they all exist beneath what you think of as normal consciousness. Events are not built up initially from physical particles. They are the result of psychological activity.
    “In the beginning” you were only aware of that psychological activity. It had not “as yet” thickened itself into form. The form was there, but it was not manifest. I do not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small particles, you had small units of consciousness gradually building themselves into large ones —but a smaller unit of consciousness, you see, is not “less than” a larger unit, for each unit of consciousness contains within itself the innate heritage of All That Is.
    You think of the conscious mind, as you know it, as the only kind of consciousness with a deliberate intent, awareness of itself as itself, and with a capacity for logic and the appreciation of symbolism. That only seems true because of your particular range of activity, and because you can only pinpoint events within a particular psychological spectrum.
    Now: I call the building blocks of matter CU’s—units of consciousness. They form physical matter as it exists in your understanding and experience. Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter that you do not perceive.^{1 [889]}
    CU’s can also operate as “particles” or as “waves.” Whichever way they operate, they are aware of their own existences. When CU’s operate as particles, in your terms, they build up a continuity in time. They take on the characteristics of particularity. They identify themselves by the establishment of specific boundaries.
    They take certain forms, then, when they operate as particles, and experience their reality from “the center of” those forms. They concentrate upon, or focus upon, their unique specificiations. They become in your terms individual.
    When CU’s operate as waves, however, they do not set up any boundaries about their own self-awareness—and when operating as waves CU’s can indeed be in more than one place at one time.
    I understand that this is somewhat difficult material to comprehend. However, in its purest form a unit of consciousness can be in all places at the same time. It becomes beside the point, then, to say that when it operates as a wave a unit of consciousness is precognitive, or clairvoyant, since it has the capacity to be in all places and all times simultaneously.
    Those units of consciousness are the building blocks for the physical material of your body, for the trees and rocks, the oceans, the continents, and the very manifestation of space itself as you understand it.
    These CU’s can operate as separate entities, as identities, or they can flow together in a vast, harmonious wave of activity, as a force. Period. Actually, units of consciousness operate in both ways all of the time. No identity, once “formed,” is ever annihilated, for its existence is indelibly a part of “the entire wave of consciousness to which it belongs.”
    Each “particleized” unit, however, rides the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave and particle both belong. Each particleized unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles— for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. Basically the units move faster than light,^{2 [889]} slowing down, in your terms, to form matter. These units can be considered, again, as entities or as forces, and they can operate as either. Metaphysically, they can be thought of as the point at which All That Is acts to form [your] world— the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of divine fact. Scientifically, again, the units can be thought of as building blocks of matter. Ethically, the CU’s represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man’s relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with them.
    In the beginning CU’s, then, units of consciousness, existing within a divine psychological gestalt, endowed with the unimaginable creativity of that sublime identity, began themselves to create, to explore, and to fulfill those innate values by which they were characterized. Operating both as waves and particles, directed in part by their own creative restlessness, and directed in part by the unquenchable creativity of All That Is, they embarked upon the project that brought time and space and your entire [universe] into being. They were the first entities, then.
    I want you to try and imagine a situation in which there exists a psychological force that includes within its capabilities the ability to act simultaneously on the most microscopic and the most macroscopic levels; that can form within itself a million separate inviolate unique identities, and that can still operate as a part of those identities, and as a larger unit that is their source—in which case it is a wave from which the particles emerge. That description fits our units of consciousness.
    They built your world from the inside out. As physical creatures, they focused upon what you think of as physical identities: separate, individual differences, endowing each physical consciousness with its own original variations and creative potentials, its own opportunity for completely original experience, and a viewpoint or platform from which to participate in reality —one that at that level could not be experienced in the same way by any other individual. This is [the] privileged, always new, private and immediate, direct experience of any individual of any species, or of any degree, as it encounters the objective universe.
    At other levels, while each individuality is maintained, it rides the wavelike formations of consciousness. It is everywhere at once, and the units of consciousness that make up your cells know the positions of all other such units, both in time and in space.
    In the beginning, then, these units operated both as identities or particles, and as waves. The main concentration was not yet physical in your terms. What you now think of as the dream state was the waking one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity, creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective between the two realities, and as a species you literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers. You walked in your sleep. You dreamed your languages. You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the alphabets—and your knowledge and your intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your minds emerged.
    Physical matter by itself could never produce consciousness. One mind alone could not come into being from chance alone; one thought could not leap from an infinite number of nerve ends, if matter itself was not initially alive with consciousness, packed with the intent to be. A man who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life— and a meaningless existence could never produce life. Nor was the universe created for one species alone, by a God who is simply a supervision of the same species—as willful and destructive as man at his worst.
    Instead, you have an inner dimension of activity, a vast field of multidimensional creativity, a Creator that becomes a portion of each of its creations, and yet a Creator that is greater than the sum of its parts: a Creator that can know itself as a mouse in a field, or as the field, or as the continent upon which the field rests, or as the planet that holds the continent, or as the universe that holds the world—a force that is whole yet divisible, that is one and the inconceivably many, a force that is eternal and mortal at once, a force that plunges headlong into its own creativity, forming the seasons and experiencing them as well, glorifying in individuation, and yet always aware of the great unity that is within and behind and through all experiences of individuality: a force from [which] each moment pasts and futures flow out in every conceivable direction.
    In your terms of time, however, we will speak of a beginning, and in that beginning it was early man’s dreams that allowed him to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his original learning ground. In times of drought he would dream of the location of water. In times of famine he would dream of the location of food. That is, his dreaming allowed him to clairvoyantly view the body of land. He would not waste time in the trial-and-error procedures that you now take for granted. In dreams his consciousness operated as a wave. In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of the animals also—long before he learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. Where is there food or water? What is the lay of the land? Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was there.
    People were not nearly as isolated as it now appears, for in their dreams early men communicated their various locations, the symbols of their cultures and understanding, the nature of their arts. 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. Man dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know.
    There is a point here that I want to emphasize before we go too far, and it is this: The dream world is not an aimless, nonlogical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that your own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put your computers to shame. I am not, therefore, putting the intellectual capacities in the background —but I am saying that they emerge as you know them because of the dreaming self’s uninterrupted use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions.
    The intellectual abilities as you know them cannot compare to those greater capacities that are a part of your own inner reality.
    This inner universe is a gestalt formed by fields of awareized energy that contains what we will call “information” for now—but we will have some comments later, for this is not the kind of information you are used to.
    Each unit of consciousness inherently possesses within itself all of the information available to the whole, and its specific nature when it operates as a particle rests upon that great “body” of inner knowledge. Any one such particle can be where it “is,” be what it is, and be when it is only because the positions, relative positions, and situations of all other such particles are known.
    In the deepest terms, again, your physical world is beginning at each point at which these units of consciousness assert themselves to form physical reality. Otherwise, life would not be “handed down” through the generations. Each unit of consciousness (or CU) intensifies, magnifies its own intent to be—and, you might say, works up from within itself an explosive spark of primal desire that “explodes” into a process that causes physical materialization. It turns into what I have called [an] EE unit,^{1 [890]} in which case it is embarked upon its own kind of physical experience.
    These EE units also operate as fields, as waves, or as particles, as the units of consciousness do—but in your terms they are closer to physical orientation. Their die is cast, so to speak: They have already begun the special kind of screening process necessary that will bring about physical form. They begin to deal with the kinds of information that will help form your world. There are literally numberless steps taken before EE units combine in their own fashion to form the most microscopic physical particles, and even here the greatest, gentlest sorting-out process takes place as these units disentangle themselves at certain operational levels from their own greater fields of “information,” to specialize in the various elements that will allow for the production of atoms and molecules impeccably suited to your kind of world.
    First, again, you have various stages of, say, pseudomatter, of dream images, that only gradually—in those terms—coalesce and become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of “matter” between the matter that you recognize and the antimatter of physicists’ theories.
    Form exists at many other levels than those you recognize, in other words. Your dream forms are quite as real as your physical ones. They simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that you had in the beginning of [your] world.
    While you and all of the other species were what I have called sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner of speaking, you did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now, from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, you had to learn to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest your food, and to perform all of the biological manipulations that now you take for granted.
    You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earthtuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body’s efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physically appear.
    Units of consciousness (CU’s), transforming themselves into EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms, each portion of physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even though this may involve a larger generalized held than your own, or a smaller one.
    So to rocks, say, you can be considered a portion of their environment, while you may consider them merely a portion of your environment. You simply do not tune into the range of rock consciousness. Actually, many other kinds of consciousness, while focused in their own specific ways, are more aware than man is of earth’s unified nature—but man, in following his own ways, also adds to the value fulfillment of all other consciousnesses in ways that are quite outside of usual systems of knowledge.
    If you remember that beneath all, each unit of consciousness is aware of the position of each other unit, and that these units form all physical matter, then perhaps you can intuitively follow what I mean, for whatever knowledge man attains, whatever experience any one person accumulates, whatever arts or sciences you produce, all such information is instantly perceived at other levels of activity by each of the other units of consciousness that compose physical reality— whether those units form the shape of a rock, a raindrop, an apple, a cat, a frog or a shoe. Manufactured products are also composed of atoms and molecules that ride upon units of consciousness transformed into EE units, and hence into physical elements.
    What you have, really, is a manifested and an unmanifested consciousness, but only relatively speaking. You do not perceive the consciousness of objects. It is not manifest to you because your range of activities requires boundaries to frame your picture of reality.
    All of your manufactured objects also originated in the realm of dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same way man produced his first tools. He was born with all of those abilities—abilities by which he is now characterized—and with other abilities that in your terms still wait for development. Not that he has not used them so far, but that he has not focused upon them in what you consider the main lines of civilized continuity. Hints of those abilities are always present in the dream state, and in the arts, in the religions, and even in the sciences. They appear in politics and business, but as the largely unmanifcst intuitive background, which is largely ignored. We will return to these later in the book.
    Man’s dreams have always provided him with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which to form his civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of man’s dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments.
    They were responsible for the birth of agriculture, as well as industry, the rise and fall of nations, the “glory” that was Rome, and Rome’s destruction. 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. But if what I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that your physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean something far different from the usual definition of dream reality. Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each person’s intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what you think of as the state of dreaming.
    That analogy will help you at least intuitively understand the existence of situations such as suffering, and poverty, that otherwise seem to have no adequate explanations. I hope also to account for behavior on the part of nature that certainly seems to imply the survival of the fittest in a tooth-and-claw fashion, or the punishing acts of a vengeful God on the one hand and the triumph of an evil force on the other.
    For now in our tale of beginnings, however, we still have a spasmodic universe that appears and disappears—that gradually, in those terms, manifests for longer periods of time. What you really had in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that you now consider formed physical matter.
    As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more specific orientations, greater organizations at your end. At the “other end,” it disentangled itself from vaster fields of activity to allow for this specific behavior. All of these units of consciousness, again, operate as entities (or particles, or as waves or forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time—and not, of course, the other way around.
    You were each present at the beginning of the world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion.
    Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All That Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make more sense.
    For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity. Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.
    Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition, [of] structure and design.
    You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now— but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one.
    While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.
    Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance, so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.
    Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always.
    There is also constant communication between them and you at other levels than those you recognize, so that there is an unending interplay between each species and its environment.
    There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice versa. Each form of life is created along with each other form—environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other.
    Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness, each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time [had to be] impeccable.
    Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses tuned to physical frequencies—frequencies of such power and allure that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time alignment.
    In the beginning, man’s dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man information—a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man’s dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh.
    Now: When he dreamed—when he dreamed—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. “They remembered how it was.” They remembered that they formed each other.
    This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance—and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” Each portion has its own identity and validity— and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.
    I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions—so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole.
    The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.
    In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity’s composition. You want to know where you came into the musical production, so to speak. I use a musical analogy here, if a simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of perception. You are tuned into earth’s orchestration [you might say], and your perception of time is simply the result of habits—habits of perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. And you learned those habits as your physical senses gradually became more alert and specific.
    You “timed” yourselves—but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know.

3. Seth’s “fields of consciousness” sounds like an elaboration of field theory in physics. In physics, however, the field is called “energy and momentum,” not consciousness.
1. [889] Later, I asked Seth to comment upon his most intriguing statement. His answer was brief, for insertion here, and as much as I wanted to I didn’t ask him to enlarge upon it. However, I’m sure that the subject of “other kinds of matter” is one with almost endless ramifications. Seth:

   “Units of consciousness do help form different kinds of physical realities—as indeed Ruburt has himself hinted in some of his poetry. There are many dimensions that are as physical, so to speak, as your own world, but if you are not focused in them you would not at all be aware of their existence, but perceive only empty space.
   “Nothing in the universe is ever lost, or mislaid, or wasted, so the energy of your own thoughts, while they are still your own thoughts, helps to form the natural attributes of physical realities that you do not perceive. So is your own world formed by units of consciousness. Its natural elements are the glistening remnants of other units of consciousness that you do not see.”

2. [889] According to Albert Einstein, no material particle in our universe can be accelerated from rest to quite the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. However, as I wrote in Note 1 for Session 709, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, “supposed faster-than-light particles are thought to be possible within the context of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.”
    Seth gave excellent material on the units of consciousness in both volumes of “Unknown” Reality. In Volume 1, for example, see Session 682 for February 13, 1974.

1. [890] Seth’s earliest material on EE (electromagnetic energy) units came through in September and October of 1967; in the Appendix of The Seth Material, see the excerpts Jane presented from sessions 504 through 506. Then in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks, see Session 581 for April 14, 1971.

    For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. They slept long hours, as did the animals—awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and, later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.
    These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence. The species—from your viewpoint—lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins [and arteries], the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.
    In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as yet firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He was aware of himself in a different way, so that, for example, his identification with the self did not stop where his skin stopped: He could follow it outward into the space about his form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal senseexperience that you have forgotten.
    During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CU’s translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into the physical form.
    Then in your terms man began, with the other species, to waken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man still sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his own origins, and with the origins of the universe as he knows it as well.
    Man dreamed his languages. He dreamed how to use his tongue to form the words. In his dreams he practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he could and would complete it.
    All languages have as their basis the language that was spoken in dreams. The need for language arose, however, as man became less a dreamer and more immersed in the specifics of space and time, for in the dream state his communications with his fellows and other species was instantaneous. Language arose to take the place of that inner communication, then. There is a great underlying unity in all of man’s so-called early cultures— cave drawings and religions—because they were all fed by that common source, as man tried to transpose inner knowledge into physical actuality.
    The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams— and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of consciousness contributes to the health and stability of all other portions. Far from the claw-and-dagger universe, you have one whose very foundation is based upon the loving cooperation of all of its parts. That is given—the gift of life brings along with it the actualization of that cooperation, for the body’s parts exist as a unit because of inner relationships of a cooperative nature; and those exist at your birth, when you are innocent of any cultural beliefs that may be to the contrary.
    If it were not for this most basic, initial loving cooperation, that is a given quality in life itself, life would not have continued. Each individual of each species takes that initial zest and joy of life as its own yardstick. Each individual of whatever species, and each consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself—not only for itself but for all of reality as well.
    This is a given characteristic of life, regardless of the beliefs that may lead you to misinterpret the actions of nature, casting some of its creatures in a reprehensible light.
    In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, dreamed all of life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presents, and futures—that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All That Is.
    All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They [have] always existed and they always will exist. All That Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence—and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of your world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and as psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of your world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In your terms those entities are your ancestors—and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world.
    During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions took place as the “structure” of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of “the self.”
    What was needed was a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that was being formed along with physical creatures—a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space. A knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be allowed to distract the physical focus.
    In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion—or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.
    Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self—composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.
    As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from EE units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.
    So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now, is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness—the part delegated to the body.
    [Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet. It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.
    At that level environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural world are all united—a point we will return to quite often. Your intellect as you think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically, sometimes so arrogantly,
    because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified, “ancient,” “unconscious” power—the power of instant knowing that is a characteristic of the body consciousness.
    Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.
    The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder—and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.
    The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in your terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical creature. That portion of the self is the portion you recognize as your usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. That is the self that lives the life of the body.
    It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that you call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both your own consciousness and your body consciousness emerged.
    You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that you have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that you know. These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole. The divisions—the seeming divisions—are not stationary, but change constantly.
    To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are.
    “Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” A twist on an old quote, I believe—but the fact is, you are physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides.
    That environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind—for the life of the body provides you, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range.
    Now as you will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will experience—but to one extent or another all, sensations are felt. We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation, for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation. Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions made [among] stimuli. The body is made to react. It is made to feel life and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering what you might call natural stress. The body maintains its equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance between balance and off-balance.
    The body consciousness is therefore given a superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment —and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures.
    The entities, or units of consciousness—those ancient fragments that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All That Is—dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that “until then” had been closed, and therefore to that [degree] extended the experience and immense existence of All That Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All That Is. In those terms All That Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature’s existence.
    All That Is, therefore, is immersed within your world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.
    Again, your world was not created, then, by some exteriorized, objectified God who created it from the outside, so to speak, and set it into motion. Many [religious] theorists believe, for example, that such a God created the world in such a fashion, and that the process of decay began at almost the same hypothetical moment that the creation ended.
    Such an idea is much like some scientific ones, that see the universe running down, [with energy] being dissipated and order gradually disintegrating into chaos. Both versions conceive of a finished creation, though one is a divine production and the other is a result of nothing more than happenstance.
    All in all, however, we are speaking of a constant creation, even though I must explain it in serial terms. We are discussing a model of the universe in which creation is continuous, spontaneously occurring everywhere, and everywhere simultaneously, in a kind of spacious present, from which all experiences with time emerge. In this model there is always new energy, and all systems are open, even though they may seem to operate separately. Once again, also, we are considering a model that is based upon the active cooperation of each of its parts, which in one way or another also participate in the experience of the whole.
    In this model, changes of form are the result of creative syntheses. This model is seen to have its origin within a vast, infinite, divine subjectivity—a subjectivity that is within each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree. A subjective divinity, then, that is within creation itself, a multidimensional creativity of such proportions that it is itself the creator and its creations at the same time.
    This divine psychological process—and “process” is not the best word here—this divine psychological state of relatedness forms from its own being worlds within worlds. Your universe is not the only one. Nothing exists isolate in nature, and to that extent the very existence of your universe presupposes the existence of others.
    These were, and are, and will be, created in the same fashion as that I have explained—and again, all such systems are open, even though operationally they may appear not to be.
    There are literally infinite numbers of sequences, faultlessly activated, that make the existence of your own world possible. I admit that it is sometimes inconceivable to me that a human being can imagine his world to be meaningless, for the very existence of one human body speaks of an almost unbelievable molecular and cellular cooperation that could hardly result through the bounty of the most auspicious works of chance.
    In a manner of speaking, your universe and all others spring from a dimension that is the creative source for all realities—a basic dream universe, so to speak, a divine psychological bed where subjective being is sparked, illuminated, stimulated, pierced, by its own infinite desire for creativity. The source of its power is so great that its imaginings become worlds, but it is endowed with a creativity of such splendor that it seeks the finest fulfillment, for even the smallest of its thoughts and all of its potentials are directed with a good intent that is literally beyond all imagining.
    That good intent is apparent within your world. It is obvious in the cooperative ventures that unite, say, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, the relationship of bee to flower. And your beliefs to the contrary, you have closed your minds to man’s own cooperative nature, to his innate desire for fellowship, his natural bent for taking care of others, and (with elaborate, if gentle emphasis) for altruistic behavior. But we will discuss those matters later in our book.
    The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.
    The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to you in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.
    When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. You try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are your usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, you are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when you “come awake” within your dreams—a matter we will discuss later on in this book. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that your own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. You think your thoughts and you dream your dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.
    Also, in a manner of speaking, you are yourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed your world into being. You must understand that I am not saying that you are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that you are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment—inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves. Spontaneity knows its own order.
    I have said that many times. The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. In that regard, again, your dreaming state presents you with many clues about the source of your own lives and that of your world.
    Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses. Nor can any amount of information “possessed” or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.
    You are subjectively “alive” before your birth. You will be subjectively alive after your death. Your subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that you call the waking one, in which you recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. Your greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe. You create lives for yourselves, changing them as you go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. The processes occur at another level of consciousness.
    In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into the physical one—and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.
    While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.
    The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happened spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.
    The plants awakened before the animals—and there are reasons for these varying degrees of “wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of specieshood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.
    Again, the environment as you think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what you think of as nature—the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.
    In a matter of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world—a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him. And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.
    Man thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes—but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.
    What was it like when man awakened from the dream world?

    The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements—a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.
    The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts. He will grow the flower of the intellect—a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.
    But man looked out and felt himself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness. Now he must find food, where before his dream body did not need physical nourishment. Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. Man has to physically procreate. Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division. By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.
    On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality—a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree immersed.^{3 [899]} Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity, the full capacity for the development of language—a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.
    But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery. He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures. He instantly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.
    In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique. Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in your terms. Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being. That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.
    Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can—as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing. The dream body does not die. It exists before and after physical death. In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.
    They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived—and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.
    [Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue—but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form. When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge. He became more and more aware of his physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant and some were not. Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.
    Basically, what made him feel good was good. He was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him toward his own greatest development, to his own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he also helped to bring about the highest potentials of all of the other species of consciousness. His natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him in just such a direction, so that he sought what was the best for himself and for others.
    At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality—the world of his dreams—but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now.
    The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [But] more and more man began to identify himself with his exterior environment. He began to think of his inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself. It became his version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality—a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spiritlike soul that acted in an immaterial world.
    This early man (and early woman) regarded the snake as the most sacred and basic, most secretive and most knowledgeable of all creatures. In that early experience it seemed, surely, that the snake was a living portion of the earth, rising from the bowels of the earth, rising from the hidden source of all earth gods. Men watched snakes emerge from their holes with wonder. The snake was then—in your terms, now —both a feminine and masculine symbol. It seemed to come from the womb of the earth, and to possess the earth’s secret wisdom. Yet also, in its extended form particularly, it was the symbol of the penis. It was important also in that it shed its skin, as man innately knew he shed his own bodies.
    All units of consciousness, whatever their degree, possess purpose and intent. They are endowed with the desire for creativity, and to increase the quality of existence.
    They have the capacity to respond to multitudinous cues. There is a great elasticity for action and mobility, so that, for example, in man his conscious experience can actually be put together in an almost limitless number of ways.
    The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery— or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.
    We will return to the subject of war later on. I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics.” He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival—but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experiences with it, in that fashion.
    Man does have an instinct and a desire to live, and he has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth.
    Physically speaking, man’s “purpose” is to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his “purpose” is to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the sources of his being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he is presently unaware. In his thinking, in the quality of his thoughts, in their motion, he is indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man is learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he has taken on many challenges.
    You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well—but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.
    You are aware of such activities now as automatic speaking and automatic writing, and of sleepwalking. These all give signs in modern times of some very important evidence in man’s early relationship with the world and with himself.
    Sleepwalking was once, in that beginning, a very common experience— far more so than now—in which the inner self actually taught the physical body to walk, and hence presented the newly emerged physically oriented intellect from getting in its own way, asking too many questions that might otherwise impede the body’s smooth spontaneous motion.
    In the same fashion man is born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his dreams. In a fashion, you could almost say that he used language before he consciously understood it. It is not just that he learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about howr the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his drawing was in the same way automatic. You might almost say—almost—that he used the language “despite himself.” Therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the “word” was seen as coming directly from God.
    The world as you know it exists as it does because you are yourself a living portion of a vast “conscious grid” of perception.
    Every cell , in those terms, is a sender and a receiver. All of the larger divisions of life—the mammals, fish, birds, and so forth— are an integral part of that living gridwork. The picture of the world is not ony the result of those messages transmitted and received, however, but is also caused by the relationships between those messages. In your terms then, all of life’s large classifications were present “at the beginning of the world.” Otherwise there would have been vast holes in that grid of perception that makes possible the very sensations of physical life.
    In a manner of speaking, the physical universe is “transposed” upon another reality that must be its source. The world was and is created in dimensions outside of time, and outside of space as you understand it.
    Other realities quite as legitimate as your own, quite as vital, quite as “real,” coexist with your own, and in the terms of your understanding, “in the same space”—but of course in terms of your experience those spaces and realities would appear to be quite separate. No systems are closed, however, so that basically the living grid of perception that causes one world or reality is also “wired into” all other such systems. There is a give-and-take between them.
    The grids of perception that compose your world give you the world picture as you experience it because your physical senses put you in a certain position within the entire grid. Animals, for example, while part of your experience, are also “tuned into” that grid at another level. The large classifications of mammals, fish, birds, men, reptiles, plants, and so forth, are [each] an integral part of that larger perceptive pattern—and that pattern in those terms had to be complete even in the beginning of your time.
    In various periods that “gridwork” might “carry more traffic” along certain circuits than at other periods, so that there has been some creative leeway allowed, particularly on the parts of the species that make up your larger classifications. There were always birds, for example, but in the great interplay of “interior” and exterior communication among all portions of this vast living system, there was a creative interplay that allowed for endless variations within that classification, and each other one.
    Your technological communication system is a conscious construct— a magnificent one—but one that is based upon your innate knowledge of the inner, cellular communication between all species. Saying that, I am not robbing the intellect of its right to congratulate itself upon that technology.
    The large classifications of life give you the patterns into which consciousness forms itself, and because those patterns seem relatively stable it is easy to miss the fact that they are filled out, so to speak, in each moment with new energy. Man does not in his physical development pass through the stages supposedly followed by the hypothetical creature who left the water for the land to become a mammal—but each species does indeed have written within it the knowledge of “its past.” Part of this, again, is most difficult to express, and I must try to fill out old words with new meanings. The reincarnational aspects of physical life, however, serve a very important purpose, providing an inner subjective background. Such a background is needed by every species.
    Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its “reincarnational” existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification.^{1 [903]} This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as you think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it. In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind.
    These grids of perception “do not exist forever” in your dimension of time, for your dimension of time cannot hold anything that is outside it. Once a world exists, however, it becomes imprinted or stamped upon eternity, so that it exists in time and out of it “at once.”
    When you ask: “When did the world begin?” or “What really happened?” or “Was there a Garden of Eden?”, you are referring to the world as you understand it, but in those terms there were earths in the same space before the earth you recognize existed,^{2 [903]} and they began in the manner that I have given you in the early chapters of this book. The patterns for worlds—the patterns—continue in your time dimension, though in that time dimension those worlds must disappear, again, to continue “their existence outside of time.” The patterns are filled out again.
    In the case of earth the grid of perception is simply used differently, certain areas becoming prominent in some eras, and less prominent in others. Using your idea of time, I can only say that when the entire gestalt of consciousnesses that formed a particular earth have formed its reality to the best of their abilities, fulfilling their individual and mass capacities as far as possible, then they lovingly turn over that grid to others, and continue to take part in existences that are not physical in your terms. And that has happened many times.
    Your tale about the Garden of Eden, then, is a legend about earth’s last beginning. Each world is so cunningly constructed, again, that each consciousness, regardless of its degree, plays a vital part. And each of your actions, however inconsequential, becomes connected in one way or another—in one way or another—to each other reality and each other world.
    Now in a manner of speaking—though I see that little time has passed in this living room where I speak with Ruburt’s permission—we have transcended time to some extent this evening, for in what I have said there are indeed hints and illusions— cadences—that can, if you are ready, give you a feeling for existence as it is outside of time’s context. Even to try and verbally present such material necessitates alterations involving perception, for while that gridwork appears quite stable to your senses, giving you a reliable picture of reality, this is also because you have trained yourselves to pick up certain signals only. Others at other levels are available. You can tune into cellular consciousness, for example.
    Since this material must be comprehensible, Ruburt and I together form our own pathway of perceptions—he from his end and me from mine, so that we thread back and forth as if through the through the wiring of some vast computer—but a computer that is alive.
    The emergence of action within a time scheme is actually one of the most important developments connected with the beginning of your world.
    The Garden of Eden story in its most basic sense refers to man’s sudden realization that now he must act within time. His experiences must be neurologically structured. This immediately brought about the importance of choosing between one action and another, and made acts of decision highly important.
    This time reference is perhaps the most important within earth experience, and the one that most influences all creatures. In experience or existence outside of time, there is no necessity to make certain kinds of judgments. In an out-of-time reference, theoretically speaking now, an infinite number of directions can be followed at once. Earth’s time reference, however, brought to experience a new brilliant focus—and in the press of time, again, certain activities would be relatively more necessary than others, relatively more pleasant or unpleasant than others. Among a larger variety of possible actions, man was suddenly faced with a need to make choices, that within that context had not been made “before.”
    Speaking in terms of your time, early man still had a greater neurological leeway. There were alternate neurological pathways that, practically speaking, were more available then than now. They still exist now, but they have become like ghostly signals in the background of neurological activity.
    This is, again, difficult to explain, but free will operates in all units of consciousness, regardless of their degree—but it operates within the framework of that degree. Man possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man’s degree—that is, his free will is somewhat contained by the frameworks of time and space.
    He has free will to make any decisions that he is able to make. This means that his free will is contained, given meaning, focused, and framed by his neurological structure. He can only move, and he can only choose therefore to move, physically speaking, in certain directions in space and time. That time reference, however, gives his free will meaning and a context in which to operate. We arc speaking now of conscious decisions as you think of them.
    You can only make so many conscious decisions, or you would be swamped and caught in a constant dilemma of decision making. Time organizes the available choices that are to be made. The awakening mentioned earlier, then, found man rousing from his initial “dreaming condition,” faced suddenly with the need for action in a world of space and time, a world in which choices became inevitable, a world in which he must choose among probable actions—and from an infinite variety of those choose which events he would physically actualize. This would be an almost impossible situation were the species—meaning each species—not given its own avenues of expression and activity, so that it is easier for certain species to behave in certain manners. And each species has its own overall characteristics and propensities that further help it define the sphere of influence in which it will exert its ability to make choices.
    Each species is endowed also, by virtue of the units of consciousness that compose it, with an overall inner picture of the condition of each other species, and further characterized by basic impulses so that it is guided toward choices that best fulfill its own potentials for development while adding to the overall good of the entire world consciousness. This does not curtail free will any more than man’s free will is curtailed because he must grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around.
    The differences among all species are caused by this kind of organization, so that areas of choice are clearly drawn, and areas of free activity clearly specified. The entire gestalt of probable actions, therefore, is already focused to some degree in the species’ differentiations. In the vast structure of probable activity, however, far more differentiation was still necessary, and this is provided for through the inner passageways of reincarnational existence.
    Each person, for example, is born with his or her uniquely individual set of characteristics and abilities, likes and dislikes. Those serve to organize individual action in a world where an infinite number of probable roads are open—and here again, private impulses are basically meant to guide each individual toward avenues of expression and probable activities suited best to his or her development. They are meant, therefore, as aids to help organize action, and to set free will more effectively into motion. Otherwise, free will would be almost inoperble in practical terms: Individuals would be faced by so many choices that any decisions would be nearly impossible. Essentially, the individual would have no particular leaning toward any one action over any other.
    “By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development. The inner rein-carnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man’s physical survival. Children— change that to “infants”— dream of their past lives, remembering, for example, how to walk and talk. They are born with the knowledge of how to think, with the propensity for language. They are guided by memories that they later forget.
    In time’s reference, the private purposes of each individual appear also in the larger historical context, so that each person forms his corner of his civilization—and all individuals within a given time period have private and overall purposes, challenges that are set, probable actions that they will try to place within history’s context.

3. [899] At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. I’ll try to remember to ask Seth to elaborate upon this point, although I also think he alludes to it later in this session.

NOTES. Session 902 (Non book material provided as optional)

1. Shades of the great ages given for those patriarchs in the Bible! That was my first thought when Seth told us that in ancient times certain people had “lived for several centuries.” My second thought was to cut his statement out of this record entirely, so that Jane and I wouldn’t have to contend with it at all. Jane wasn’t upset by Seth’s remark, and I could appreciate the humorous aspects of my own initial reactions—yet in all of the years he’s been giving us material, Seth has never before made a reference to what seems like impossible longevities.
    I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).
    In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years. Generally, Abraham’s forebears didn’t live as long as Adam’s descendants had, although after Shem their ages still ranged from 148 years to 460. Abraham himself was “only” 175 years old at his death.
    During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, fane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal— that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a greatgreat- grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.
    Both of us thought that the long-lived individuals postulated by Seth had existed outside of the Biblical framework, however, and in truth far earlier historically. “Seth saying that makes perfect sense to me. It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said when I asked her what she thought of Seth’s material. “You weren’t encouraged to read the Bible even in Catholic grade school,” she added. “We just didn’t deal with it that much to worry about it. I never even read it through. . . .”
    My questions about those ancient great ages led Seth to volunteer some more information in a couple of private sessions.
    First: “In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze you today—many living to be several hundred years old. This was indeed due to the fact that their knowledge was desperately needed, and their experience. They were held in veneration, and they cast their knowledge into songs and stories that were memorized throughout the years. Beside this, however, their energy was utilized in a different fashion than yours is: They alternated between the waking and dream states, and while asleep they did not age as quickly. Their bodily processes slowed. Although this was true, their dreaming mental processes did not slow down. There was a much greater communication in the dream state, so that some lessons were taught during dreams, while others were taught in the waking condition. There was a greater and greater body of knowledge to be transmitted as physical existence continued, for they did not transmit private knowledge only, but the entire body of knowledge that belonged to the group as a whole.”
    Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”
    Seth first discussed the Speakers, and their oral traditions, in Session 558 for November 5, 1970. See the Appendix of Seth Speaks.
1. [903] Seth is telling us a great deal here, on a subject Jane and I have done little to explore with him. We’d like to know much more. Mammals are animals of the highest class of warm blooded vertebrates, the Mammalia. They are usually hairy, and their young are fed with milk secreted by the female. Dogs, cats, manatees, lions, dolphins, apes, bats, whales, shrews, sloths, and deer are mammals, to name just a few. I’m interpreting Seth to say that a consciousness can choose to range among such forms. However, for reasons to be hinted at later in the session, the primate man (who is also a mammal) falls outside of Seth’s meaning here.
    I found the scientific, systematic categorization of organisms to be fascinating. For man alone the arrangement goes in this descending order from the most inclusive: The kingdom Animalia; phylum Chordata; class Mammalia; order Primates; family Hominidae; genus Homo; species name Homo sapiens; common name Man.
2. [903] Seth has told us almost from the beginning of the sessions that in our terms the earth we know is but the latest in a series of earths that have existed in the same “space,” or “value climate of psychological reality.” According to Seth, however, much more is involved. From Session 29, for February 26, 1964 (just 16 years ago): “There are endless planes upon your earth, or rather endless planes occurring simultaneously with your earth. Your solid earth is not a solid to inhabitants that would seem to take up the same space as your earth. The idea of taking up the same space is erroneous to begin with, but I don’t see how we can avoid such terms and still make any sense to you.”
    Jane and I, and Seth, hadn’t cared for the trite term, “plane,” even then. “The value climate of psychological reality” is one of Seth’s attempts to originate something better. See Appendix 8 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.

    Any real discussion of genetic heritage must also bring up questions involving free will and determinism,² and to some extent those issues must also lead to questions concerning the nature of the reasoning mind itself.
    Reasoning, as you are familiar with it, is the result of mental or psychic processes functioning in a space-time context, and in a particular fashion. To some extent, then, reasoning—again, as you are familiar with it—is the result of a lack of available knowledge. You try to “reason things out,” because the answer is not in front of you. If it were, you would “know,” and hence have no need to question.
    The reasoning mind is a uniquely human and physical phenomenon. It depends upon conscious thinking, problem-solving methods, and it is a natural human blossoming, a spectacular mental development in its own framework of activity.
    Your technology is one of the results of that reasoning mind. That “reasoning” is necessary, however, because of the lack of a larger, immediate held of knowledge. Thoughts are mental activity, scaled to time and space terms so that they are like mental edifices built to certain dimensions only. Your thoughts make you human.
    Other creatures have their own kinds of mental activity, however. They also have different kinds of immediate perceptions of reality. All species are united by their participation in emotional states, however. It is not just that all species of life have feeling, but that all participate in dimensions of emotional reality. It has been said that only men have a moral sense, that only men have free will—if indeed free will is possible at all. The word “moral” has endless connotations, of course. Yet animals have their own “morality,” their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. They have loving emotional relationships, complicated societies,³ and in a certain sense at least—an important one— they also have their arts and sciences. But those “arts and sciences” are not based upon reasoning, as you understand it.
    Animals also possess independent volition, and while I am emphasizing animals here, the same applies to any creature, large or small: insect, bird, fish, or worm; to plant life; to cells, atoms, or electrons. They possess free will in relationship to the conditions of their existence.
    The conditions of existence are largely determined by genetic structure. Free will must then of course function in accordance with genetic integrity. Genetic structure makes possible physical organisms through which life is to be experienced, and to a large extent that structure must determine the kind of action possible in the world, and the way or ways in which volition can be effectively expressed.
    The beaver is not free to make a spider web. In human beings the genetic structure largely determines physical characteristics such as height, color of eyes, color of hair, color of skin—and, of course, more importantly, the number of fingers and toes, and the other specific physical attributes of your specieshood. So physically, and on his physical attributes alone, a man cannot use his free will to fly like a bird, or to perform physical acts for which the human body is not equipped.
    The body is equipped to perform far better, in a variety of ways, than you give it credit for, however—but the fact remains that the genetic structure focuses volition. The genetic apparatus and the chromosomal messages actually contain far more information than is ever used. That genetic information can, for example, be put together in an infinite number of ways. The species cares for itself in the event of any possible circumstance, so that the genetic messages also carry an endless number of triggers that will change genetic combinations if this becomes necessary.
    Beyond that, however, genetic messages are coded in such a way that there is a constant give-and-take between those messages and the present experience of any given individual. That is, no genetic event is inevitable.
    Now besides this physical genetic structure, there is an inner bank of psychic information that in your terms would contain the “past” history—the reincarnational history—of the individual. This provides an overall reservoir of psychic characteristics, leanings, abilities, knowledge, that is as much a part of the individual’s heritage as the genetic structure is a part of the physical heritage.
    A person of great intelligence may be born from a family of idiots, for example, because of that reincarnational structure. Musical ability may thus appear complete—with great technical facility, regardless of family background, genetically speaking, and again, the reincarnational bank of characteristics accounts for such events. That inner reincarnational psychic structure is also responsible for triggering certain genetic messages while ignoring others, or for triggering certain combinations of genetic messages. In actuality, of course —say that I smiled—all time is simultaneous, and so all reincarnational lives occur at once.
    Perhaps an analogy will help. An actor throwing him self or herself into a role, even momentarily lost in the part, is still alive and functioning as himself or herself in a context that is larger than the play. The character in the play is seemingly alive (creatively) for the play’s duration, perception being limited to that framework, yet to play that role the actor draws upon the experience of his own life. He brings to bear his own understanding, compassion, artistry, and if he is a good actor, or if she is, then when the play is over the actor is a better person for having played the role.
    Now in the greater framework of reincarnational existences you choose your roles, or your lives, but the lines that you speak, the situations that you meet, are not predetermined. “You” live or exist in a larger framework of activity even while you live your life, and there is a rambunctious interplay between the yous in time and the you outside of time.
    The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative psychological face that you use for the purposes of your life’s drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that you mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play’s formal structure. You cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past.
    You reason out your position. Otherwise your free will would have no meaning in a physical framework, for the number of choices available would be so multitudinous that you could not make up your mind to act within time: With all the opportunities of creativity, and with your own greater knowledge instantly available, you would be swamped by so many stimuli that you literally could not physically respond, and so your particular kinds of civilization and science and art could not have been accomplished—and regardless of their flaws they are magnificent accomplishments, unique products of the reasoning mind.
    Without the reasoning mind the artist would have no need to paint, for the immediacy of his mental vision would be so instant and blinding, so mentally accomplished, that there would be no need to try any physical rendition of it. So nowhere do I ever mean to demean the qualities or excellence of the reasoning mind as you understand it.
    You have, however, become so specialized in its use, so prejudiced in its favor, that your tendency is to examine all other kinds of “consciousness using the reasoning mind as the only yardstick by which to judge intelligent life. You are surrounded everywhere by other kinds of consciousness whose validity you have largely ignored, whose psychic brotherhood you have dismissed—kinds of consciousness in the animal kingdom particularly, that deal with a different kind of knowing, but who share with you the reality of keen emotional experience, and who are innately aware of biological and psychic values, but in ways that have escaped your prejudiced examination.
    To some extent that emotional reality is also expressed at other levels—as your own is—in periods of dreaming, in which animals, like men, participate in a vast cooperative venture that helps to form the psychological atmosphere in which your lives must first of all exist.
    Now: The reasoning mind represents human mental activity in a space and time context, as mentioned earlier.
    Again, it is involved with the trial-and-error method. It sets up hypotheses, and its very existence is dependent upon a lack of available knowledge—knowledge that it seeks to discover. In the dreaming state the characteristics of the reasoning mind become altered, and from a waking viewpoint it might seem distorted in its activity. What actually happens, however, is that in the dreaming state you are presented with certain kinds of immediate knowledge. It often appears out of context in usual terms. It is not organized according to the frameworks understood by the reasoning portions of your mind, and so to some extent in dreams you encounter large amounts of information that you cannot categorize.
    The information may not fit into your recognizable time or space slots. There are, in fact, many important issues connected with the dreaming state that can involve genetic activation of certain kinds: information processing on the part of the species, the insertion or reinsertion of civilizing elements—and all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming.
    I have not touched upon some of these subjects before, since I wanted to present them in that larger context of man’s origins and historic appearance as a species. I also wanted to make certain points, stressing the importance of dreams as they impinge upon and help form cultural environments. Dreams also sometimes help in showing the pathways that can be taken to advantage by an individual, or by a group of individuals, and therefore help clarify the ways in which free will might most advantageously be directed. So I hope to cover all of these subjects.
    Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of tbe reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. The physical eyes cannot see today the dawn that will come in the morning. The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow’s street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses’ domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. It must rely upon observation to make its deductions accordingly. In a fashion, it must divide to conquer. It must try to deduce the nature of the whole it cannot perceive from the portions that are physically available.
    Children begin to count by counting on their fingers. Later, fingers are dispensed with but the idea of counting remains. There have been people throughout history who mentally performed mathematical feats that appear most astounding, and almost in a matter of moments. Some, had they lived in your century, would have been able to outperform computers (just as some are outperforming computers these days!). In most cases where such accomplishments show themselves, they do so in a child far too young to have learned scientific mathematical procedures to begin with, and often such feats are displayed by people who are otherwise classified as idiots (idiot savants), and who are incapable of intellectual reasoning.
    Indeed, when a child is involved, the keener his use of the reasoning mind becomes the dimmer his mathematical abilities grow. Others, children [or adults] who would be classified as mentally deficient, can tell, or have been able to tell, the day of the week that any given date, past or present, would fall upon. Others have been able, while performing various tasks, to keep a precise count of the moments from any given point in time. There have been children, again, with highly accomplished musical abilities, and great facility with music’s technical aspects— all such accomplishments before the assistance of any kind of advanced education.
    Now, some of those children went on to become great musicians, while others lost their abilities along the way, so what are we dealing with in such cases? We are dealing with direct knowing. We are dealing with the natural perceptions of the psyche, at least when we are speaking in human terms. We arc dealing with natural, direct cognition as it exists before and after man’s experience with the reasoning mind.
    Some of those abilities show themselves in those classified as mentally deficient simply because all of the powers of the reasoning mind are not activated. In children under such conditions, the reasoning mind has not yet developed in all of its aspects sufficiently, so that in a certain area direct cognition shines through with its brilliant capacity.
    Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms you might call it remote sensing. Your physical body, and your physical existence, are based upon certain kinds of direct cognition, and it is responsible for the very functioning of the reasoning mind itself. Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. The spider must spin his web. If he chooses not to, he will not survive. But by that same reasoning— to which, of course, I do not subscribe—you should also add that man can take no credit either for his intellect, since man must think, and cannot help doing so.
    Some pessimistic scientists would say: “Of course,” for man and animal alike are driven by their instincts, and man’s claim to free will is no more than an illusion.
    Man’s reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and deduction, and for observation, rests upon a direct cognition—a direct cognition that powers his thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He thinks because he knows how to think by thinking, even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind.^{1 [908]}
    In dreams the reasoning mind loosens its hold upon perception. From your standpoint vou are almost faced with too much data. The reasoning mind attempts to catch what it can as it reassembles its abilities toward waking, but the net of its reasoning simply cannot hold that assemblage of information. Instead it is processed at other levels of the psyche. Dreams also involve a kind of psychological perspective with which you have no physical equivalent—and therefore such issues are most difficult to discuss.
    The reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and suitable for physical existence, and for the utilization of free will, which is very dependent upon perception of clearly distinguishable actions. In the larger framework of existence, however, it is simply one of innumerable methods of organizing data. A psychological filing system, if you prefer.
    Your dreaming self possesses pyschological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. You must, again, realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity—an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own. You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware.
    If you are having a dream as yourself from your own perspective, another reincarnational self may be having the same dream from its perspective—in which, of course, you play a minor role. 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. But culture throughout the ages was spread by more than physical means. 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.
    Now: Man’s first encounter with physical reality in life is his experience with the state of his own consciousness.
    He is aware of a different kind of being. He encounters his consciousness first, and then he encounters the world—so I am saying, of course, that each person has an identity that is larger than the framework of consciousness with which you are usually familiar in life.
    When you are born, you understand that you have a new consciousness. You explore its ramifications. It is your primary evidence that you exist in flesh. Basically, each person must confront the experience of reality through a direct encounter with it. This encounter takes place through the use of the physical senses, of course, as they are used to perceive and interpret physical data. The very utilization of those senses, however, is dependent upon the nature of your consciousness itself, and that consciousness is aware of its power and action through the exercise of its own properties.
    Those “properties” are the faculties of the imagination, creativity, telepathy, clairvoyance, and dreaming, as well as the functions of logic and reason. You know that you dream. You know-that you think. Those are direct experiences. Anytime you use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, you are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more “convincing” and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. Although instruments can indeed be most advantageous in many ways, they still present you with secondary rather than primary tools of investigation—and they distort the nature of reality far more than the subjective attributes of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions do.
    The human consciousness has not, therefore, developed the best and most proper “tool” with which to examine the nature of reality. It is because you have used other methods that much evidence escapes you—evidence that would show that the physical universe exists in quite different terms than is supposed.
    You are taught not to trust your subjective experience, which means that you are told not to trust your initial and primary connection with reality.
    Evidence for reincarnation is quite available. There are enough instances of it, known and tabulated, to make an excellent case; and beside this there is evidence that remains psychologically invisible in your private lives, because you have been taught not to concentrate in that direction.
    There is enough evidence to build an excellent case for life after death. All of this involves direct experience—episodes, encountered by individuals, [that are] highly suggestive of the afterdeath hypothesis; but the hypothesis is never taken seriously by your established sciences. There is far more evidence for reincarnation and life after death than there is, for example, for the existence of black holes. Few people have seen a black hole, to make the most generous statement possible, while countless people have had private reincarnational experiences, or encounters that suggest the survival of the personality beyond death.
    Those experiences are usual. They have been reported by peoples of all kinds and in all ages, and they represent a common-sense kind of knowledge that is frowned upon by the men of learned universities. Throughout this book we will often be talking about experiences that are encountered in one way or another by most people, but are not given credence to on the part of the established fields of knowledge. Therefore, dreams will be considered throughout the book in various capacities as they are related through genetics, reincarnation, culture, and private life. We will also be considering the matter of free will and its role individual value fulfillment.

2. Free will is the philosophical doctrine that the individual has the freedom to choose, without coercion, some actions consistent with his or her particular morals and ideals. Determinism is the opposing doctrine that everything, even the individual’s course of action, is determined by conditions outside one’s will.
    Through the centuries philosophical and religious thinkers have created numerous complicated variations of ideas involving free will and determinism, so that neither thesis is as simple as it first appears to be. Man related the concept of free will long ago to the question of whether he could deliberately choose evil, for example. He still does. And he still struggles with questions about his freedom before God’s omnipotence and foreknowledge, and whether those qualities cause events, or can cause them, and whether they involve predestination. Opposing determinism is the idea that man has always fought for his personal responsibility—that instead of being controlled entirely by his heritage, he’s capable of forming new syntheses of thought and action based upon the complicated patterns of his own history.
    In a strange way, determinism has always seemed lacking as a concept to Jane and me—for if it means what it’s supposed to mean, then surely human beings set up the parameters within which determinism is said to operate. I see this as a contradiction of the notion that the individual is entirely at the mercy of his or her history and of nature. How can we be, if through the ages we’ve created that history and nature against which we react? In other words, on joint and individual scales, vast though they may be, we do create our joint and individual realities.
    I want to add that even with ideas of religious determinism— that man cannot know God’s will, for instance, or is quite dependent upon that divine grace—we’re still creating our conscious ideas of what God is, in those terms. So once again we have a determinism that operates within our sensual and intellectual boundaries: another framework within which we ceaselessly attempt to understand “the meaning of life.”
    Even in modern terms, our psychological and medical knowledge of mind and brain have added more complications to the doctrine of free will, yet it survives and grows. And all the while I worked on this note, I felt strong connections involving free will, determinism, and probable realities—connections largely unexpressed and unexplored in our world’s societies.
    3. See the Preface for Dreams. In the notes immediately preceding the private session for September 13, 1979, I quoted some of the very evocative material on animal cultures and civilizations that Seth had given in Chapter 5 of Mass Events.
    1. [908] With a little reflection it become obvious, but I think it important to note that Jane’s expression of the Seth material is certainly the result of her direct cognition. Because she has to deliver it linearly in words, which take “time,” she cannot produce her material almost at once, as the mathematical prodigy can his or her answers, but in their own way her communications with Seth are as psychologically clear and direct as the calculator’s objective products are with numbers, or the musician’s are with notes. From the very beginning of the sessions, in late 1963, I appreciated the speed with which Jane delivered the Seth material, and began recording the times involved throughout each session. I now think that spontaneously starting to do that reflected my own intuitive understanding of her direct cognition, long before either one of us knew how to describe it. And when Jane speaks extemporaneously for Seth, her delivery is even more rapid. It was most definitely faster—sometimes spectacularly so—during all of those years she gave sessions in ESP class.
    More is involved, of course. I’ve read that mathematical prodigies are in love with their numbers, and rely upon their dependability in an often unsure world. Jane has a deep love for words. Words, however, can be very elusive tools, and vary from language to language, although intrinsically through the Seth material Jane conveys depths of meaning that continue to develop within whatever language others may cast it. This psychological growth, and the many challenges involved, set her work apart from the mental calculator’s numbers or the musician’s notes, which are ever the same: Those friendly columns of figures, for instance, add up to identical sums in any language. In her own direct cognition Jane deals with feelings and ideas that are often quite divorced from any such reliability and acceptance.
    Regardless of who or what he is, then, with Jane’s permission Seth adds his material to the information possessed by her reasoning mind— and thus offers it to the reasoning minds of others