JUST SETH

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

    Your species as a species includes the idiot and the genius, the stupid and the wise, the athletic, the deformed, the beautiful and the ugly, and all variations in between. There are genetic cultures operating, then, of literally infinite variety, and they each have their place and their reason, and they each fit into the overall picture—not only of man’s reality but of the planet’s reality, including all of nature.
    Your religious ideas have often told you that deformities at birth were the result of the parents’ sins cast upon the children, or that another kind of punishment was involved in terms of “karma.” In terms of biology, people talk about coming from good stock or bad stock, and even those designations imply moral judgments.
    The entire idea of reincarnation has been highly distorted by other religious concepts. It is not a psychological arena composed of crime and punishment. Again, you have free will in the conditions of your life, given the characteristics that are your own. The great facility and adaptability of the human species are dependent upon an amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom. The very characteristic attributes of the species, its dependability and integrity, are dependent upon constant checks and balances, the existence of divergent characteristics against which the species can measure itself.
    The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man but of other species.
    The possibility of creative change must always be present to insure the species’ resiliency, and that resiliency can show in many ways—in conditions that you consider deformities, disabilities from birth, or in any physical variation from a hypothetical physical norm. You all look quite alike, with one head, two arms and legs, and so forth, as a rule. Such differences or variations are very noticeable at a certain level, if you have more fingers than you are supposed to, or less, or two thumbs to a hand, or any other condition that is considered an abnormality.
    There are mental conditions also: the so-called retarded people who do not use their reasoning minds as others do. There are also, again, highly gifted people, physically or mentally, people who seem to be at times as far from the ordinary person on the gifted scale as an idiot might be [on] the other. So as we progress, I hope to show where all of these situations fit in with the development of the individual and the species.
    At a smaller level of activity such variances of course escape your notice. You do not know if you have any errant genes unless their effects show themselves. At microscopic levels, in fact, no one fits any norm, and there is no way to predict with complete certainty the development of any genetic element. You can make group predictions; and overall make certain judgments, but other elements are involved, so that any particular genetic element cannot be pinned down in terms of its development. This is because its activity is also involved with relationships that do not show in any of your calculations.
    Your thoughts, feelings, desires and intents, your reincarnational knowledge¹ as well, modify that structure, bring certain latent characteristics into actualization, minimize others, as through the experience of your life you use your free will and constantly make new decisions.
    If there were no idiots among you, you would soon find that geniuses were absent also.
    Those human abilities that you consider to be characteristic of your species are, again, dependent upon the existence of infinite numbers of variations that appear in the aggregate, to give you often obviously opposing states. What you think of then as the average intelligence is a condition that exists because of the activity of constant variables, minute variations that give you at one end of the scale the idiot, and at the other the genius.
    Both are necessary to maintain that larger “norm” of mental activity. I am using the word “norm” here for your convenience, though I disagree with the ways in which the term has been used, when it has been set up as a rule of measurement, psychologically speaking. The genetic system^{2 [910]} is not closed, therefore. The genes do not simply hold information, without any reference to the body’s living system. It does not exist, then—the genetic structure—like some highly complicated mechanism already programmed, started and functioning “blindly,” so that once it is set into operation there is no chance for modification.
    Particularly in your own species there is a great give-and-take between human genetic systems, the environment, and cultural events—and by cultural events I mean events having to do with your peculiarly unique field of activity that includes the worlds of politics, economics, and so forth.^7-JS1
    Genetic events are not irrefutable in a deterministic fashion. They represent strong inclinations toward certain bodily or mental activity, certain biological preferences. They lead toward the activation of certain events over others, so that the probabilities are “loaded” in certain directions. Genetic events are then events, though at a different level of activity than you are used to thinking of.
    We are speaking of chromosomal messages. These are not written within the chromosomes as words, might be written upon paper, but the information and the chromosomes are a living unit. The information is alive. We are speaking about a kind of biological cuneiform, in which the structures, the very physical structures, of the cells contain all of the knowledge needed to form a physical body—to form themselves. This is indeed knowledge in biological form, and biologically making its clearest living statement.
    The cells [with their] genetic packages, like all cells, react to stimuli. They act. They are aware of all of the body’s events biologically. In ways impossible to verbalize, they are also aware of the environment of the body as it is perceived at biological levels. I have said before that in one way or another each living cell is united with each other living cell through a system of inner communication. “Programmed” genetic activity can be altered by conditions in the environment.
    I am not simply saying that genetic activity can be changed, for example, through something like a nuclear accident, but that highly beneficial alterations can also take place in genetic behavior, as in your terms the genetic structure not only prepares the species for any contingency, but also prepares it by triggering those characteristics and abilities that are needed by the species at any given time, and also by making allowances for such future developments.
    Your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate. In your terms, it contains the physical history of the species in context with the probable future capabilities of the species. You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and capabilities of the species. You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and potentials that you have chosen. It represents your physical reference point, your bodily framework. It is your personal physical property. It is a portion of physical matter that you have identified, filled out with your own identity. It is like a splendid ship, the body, that you have chosen ahead of time for a splendid challenging adventure—a ship that you have personally appointed that is equipped to serve as much as possible as a physical manifestation of your personhood.
    Some people, in beginning such a venture, will indeed insist upon an excellent vessel, with the most sophisticated mechanisms, equipped with grand couches and a banquet room. Others would want much more excitement, much more zest, and order then instead a less grand vessel, but one that went faster. Some would set goals for themselves that demanded that their powers of seamanship be tested. The analogy may be a simple one, yet each person chooses the living vessel of the body, with his or her own intents and purposes in mind.
    In physical reality, if you will forgive me, life is the name of the game—and the game is based upon value fulfillment. That means simply that each form of life seeks toward the fulfillment and unfolding of all of the capacities that it senses within its living framework, knowing that in that individual fulfillment each other species of life is also benefited.
    In no way do I mean to demean the indisputable value of geniuses, or their great contributions to the quality of life— but the quality of life is, again, also benefited by the existence of idiots. Not only because both ends of the scale are necessary for genetic reasons, but also because idiots themselves are in no way considered failures or defects by nature. Those terms are human judgments. Idiots also serve their role by moderating the sometimes fierce hold that the reasoning mind can have upon human activity.
    The idiot is often able to experience in his or her own reality a freer, more generous, more faithful flow of emotional states, unhampered by reason’s sometimes stern dictates, and it is important that such a moderating tendency does operate genetically.
    The reasoning mind, as you have used it thus far, roughly since the birth of Christianity, has used—instead of used, confined—has confined its reasoning abilities to a very narrow spectrum of reality. It has seen the value of life largely only as that life conforms to its own standards. That is, the reasoning mind, as you have used it, considers that only reasoning creatures are capable of understanding life’s values. Other forms of life have almost seemed beside the point, their value considered only insofar as they were of service to man. But man’s life is obviously dependent upon the existence of life’s other species, and with him those species share certain values. Life is sacred—all life—and again, all life seeks value fulfillment, not simply physical survival.
    Ruburt read an article about the development of a strain of mice without thymus [glands]. Since the thymus is very important in the necessary process of maintaining bodily resistance to disease, these particular mice have little resistance. They are bred and sold for experimental purposes. The intent of such procedures is to promote the quality of human life, to study the nature of diseases, and hopefully apply what is learned to some of the lives of human beings. Mice are not considered human. They are not. So like any animal, they are thought of as dispensable, sacrificed to a fine humanitarian end.
    Perhaps at first that prejudice of the reasoning mind might escape you, since after all mice are far divorced from your own species. There were Jews sacrificed to the same end not too long ago, and the reasoning was largely the same, though in that case you were dealing with your own species.
    Jews were considered almost not human, however, and whenever such atrocities against your own species are concerned, you indulge in the same kind of twisted reasoning. Because the Jews were considered less than human— or, at best, human defects—they were thought of as justifiable sacrifices on the altar of “the genetic betterment of mankind.” You cannot improve the quality of your own lives by destroying the quality of any other kinds of life. There is no genetic master race. The very classification of the species into races to begin with is based upon distinctions that are ridiculously minute in the overall picture of the similarities.
    Ruburt was incensed by the article that he read, and he said indignantly that such procedures involve a biological immorality. I usually avoid terms like “morality” or “immorality,” since their definitions vary according to the individual. The proceedings, however, do involve a biological violation, a going against nature’s flow and intent, a process in which a form of life is made to go against its own value fulfillment, and it is because of such attitudes involving other kinds of life that the horrors of the Jewish war camps were made possible.
    The genetic system is an inner, biological, “universal” language.
    In your terms that language speaks the flesh—and it speaks the flesh equally in all races of mankind. There are no inferior or superior races. Now dreams also provide you with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one extent or another, regardless of their physical circumstances or nationalities or alliances.
    The cataloging of separate races simply involves you in organizations of variances played upon a common theme—variances that you have used for various purposes. Often those purposes led you to overexaggerate the differences between groups, and to minimize man’s biological unity.
    The most important aspects of individuality are those subjective characteristics that on the one hand distinguish each person from the other, and that on the other hand are each like sparkling psychological mosaics, giving separate, exquisite individual versions of that larger pattern from which mankind emerges. The security, the integrity, and the brilliance of each individuality rises in these terms from that universal genetic language, and also from the inner subjective universal language of dreams. There are great connections between the two, and both are spoken together.
    Let us become more practical, and see how these issues merge in your reality. Some of this requires a great honesty on your own parts, as you try to recall some feelings and daydreams that you have tried to put away or forget or disown. Why are some people, then, born with conditions that are certainly experienced as genetically defective, granting even the overall value of such variances on the part of the species? For, again, I must stress the fact that in its way nature makes no such judgments, regardless of the beliefs of your science or religions.
    Science seems to be of the opinion that the individual is important only insofar as he or she serves the purposes of the species’ survival—and I am not saying that. I am saying that the existence of each individual is important to the value fulfillment of the species. And moreover, I am stating that the value fulfillment of the individual and the species go hand in hand.
    I am also stating that the species is itself aware of those conditions that lead to its own value fulfillment, and that of its members. No species basically biologically considers its own existence with other species except in a cooperative manner—that is, there is no basic competition between species. When you think that there is, you are reading nature wrong. Whatever man’s conscious beliefs, on a biological level his genetic structure is intimately related to the genetic structure of all other species.
    In man, the probabilities of development are literally numberless. No computer could count the combinations of characteristics possible. It is highly important, then, that the species retain flexibility, and not become locked into any one pattern, however advantageous—and I am referring to physical or mental patterns. Within the framework of established specieshood, there must be every kind of leeway—leeways that are biologically activated, so that variances are constantly active. Those genetic variances may appear as defective or eccentric. They may appear as the handicapped. They may appear as superior characteristics of one kind or another, but they must be biologically stated as the variations from the genetic norm.
    By themselves, whether they appear as superior or defective conditions, they necessitate a different kind of adaptability, a change of subjective or physical focus, the intensification of other abilities that perhaps have been understressed. Yet granting all this, why, again, would some individuals choose situations that would be experienced as defective conditions? For this, we need to examine some human feelings that are often forgotten. Now I have often said that suffering of itself is not “good for the soul.” It is not a virtue, yet certainly many individuals seem to seek suffering. Suffering cannot be dismissed from human experience as a freak matter of distorted emotions or beliefs.
    Suffering is a human condition that is sought for various reasons. There are gradations of suffering, of course, and each person will have his or her definitions of what suffering is. Many people do indeed equate a certain kind of suffering with excitement. Sportsmen, race-car drivers, mountain climbers—all seek suffering to one extent or another, and find the very intensity of certain kinds of pain pleasurable. You might say that they like to live dangerously.
    Some sects have believed that spiritual understanding came as the result of bodily agony, and their self-inflicted pain became their versions of pleasure. It is usually said that animals, and also man, avoid pain and seek pleasure—and so any courting of pain, except under certain conditions, is seen as unnatural behavior.
    It is not unnatural. It is an eccentric behavior pattern. Many children daydream not only of being kings or queens, or given great honors, they also daydream about being tragic figures. They daydream of cruel deaths. They glory in stories of wicked stepmothers. They imagine, in fact, every situation that they can involving human experience. To an extent adults do the same thing. They are drawn to cinema or television dramas that involve tragedies, sorrows, great dramatic struggles. This is because you are alive as the result of your great curiosity for human experience. You are alive because you want to participate in human drama.
    While I admit that many people will not agree with me, I know from experience that most individuals do not choose one “happy” life after another, always ensconced in a capable body, endowed by nature or heritage with all of the gifts most people seem to think they desire.
    Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose “defective” bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus. They want to sift their characteristics through a certain cast. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well, so that a certain group of people will relate to the world in a highly characteristic way. In almost all such cases, such people will be embarked upon subjective issues and questions also that might not be considered otherwise. They will ask questions on their own parts that need to be raised, not only for themselves but for the society at large.
    Those questions help bring out psychological maturities and insights about the nature of the species in general. Many such conditions also serve to keep man’s sympathies alive. I make a distinction between sympathy and pity, for a lively sympathy leads toward construction, toward the utilization of abilities, even to social discourse, while pity can be deadening.
    Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course. Many religious dogmas consider such conditions, again the result of god’s punishment. The survival of the species is far more dependent upon your subjective activities than your physical ones—for it is your subjective behavior that is responsible for your physical acts. Science of course looks at it the other way around, as if your physical acts are the result of a robot’s mechanical, formalized behavior—a robot miraculously programmed by the blind elements of an accidental universe formed by chance. The robot is programmed only to survive at anyone’s or anything’s expense. It has no real consciousness of its own. Its thoughts are merely mental mirages, so if one of its parts is defective then obviously it is in deep trouble. But man is no robot, and each so-called genetic defect has an internal part to play in the entire picture of genetic reality. The principle of uncertainty must operate genetically, or you would have been locked into overspecializations as a species.^{2 [911]}
    There are states of consciousness, one within the other, and yet each connected, of course, so that genetic systems are really systems of consciousness. They are intertwined with reincarnational systems of consciousness. These are further entwined with the consciousness that you recognize. The present is the point of power. Given the genetic makeup that you now have, your conscious intents and purposes act as the triggers that activate whatever genetic or reincarnational aspects that you need.
    The state of dreaming provides the connecting links between these systems of consciousness.
    Again, the genetic system is a far more open one than is usually supposed. It not only contains and conveys information, but it also reacts to information from the physical and cultural worlds.
    In a way I hope to explain, then, the genetic system also reacts to those beliefs and events that are paramount in any given civilization. Events can trigger genetic activity—not simply through, say, chemical reactions, but through individual and mass beliefs about the safety or lack of it in the world at large. There are also what I will call genetic dreams, which are inspired directly by genetic triggering. These help form and direct consciousness as it exists in any given individual from before birth.
    The fetus dreams. As its physical growth takes place in the womb, so the shaping of its consciousness is also extended by genetic dreams. These particular fetus-oriented dreams are most difficult to describe, for they are actually involved with forming the contours of the individual consciousness. Such dreams provide the subjective understanding from which thoughts are developed, and in those terms complete thoughts are possible before the brain itself is fully formed. It is the process of thinking that helps bring the brain into activity, and not the other way around.
    Such thoughts are like, now, electrical patterns that form their own magnets. The ability to conceptualize is present in the fetus, and the fetus does conceptualize. The precise orientation of that conceptualizing, and the precise orientation of the thinking patterns, wait for certain physical triggers received from the parents and the environment after birth, but the processes of conceptualization and of thought are already established. This establishment takes place in genetic dreams.
    Infants think long before they can speak. Thought must come before language. Language is thought’s handmaiden.
    The ability to use language is also genetically built-in, through the precise orientation, again, with the physical triggering of the parents’ native language. Children learn such languages mentally long before they are physically capable of speaking them; but again, in genetically inspired dreams, children—or rather, infants—practice language. Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the language. Those dreams themselves inspire the physical formations necessary to bring about their own actualizations.
    Genetic dreams of one kind or another continue throughout your lives, whether or not you are consciously aware of them. They were of prime importance in “man’s evolution,” as you think of it. They were the source of dreams, mentioned earlier, that sent man on migrations after food, that led him toward fertile land. Those dreams are most closely related to survival in physical existence, and whenever that survival seems threatened such dreams arise to consciousness whenever possible.
    They are the dreams that warn of famines or of wars. Such dreams, however, can also be triggered often, as in your own times, when the conscious mind is convinced that the survival of the species is threatened—and in such cases the dreams then actually represent man’s fears. Overanxiety, then, can confuse the genetic system, and in a variety of ways. The existence of each of the species is dependent upon trust, indeed a biological optimism, in which each species feels the freedom to develop the potentials of its members in relative safety, within the natural frameworks of existence. Each species comes into being not merely feeling a natural built-in trust in its own validity, but is literally propelled by exuberance in its ability to cope with its environment. It knows that it is uniquely suited to its. place within life’s framework. The young of all species exhibit an unquenchable rambunctiousness. That rambunctiousness is built in.
    Animals know that their own lives spell out life’s meaning. They feel their relationship with all other forms of life. They know that their existences are vitally important in the framework of planetary existence. Beyond that, they identify themselves with the spirit of life within them so fully and so completely that to question its meaning would be inconceivable. Not inconceivable because such creatures cannot think, but because life’s meaning is so self evident to them.
    Whenever man believes that life is meaningless, whenever he feels that value fulfillment is impossible, or indeed nonexistent, then he undermines his genetic heritage. He separates himself from life’s meaning. He feels vacant inside. Man for centuries attached faith, hope, and charity to the beliefs of established religions. Instead, these are genetic attributes, inspired and promoted by the inseparable unity of spirit in flesh. The animals are quite as familiar with faith, hope, and charity as you are, and often exemplify it in their own frameworks of existence to a better extent. Any philosophy that promotes the idea that life is meaningless is biologically dangerous. It promotes feelings of despair that directly hamper genetic activity. Such philosophies are extremely disadvantageous creatively, since they dampen the emotional spirits and exuberance, and sense of play, from which creativity itself emerges.
    Such philosophies are also deadening on an intellectual basis, for they must of necessity close out man’s great curiosity about the subjective matters that are his main concern. If life has no meaning, then nothing else really makes any difference, and intellectual curiosity itself also ends up withering on the vine.
    The intellectual ideas of societies, therefore, also have a great effect upon which genetic systems are triggered, and which ones are not.
    You have genetic systems, then, carrying information that is literally incalculable.^{1 [912]} Now: Through your technologies, through your physical experience, you are also surrounded by an immense array of communication and information of an exterior nature. You have your telephones, radios, televisions, your earth satellites—all networks that process and convey data. Those inner biological systems and the exterior ones may seem quite separate. They are intimately connected, however. The information you receive from your culture, from your arts, sciences, fields of economics, is all translated, decoded, turned into cellular information. Certain genetic diseases, for example, may be activated or not activated according to the cultural climate at any given time, as the relative safety or lack of it in that climate is interpreted through private experience.
    In one way or another, the living genetic system has an effect upon your cultural reality, and the reverse also applies. All of this is further complicated by the purposes and intents of the generations in any historical period, and the reincarnational influences.
    Value fulfillment always implies the search for excellence— not perfection, but excellence. Excellence in any given area—emotional, physical, intellectual, intuitional, scientific—is reflected in other areas, and by its mere existence serves as a model for achievement. This kind of excellence need not be structured, then, into any one aspect of life, though it may appear in any aspect, and wherever it appears it is an echo of a spiritual and biological directive, so to speak. There are different historical periods, in your terms, where the species has showed what it can do—and what is possible in certain specific directions when the genetic and reincarnational triggers are touched and opened full blast, so that certain characteristics appear in their clearest, most spectacular light, to serve as individual models and as models for the species as a whole.
    Again, such times are closely bound with reincarnational intents that direct the genetic triggering, and that meet in the culture the further stimulus that may be required. The time of the great masters in the fields of painting and sculpture is a case in point —so you see, I am getting to one of your favorite questions,^{2 [912]} and we will continue the discussion at our next session.
    Do you have any questions otherwise?
    I did have a question for Seth now—one made up of a number of questions, actually, and another one of my favorites. It’s easily the longest I’ve asked in a session. It grows out of Seth’s philosophy, obviously, yet it also reflects my own, and concerns man’s attempts to both fight and grasp his heritage. Here’s a condensation of what I said:
    “The other day Jane and I were talking about people who maintain that the universe is an accident, or that it has no meaning, or that there’s no such thing as life after death, or that psychic abilities don’t exist—that sort of thing. People who call themselves skeptics, who seem to have a very rigid focus only within what they call physical reality. Those attitudes are very common. Some people have built careers around negative beliefs like that, and Jane and I were wondering how they react after physical death, when they discover that they still live—that they may have spent their professional lives maintaining belief systems which after death they begin to understand are quite wrong. How do they react? Are those individuals even aware of their earlier beliefs ? Do they care what they used to think ? Are they shocked, do they have feelings of regret or embarrassment, or what? Or is there such a variety of responses possible that you can’t answer the question simply? And how do such people react after death when they start to get glimmerings about the workings of reincarnation,^{3 [912]} for example?”
    Seth had listened politely while I expressed myself)
    Well, a tidbit: It is a highly individual matter, so that an overall answer is difficult.
    Reincarnational patterns apply also. Some people, having lived lives believing in one religious system or another, being completely immersed in them, give themselves shock treatments of sorts, then, living lives in which they believe in nothing, or at least freeing themselves from any beliefs—only to discover, of course, that a belief in nothing is the most confining belief of all. That realization is the eye-opener, in such cases.
    There are those who overrelied upon religious beliefs, using them as crutches, and in [later lives] then, they might—such people—throw those crutches away overreacting to their newfound “freedom”; and through living lives as meaningless they then realize, after death, that the meaningfulness of existence was after all not dependent upon any religious system. It was there all along, but they had not seen it.
    The variations are endless. On the whole, in the vast scheme of reincarnational reality, a belief in life’s meaning is by far the rule, and other excursions are indeed eccentric variations. Specifically, however, such life episodes will of course involve their “moments” of after-death realization—dismay, shock, or what have you.
    If you will remind me, I will say more from time to time on that subject.
    End of session. [912]
    Your established fields of knowledge do not grant any subjective reality to cells.
    Cells, however, possess an inner knowledge of their own shapes, and of any other shapes in their immediate environment— this apart from the communication system mentioned earlier that operates on biological levels between all cells.
    To some important degree, cells possess curiosity, an impetus toward action, a sense of their own balance, and a sense of being individual while being, for example, a part of a tissue or an organ. The cell’s identification biologically is highly connected with this [very] precise knowledge of its own shape, or sometimes shapes. Cells, then, know their own forms.
    In highly complicated cellular structures like yourselves, with your unique mental properties, you end up with a vital inborn sense of shape and form. The ability to draw is a natural outgrowth of this sensing of shape, this curiosity of form. On a quite unconscious level you possess a biological selfimage that is quite different from the self that you see in a mirror. It is a knowledge of bodily form from the inside out, so to speak, composed of cellular shapes and organizations, operating at the maximum. The simple cell, again, has a curiosity about its environment, and on your much more advanced cellular level your own curiosity is unbounded. It is primarily felt as a curiosity about shapes: the urge to touch, to explore, to feel edges and smooth places.
    There is particularly a fascination with space itself, in which, so to speak, there is nothing to touch, no shapes to perceive. You are born, then, with a leaning toward the exploration of form and shape in particular.
    Remember that cells have consciousness, so while I say these leanings are biologically entwined, they are also mental properties. Drawing in its simplest form is, again, an extension of those inclinations, and in a fashion serves two purposes. Particularly on the part of children, it allows them to express forms and shapes that they see mentally first of all. When they draw circles or squares, they are trying to reproduce those inner shapes, transposing those images outward into the environment—a creative act, highly significant, for it gives children experience in translating inner perceived events of a personal nature into a shared physical reality apparent to all.
    When children draw objects they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences—possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms. The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two processes. An astute understanding of inner energy and outer energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements.
    The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such a capacity to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes. The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo (1475-1564) could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements. You are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days images outside of those provided by nature’s objects were highly rare.
    People could physically only see what was presently before their eyes—no postcards with pictures of the Alps, or far places. Visual data consisted of what the eye could see—and that was indeed a different kind of a world, a world in which a sketched object was of considerable value. Portraits [were] possessed only by the priests and nobility. You must remember also that the art of the great masters was largely unknown to the poor peasants of Europe, much less to the world at large. Art was for those who could enjoy it—who could afford it. There were no prints to be passed around,^{4 [913]} so art, politics, and religion were all connected. Poor people saw lesser versions of religious paintings in their own simple churches, done by local artists of far lesser merit than those [who] painted for the popes.
    The main issue, however, in that particular era, was a shared belief system, a system that consisted of, among other things, implied images that were neither here nor there—neither entirely earthly nor entirely divine—a mythology of God, angels, demons, an entire host of Biblical characters that were images in man’s imagination, images to be physically portrayed. Those images were like an entire artistic language. Using them, the artist automatically commented upon the world, the times, God, man, and officialdom.
    Those mythological images and their belief system were shared by all—peasants and the wealthy—to a large degree. They were, then, highly charged emotionally. Whether an artist painted saints or apostles as heroic figures, as ideas embodied in flesh, or as natural men, he commented on the relationship between the natural and the divine.
    In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example! He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also. The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive. If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him.
    This was an entirely different kind of art than you have now. It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system. Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework. That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found elsewhere, brought art into that great flowering.
    Later, as man insisted upon more objectivity of a certain kind, he determined that images of men should look like men—human beings, with weaknesses and strengths. The heroic mold began to vanish. Artists decided to stick to portraying the natural world as they saw it with their natural eyes, and to cast aside the vast field of inner imagery. Some of da Vinci’s sketches already show that tendency, and he is fascinating because with his undeniable artistic tendencies he also began to show those tendencies that would lead toward the birth of modern science.
    His notebooks, for example, dealt with minute observations made upon aspects of nature itself. He combined the forces of highly original, strong imagination with very calculated preciseness, a kind of preciseness that would lead to detailed sketches of flowers, trees, the action of water—all of nature’s phenomena.
    Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an entirely different fashion, divorced to some extent from its beginnings— in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world. In your world, technology is your art. It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe.
    Science has until recently provided you with a unified belief system that is only now eroding—and if you will forgive me, your space voyages have simply been physical attempts to probe into that same unknown that other peoples in other times have tried to explore through other means. Technology has been responsible for the fact that so many people have been able to see the great paintings of the world, either directly or through reproductions—and more people are familiar with the works of the great masters than ever were in their lifetimes.
    The species uses those conditions, however, so that the paintings of the great masters can serve as models and impetuses, not simply for the extraordinary artwork involved, but to rearouse within man those emotions that brought the paintings into being.
    Man always does best, or his best, when he sees himself in heroic terms. While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system, for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. Man the sinner took over from man the child of God. As a result, one you see in art particularly, man became a heroic figure, then a natural one. The curiosity that had been directed toward divinity became directed toward nature. Man’s sense of inquiry led him, then, to begin to paint more natural portraits and images. He turned to landscapes also. This was an inevitable process. As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of the imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not. So his paintings became more and more realistic.
    Art became wedded, then, to phenomena directly before the eyes. Therefore, in a way it could present man no more data than he had before. Imaginative interpretations seemed like pretensions. Art largely ended up—in the those terms, now—as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth. What you call abstract art tried to reverse that process, but even the abstract painters did not believe in the world of the imagination, in which there were any heroic dimensions, and the phase is largely transitory.
    I did mean to mention that man’s use of perspective in painting was a turning point (early in the 15th century), in that it foreshadowed the turning of art away from its imaginative colorations toward a more specific physical rendering—that is, to a large degree after that the play of the imagination would not be allowed to “distort” the physical frame of reference.
    All of this involved the triggering of innate abilities at certain points in time by the species at large, and on the parts of certain individuals, as their purposes and those of the species merged.
    People have a biologically built-in knowledge that life has meaning. They share that biologically ingrained trust with all other living creatures. A belief in life’s meaning is a necessity on the part of your species.
    It is vital for the proper workings of genetic systems. It is a prerequisite for individual health and for the overall vitality of any given “stock.” Your greatest achievements have been produced by civilizations during those times when man had the greatest faith in the meaningfulness of life in general, and in the meaningfulness of the individual within life’s framework.
    You are, I hope, coming toward a time of greater psychological synthesis, so that the intuitions and reasoning abilities work together in a much more smooth fashion, so that emotional and intuitive knowledge regarding the meaningfulness of life can find clearer precision and expression, as the intellect is taught—as the intellect is taught—to use its faculties in a far less restricted manner.
    No matter what science says about certain values being outside of its frame of reference, science implies that those values are therefore without basis. The reasoning qualities of the mind are directed away from any exploration that might bring about any acceptable scientific evidence for such values, therefore. The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores.
    For that reason, science—after its first great adventurous era—had its own flaws built in, and so it must expand its definitions of reality or become a tin-can caricature of itself, a prostituted handmaiden to an outworn technology, and quite give up its early claims of investigating the nature of truth or reality. It could become as secondary to life as, say, the Roman Catholic Church is now, losing its hold upon world dominance, losing its claim of being the one official arbiter of reality.
    There are, overall, some processes important in man’s development, and in the development of the species. Efforts, methods that work against value fulfillment phase themselves out, for in the long run they do not work.
    There is nothing wrong with technology. Man has an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity. When men use tools in accord with the “dictates” of value fulfillment, those tools are effective. Your technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree—but not entirely—been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment. Therefore, you end up with a technology that threatens to work no longer. You end up with affairs of great national and world concern, such as the Three Mile Island episode, and other lesser-known near-nuclear accidents.
    The control panels of the nuclear plants, many of them, were designed as if consciousness did not enter into the picture at all, as if the plants were [to be] run by other machines, not men— with controls that are not handily within reach, or physically inaccessible, as if the men who drew up the plans had completely forgotten what the species [is] like mentally or physically.
    Now, the overall purpose supposedly is the utilization of energy— a humanitarian project meant to bring light and warmth to millions of homes. But that intent was sabotaged because the philosophy behind it denied the validity of the very subjective values that give man his reason for living. Because those values were forgotten, life was threatened.
    There are grass-roots organizations—cults, groups of every persuasion—growing up in your country as small groups of people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning. These groups represent the beginnings of new journeys quite as important to the species as any sea voyage ever was as man searched for new lands.
    Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.
    The true motion of the species, however, has always been psychological, or psychic if you prefer, involving the exploration of ideas. And again, the survival of the species in those terms is basically dependent upon its belief in the meaningfulness of its existence. These new cults and groups, however—these new cults and groups, therefore—therefore—are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief.^7-JS2 And if some of their present beliefs are ludicrous in the light of the intellect’s reason, in the end—because [such groups] are following the dictates of value fulfillment, however feebly—they are significant. It is easy for the intellect, as you are used to using it, to see only the antics of such groups, and they can appear ridiculous in that light.
    A scientist who would threaten the very survival of life on the planet in order to increase life’s conveniences is, however, truly displaying ludicrous behavior.
    The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided—all loaded, of course, at man’s end at the expense of the other species, and [with] all thinking in terms of progress along very narrow consecutive lines. Such ideas have much to do with the way you think of yourselves, and what you consider human characteristics, and the light in which you view those who vary in one way or another from those norms.
    Now: Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding— a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.
    There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned. Such people are not considered retarded, of course. I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both were immeasurably enhanced.
    I also want to emphasize that your present beliefs limit the full and free operation of your intellects, as far as your established fields of knowledge are concerned, for science has placed so many taboos, limiting the areas of free intellectual inquiry. I am not, however, promoting dependence upon feelings above the intellect, or vice versa.
    The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement. Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically. Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society. The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand.
    A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded. I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values.
    Now as far as the species is concerned, all variations are necessary— and it is as if in one instance a member of the species—for its own reasons, but also on behalf of the whole— decides to specialize in one particular area, to isolate certain abilities, so to speak, and display them with the greatest tenacity and brilliance, while nearly completely ignoring certain other areas. In your society, however, the capacities of the reasoning mind have been considered in opposition to the intuitive abilities, so that your ideas of what a person is or should be largely ignore the idea of emotional achievement, emotional understanding.
    Other people may be sophisticated, brilliantly aware of their own feelings and those of other people, intuitively knowledgeable in the handling of relationships, even, as adults, exquisite parents—yet they may be labeled as retarded if they do not live up to certain artificial intellectual standards. They are actually in the same position at the other end as the people mentioned earlier.
    It is as if certain members of the species, for their own reasons, and again on the part of the whole, specialized this time in the use of emotional capacities. But those people are usually considered retarded.
    I will have more to say about that particular issue, for I am speaking about certain cases only.
    Now: Mankind is a species that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary. Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes. The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience. It connects your emotions and your reason. All species are interconnected, so, as I said earlier, when you think you think for yourselves, you also specialize in thinking for the rest of nature, which physically sustains you.
    I want to discuss reason and imagination, then, and those subtle variations that unite the two. Through doing so, I hope to give a truer picture of your own dimension, and to continue our discussion about the gifts and seeming defects that are genetically inspired.

1. In Volume 1 of Dreams, see Note 3 for the 885th session. I quoted a poem (on animal consciousness) from a book of sketches and untitled poetry that Jane had created for my birthday last June. These two poems from the same little book fit in well here:

I’ve always felt
that I’ve always known you,
yet you surprise me daily
with new versions
of your personhood
that then I remember.
I clap my mental hands
and say, "Of course,"
and you change again
into a new version
that I’ve always known before!

And:

This private probability
isn’t half bad
when you consider
the public worlds
we had to travel
to get here:
molecules waiting
in the wings,
looking for
the precise
time-space
to leap into,
tiny strands of consciousness
reuniting
after centuries,
sorting out ourselves
from a million
other forms
we’ve taken part in—
reassembling
just those we wanted
to call Rob and Jane.

2.[910] In Chapter 6 for Volume 1 of Dreams, see Note 1 for the 905th session. 2.[911] Seth delivered the 823rd session for Mass Events on February 27, 1978—over two years ago. See Note 2 for that session, in Chapter 4, wherein I wrote that as a physical principle the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics “sets definite limits to the accuracy possible in measuring both the motion and position of atoms and elementary particles simultaneously,” and that “there is an interaction between the observer (with his instruments) and the object or quality being measured.”
    Here in Dreams Seth uses the uncertainty principle as an analogy (and an excellent one), meaning that as the positions and motions of elementary particles, say, cannot be simultaneously measured precisely, so our genetic qualities and their motions can not always be specifically determined. In Dreams he’s already said (in Session 909) that the human species has an “amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom,” and (in Session 910) that “your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate.” Choices and probabilities apply. Thus do we avoid genetic rigidity. 1.[912] There isn’t any such word as “incalculable,” of course, but that’s what Jane came through with as she spoke for Seth. She obviously meant to say “incalculable.” Seldom indeed does she make such slips while delivering the Seth material—much less often than any of us may do in daily life.
    2.[912] Seth referred to a question I periodically ask Jane, but seldom discuss with others simply because they don’t seem to be interested: What’s happened to all of the Rembrandts? Why isn’t there at least one artist in all of the world painting today whose ability equals Rembrandt’s, and who uses that great gift to evoke the depths of compassion for the human condition as Rembrandt did? For in my opinion there isn’t such a one around. By extension, why isn’t there a Rubens or a Velazquez or a Vermeer operating now? My choices are personally arbitrary, of course— yet why don’t we have a Rembrandt contributing to our current reality? Just those four artists, whose lives spanned a period of only 98 years (from 1577 to 1675), explored human insight in powerful ways. To link the “great masters” with our species’ reincarnational intents and drives, as Seth mentions in this session, opens up a new field for understanding my question, and a very large and intriguing one indeed.
    Our many excellent “modern” painters inevitably work within a different world ambience. Our species’ art is just no longer the same—a fact I both applaud and mourn. However, I do feel that in the course of ordinary time we have either lost certain qualities of art or no longer stress them.

3. [912] I’ve been saving the following untitled poem of Jane’s for a spot like this. She wrote it on November 7, 1979, almost a month before delivering Session 886 for Chapter 2 of Dreams (in Vol

If there is no life after life,
then what cosmic spendthrift formed
the universe,
for Chance alone can’t be
that prolific, or fake an order in which
an accident of such proportions
as the creation of a world
seems so inevitable,
each random element
falling pat, into place,
and each consciousness promptly appearing
with body parts all neatly assembled—
only to be squandered,
falling apart, dissolving into nothingness
while Chance grinds out newer odds.
If there is no life after life,
then what a lack
of cosmic economy,
for nature strings one molecule
on to another so craftily
that each seed can grow a tree,
and contains the properties
of an entire forest,
while multiplications
are hidden everywhere.

4.[913] Right away I began to wonder when Seth stated that “ There were no prints to be passed around. . . Presumably he referred to the time of Michelangelo. However, my reading indicates that Seth was probably right about prints being unavailable to the “poor peasants” of those times.
    Woodcuts and wood blocks were used for a variety of purposes by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, for example, and even by the Romans. Many of the early prints created in Europe illustrate religious subjects. One of the first dated European woodcuts, showing a religious figure, appeared in 1423; a book bearing woodcut illustrations was produced circa 1460; the first Roman book containing woodcuts was made in 1467. Bibles were illustrated with woodcuts in the late 15th century. The earliest known engravings, printed on paper, date from around 1450; pictorial engraving and etching were evidently developed in Germany in the early 1500s. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) experimented with his own method of copper engraving. But all of these efforts were beginnings: There couldn’t have been any mass circulation of printed material in those days.

    “When You Are Who You Are. The Worlds of Imagination and Reason, and the Implied Universe.”
    When you are determines where you are. Space is in many ways more “timely” than you think. I am not speaking of the usual time concepts, of course, of consecutive moments, but of a certain dimension of activity in which your space happens.
    As long as we are trying to explain the origin of your world in a new fashion, we will be bringing in many subjects that may not usually appear in such discussions. The world as you know it emerges from an inner, more extensive sphere of dimensions into actuality. It is supported then by a seemingly invisible framework.
    Beyond certain levels it is almost meaningless to speak in terms of particles, but I will for now use the term “invisible particles” because you are familiar with it. Invisible particles, then, form the foundation of your world. The invisible particles that I am referring to, however, have the ability to transform themselves into mass,¹ or to divest themselves of it. And the invisible particles of which I speak not only possess consciousness— but each one is, if you will, a seed that contains within itself a potential for an infinite number of gestalts. Each such invisible particle contains within itself the potential to embark upon an infinite number of probable variations of consciousness. To that degree such psychological particles are at that stage unspecialized, while they contain within themselves the innate ability to specialize in whatever direction becomes suitable.
    They can be, and they are, everywhere at once. Sometimes they operate with mass and sometimes without it. Now you are composed of such invisible particles, and so is everything else that you can physically perceive. To that degree—to that degree —portions of your own consciousness are everywhere at once. They are not lost, or spread out in some generalized fashion, but acutely responsive, and as highly alert as your familiar consciousness is now.
    The self that you are aware of represents only one “position” in which those invisible particles happen to intersect, gain mass, build up form. Scientists can only perceive an electron as it is to them. They cannot really track it. They cannot be certain of its position and its speed at the same time, and to some extent the same applies to your consciousness. The speed of your own thoughts takes those thoughts away from you even as you think them—and you can never really examine a thought, but only the thought of a thought.
    Because you are, you are everywhere at once. I am quite aware of the fact that you can scarcely follow that psychological motion. As we will see later, your imaginations can lead you toward some recognition, even toward some emotional comprehension, of this concept. While your reasoning abilities at first may falter, that is only because you have trained your intellect to respond in a limited fashion.
    There are what I will call “intervals of perception.” You are usually conscious of events that are significant neurologically, and that neurological timing is the end result of an [almost]² infinite series of sequences. Those sequences are areas in which activities happen. Each consciousness within each area is tuned into its proper sequence. Each area builds on the others. The invisible particles are the framework upon which your body is formed, for example—they move faster than the speed of light, yet you are not dizzy. You are aware of no such motion. You are tuned into a different sequence of action.
    There are, then, different worlds operating with different frequencies at different intervals. They are conscious in other times, though you are neurologically equipped to perceive your own interval structures. When I speak of time, I do not merely refer to other centuries as you think of them. But between the moments that you know, and neurologically accept, there are other kinds of moments, if you prefer, other versions of time, and other kinds of accomplishments and fulfillments that are not dependent upon your usual ideas of, say, growth through time.³
    Some of this may seem quite difficult at first reading, but I know that you are all far more intelligent than you realize you are—far more intuitive. I know also that you are tired of simple tales told to you as if you were children, and that your minds and hearts yearn for worthwhile challenges. You want to extend yourselves as far as possible, because each of you has been born with that urge toward value fulfillment.
    It is only because, particularly in your times, you have trained yourselves to limit the nature of your own consciousnesses that such ideas seem strange. You have thus far believed that you must train your great imaginations and your intelligences to confine themselves and their activities to the physical world as you have been told it exists. In childhood, before you so leashed your imaginations, however, you each had your own dreams— dreams that awakened you to other portions of your own identities. There are many experiences open to you now—if you can be free enough to allow them—that will give you glimpses of those other intervals in which you have a reality.
    I will deal with some such exercises later on in the book. All such methods, however, are useless if your beliefs hold you back, and so the main thrust of all of my books is to increase your own areas of thought and speculation.
    When Joseph (as Seth calls me) read the last session, he wondered whether or not the invisible particles I referred to were the same as the units of consciousness I have spoken of before.
    He was supposed to ask the question, and so was each reader. For one thing, while I realize the importance of specific terms, I do not want you as a reader to become so dependent upon terms that coming across one you have read before, you instantly categorize it. For another thing, each time I reintroduce such information I do so from another direction, so to speak, so that you as a reader are meant to approach it from a different angle also. In that way, you become familiar with certain knowledge from a variety of viewpoints.
    As you read those passages the question itself—“Are these after all the units of consciousness referred to earlier?”—should have triggered your intellect and your intuition to work together, even if only slightly, in another way. In other words, of course, I hope to inspire both your imagination and your intelligence in this chapter and in this section of the book, devoted to such subject matter.
    Remember, again, the manifest [universe] emerges from a subjective reality, one that is implied in the very nature of your world itself. I would like you, then, to think of those units of consciousness from an entirely different scale of events.
    Imagine, now, as far as you are able, the existence of All That Is, a consciousness so magnificently complex that what we may call its own psychological compartments are, literally now, infinite. All appearances of time, and all experience of it, must be psychological. The “speed” of electrons, for example, would reflect their psychological motion.
    All That Is, as the source of all realities and experience, is so psychologically complex, so multidimensional creative, that it constantly surprises itself. It is, itself, the invisible universe that is everywhere implied within your world, but that becomes manifest to your perception only through historic time. All That Is disperses itself, therefore, so that it is on the one hand “a massive” subjective entity, a psychological structure—and on the other hand, it also disperses itself into the phenomenal world. It is, in all meanings of the word, divine, yet it disperses even that divinity so that in your terms, each unit of consciousness contains within itself those properties of divinity. All That Is has no one image, but is within all images and (whether or not they are manifest). Your thoughts are the invisible partners of your words, and the vast unstated subjectivity of All That Is is in the same way behind all stated or manifest phenomena.
    In those terms, it is basically impossible for any given species to become extinct. It can disappear for a time, become unmanifest for a while in historic events. The genetic patterns for any given species reside, of course, primarily in that species’ genetic bank—but that genetic bank does not exist in isolation, but [is] invisibly connected with the genetic makeup of each other species.
    There are countless relationships between species that go unrecognized. The generations of all species interact. The genetic cues are not triggered on the proposition, obviously, that a species exists alone on the planet, but also in response to genetic sequences that operate in all of the species combined. The genetic system, again, is not closed nearly as much as supposed. That is, again, because the basic units of consciousness that build up matter—that form matter—are themselves endowed with a subjective acuteness. This also accounts for my earlier statement, that in usually understood terms the environment and its creatures “evolve” together. Your position on the scale of awareness inclines you to categorize consciousnesses so that only your own familiar brand seems to fit the definition—so again here I remind you that consciousness is everywhere in the deepest terms, because All That Is disperses itself throughout physical reality. All portions of that reality have their own rights to existence, and purposes within it. So of course do all peoples, and the races.
    Your imaginations help you bring elements of that inner implied universe into actuality. Your imaginations obviously are not limited by time. You can imagine past and future events. Your imaginations have always helped you form your civilizations, your arts and your sciences, and when they are united with your reasoning processes they can bring you knowledge about the universe and your places in it that you can receive in no other fashion.
    Now: Remember that these units of consciousness of which I have been speaking are not neutral, mathematical, or mechanistic.
    They are the smallest imaginable “packages” of consciousness that you can imagine, and despite any ideas to the contrary, basically consciousness has nothing to do with size. If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell.
    So your physical life is the result of a spectacular spontaneous order—the order of the body spontaneously formed by the units of consciousness. Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities. These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs. Both imagination and reason belonged to the species from the beginning, but the species has used these qualities in different ways throughout what you think of as historic time. There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world.
    Your many civilizations, historically speaking, each with its own fields of activity, its own sciences, religions, politics and art—these all represent various ways that man has used imagination and reason to form a framework through which a more or less cohesive reality is experienced.
    Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination. Inner events are stressed over exterior ones. The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning. In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content.
    In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality. You ended up with a true-or-false kind of world, in which it seemed that the answers to the deepest questions about life could be answered quite correctly and adequately by some multiple-choice test. Man’s imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence. In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions.
    I have taken two contrasting examples of the many ways in which the powers of the imagination and those of the reasoning abilities can be used, There are endless varieties, however—each subjectively and genetically possible, and many, of course, that you have not yet developed as a species.
    Ruburt (Jane) today received a letter from a man who would certainly be labeled a schizophrenic. Ruburt was distressed—not only by the individual’s situation, but by the philosophic implications. Why on earth, he thought, should someone form such a reality?
    Now on the question of “mental disorders,” it is highly important that individual integrity be stressed, rather than the blanket definitions that are usually accorded to any group of symptoms. In many such circumstances, however, such individuals are combining the imagination and the reasoning abilities in ways that are not in keeping with their historic periods. It would not be entirely out of keeping, though somewhat exaggerated a statement, to claim that men who stockpile nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace are insane. In your society, such activities are, in a way that completely escapes me, somehow under the label of humanitarianism!
    Such plans are not considered insane ones—though in the deepest meaning of that word, they are indeed. There are many reasons for such actions, but an overemphasis upon what you think of as the reasoning abilities, as opposed to what you think of as the imaginative abilities, is at least partially to blame.
    In the case of the man who wrote Ruburt, we have a mixture of those characteristics in which interior events—the events of the imagination—cast too strong a light upon physical events as far as the socially accepted blend is concerned. Again, I am not speaking about all cases of mental disorder here. I do, however, want to make the point that your prized psychological norm as a species means that you must also be allowed a great leeway in the use of the imagination and the intellect. Otherwise, you could become locked into a rigid conscious stance, one in which both the imagination and the intellect could advance no further. It is vitally important that you realize the great psychological diversity that is present within your psychological behavior—and those varieties of psychological experience are necessary. They give you vital psychological feedback, and they exercise the reaches of your abilities in ways that are overall most advantageous.
    The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world. He hurts no one. He supports himself a good deal of the time. His view of reality is eccentric from most viewpoints. He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there.
    I do not mean to idealize him either, or others of his kind, but to point out that you can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do. In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable—a matter I will discuss later in the book. The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it. That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves the imagination.
    Now: There are sometimes almost insurmountable difficulties involved on my part in trying to explain the origin of your world.
    You think of your universe as having certain dimensions, and you want an explanation based more or less upon the proposition that those dimensions themselves made possible the origin— which must, however, have emerged from other larger dimensions of actuality than those contained in your universe itself. The terms of reality, within your universe cannot hold or contain that vaster context in which such master events happen. Therefore, I must follow to some extent the traditional references that you use to define events to begin with.
    While I am doing that I am also trying to introduce you, intuitively at least, to a larger framework, in which events straddle the reality that you know. Nevertheless, we will begin with issues in which it is very possible that contradictions may seem to occur, since your own definitions of an event are so simple that they ignore larger ramifications—ramifications that would reconcile any seeming contradictions in an overall greater unity of structure and action. Your imaginations will be of high value here, for they can often perceive unities that are not evident to the intellect—which you have trained to deal specifically with the evidence of the here and now.
    There are phases of relatedness, rhythms and harmonies of consciousness from whose infinite swells the molecular “music” of your universe is sounded. Your place in those rhythms is highly vital. You exist in a kind of original interval—though, if you can, think of the word “interval” without the connotations of continuing time. It is as if an infinite number of orchestras were playing simultaneously, and each note sounded was also played in all of its probable positions with each other note possible, and in combination with all of the probable versions of the entire piece being played. Between the notes sounded there would be intervals, and those unsounded intervals would also be part of a massive unstated rhythm upon which the development of the entire sounded production was dependent. The unsounded intervals would also be events, of course, cues for action, triggers for response.
    Your stated universe emerged out of that kind of interval, emerging from a master event whose true nature remains uncaptured by your definitions—so there will be places in our book where I may say that an event known to you is true and untrue at the same time, or that it is both myth and fact. And in so doing I hope to lead you toward some psychic comprehension of a kind of event far too large for your usual categories of true and false. [Perhaps], then, you will let your imaginations play upon the usual events of your world, and glimpse at least in part that greater brilliance that illuminates them, so that it leads you intuitively to a feeling for the source of events and the source of your world. The units of consciousness that I have mentioned are that, and they do behave as I have said. They are also in other terms entities, fragments of All That Is, if you prefer—divine fragments of power and majesty, containing all of the powers of consciousness as you think of it, concentrations without substance in your terms.
    There are many other universes besides your own, each following its own intervals, its own harmony. Your ideas of historic time impede my explanations. In those terms, your world’s reality stretches back far further than you imagine, and in those terms—you need the qualifications—your ancestors have visited other stars, as your planet has been visited by others. Some such encounters intersected in space and time, but some did not. There are endless versions of life. There are, then, other species like your own, and in the vast spectrums of existence that your reality cannot contain, there have been galactic civilizations that came together when the conditions were right.
    Time’s framework does not exist as you think it does. Intervals of existence are obviously not the same. In ways impossible to explain, there are what I can only call inner passageways throughout the universe.^8-JS1 You know how one association can suddenly in your minds connect you with a past event so clearly strong-enough memory is like a ghost event. So there are processes that work like associations, that can provide passageways through the universe’s otherwise time-structured ways. These passageways are simply a part of the greater nature of events that you do not perceive.
    At times your species has traveled those passageways, and many of your myths represent ghost memories of those events. There is a rhythm, again, to all existence, and so in your terms your species returned to its home planet, to renew its roots, refresh its natural stock, to return to nature, to find solace again amid the sweet ancient heritage of dusk and dawn.
    The planet has seen many changes. It has appeared and disappeared many times. It flickers off and on—but because of the intervals of your attention, each “on” period seems to last for millions of years, of course, while at other levels the earth is like a firefly, flickering off and on.
    I do not mean by such a description to minimize the importance of physical life, for All That Is endows each portion of its own transformed reality with a unique existence that is duplicated nowhere else, and each spark of consciousness is endowed with a divine heritage that is never extinguished—a spark that is apparent in all other corners of the universe.

2. Just for my own study, I later inserted “[almost]” in Seth’s sentence because I hadn’t been quick enough to ask him to elaborate upon “the end result of an infinite series of sequences” when Jane delivered his material for him. After the session I began to wonder if Seth hadn’t contradicted himself by saying there could be an end result of something infinite. Yet I also felt that he meant just what he’d said—and that even from our human positions alone the ramifications of our individual and joint realities are enormously greater than we ordinarily conceive them to be. Seth had indicated in the preceding paragraph of the session that such faltering of the reasoning abilities may occur. I also thought my intellectual hang-up over the concept of infinity was inevitably mixed up with the limitations of meaning that we usually assign to words.
3. Seth’s material in this paragraph reminded me at once of Jane’s own early, intuitive concept of the moment point. In Volume 1 of “Unknoum” Reality, see Note 5 for the 681st session, which was held on February 11, 1974. I wrote that at the age of 25, nine years before initiating the sessions, Jane expressed the moment point in her poem, “More Than Men.” I still think these lines are most evocative:

    In the very next session for Volume 1, which Jane gave two days later, Seth stated: “There are systems in which a moment, from your standpoint, is made to endure for the life of a universe. I do not mean that a moment is simply stretched, or that time is slowed down alone, but that all the experiences possible within a moment become realities within that framework.”

    Master events are those whose main activity takes place in inner dimensions. Such events are too multidimensional to appear clearly in your reality, so that you see or experience only parts of them. They are source events. Their main thrust is in what you can call the vaster dimension of dreams, the unknown territory of inner reality. The terms you use make no difference. The original action, however, of such events is unmanifest—not physical. Those events then “subsequently” show themselves in time and space, with extraordinary results.
    They shed their light upon the “facts” of historical time, and influence those events. Master events may end up translated through mythology, or religion or art, or the effects may actually serve to give a framework to an entire civilization. (As indeed occurred in the case of Christianity, as I will explain later.)
    Now the origin of the universe that you know, as I have described it, was of course a master event. The initial action did not occur in space or time, but formed space and time. In your terms other universes, with all of their own space and time structures, were created simultaneously, and exist simultaneously. The effect of looking outward into space, and therefore backward into time, is a kind of built-in convention that appears within your own space-time picture. You must remember, then, when you think in terms of origins, that the very word, “origin,” is dependent upon time conventions, and a belief in beginnings and endings. Beginnings and endings are themselves effects that seem to be facts to your perceptions. In a fashion they simply represent beginnings and endings, the boundaries, the reaches and the limitations of your own span of attention.
    I said that in your terms all universes were created simultaneously—at the same time. The very sentence structure has time built in, you see, so you are bound to think that I am speaking of an almost indescribable past. Also, I use time terms, since you are so used yourselves to that kind of categorizing, so here we will certainly run into our first seeming contradiction — when I say that in the higher order of events all universes, including your own, have their original creations occurring now, with all of their pasts and futures built in, and with all of their scales of time winding ever outward, and all of their appearances of space, galaxies and nebulae, and all of their seeming changes, being instantly and originally created in what you think of as this moment.
    Your universe cannot be its own source. Its inner mysteries— which are indeed the mysteries of consciousness, not matter— cannot be explained, and must remain incomprehensible, if you try to study them from the viewpoint of your objective experience alone. You must look to the source of that experience. You must look not to space but to the source of space, not to time but to the source of time—and most of all, you must look to the kind of consciousness that experiences space and time. You must look, therefore, to events that show themselves through historical action, but whose origins are elsewhere.None of this is really beyond your capabilities, as long as you try to enlarge your framework.
    The entire idea of evolution, of course, requires strict adherence to the concept of continuing time, and the changes that time brings, and such concepts can at best provide the most surface kind of explanation for the existence of your species or any other.
    I hope, again, to stretch the reaches of both your imaginations and intellects in this book, to give you a feeling for events larger than your usual true-or-false, fact-or-fancy categories. Your existence as a species is characterized far more by your unique use of your imaginations than it is by any physical attributes. Your connections with that unmanifest universe have always helped direct your imaginations, made you aware of the rich veins of probabilities possible in physical existence, so that you could then use your intellects to decide which of the alternate routes you wanted as a species to follow.
    In that regard, it is true that in the other species innate knowledge is more clearly, brilliantly, and directly translated into action. I am not speaking of some dumb instinct, but instead of an intuitive knowing, a high intelligence different from your own, but amazingly complex, with which other species are equipped.^{2 [919]}
    Man, however, deals with probabilities and with creativity in a unique fashion—a fashion that is made possible because of the far more dependable behavior of the other species.^{3 [919]}
    In a fashion man also is equipped with the ability to initiate actions on a nonphysical level that then become physical and continue to wind in and out of both realities, entwining dream events with historic ones, in such a fashion that the original nonphysical origins [are] often forgotten. Man overlays the true reality quite spontaneously. He often reacts to dream events as if they were physical, and to physical events as if they were dreams. This applies individually and collectively, but man is often unaware of that interplay.
    In the terms of evolution as you like to think of it, ideas are more important than genes, for we are again dealing with more than the surfaces of events. We are dealing with more than some physical mechanics of being. For one thing, the genes themselves are conscious, though in different terms than yours. Your cultures—your civilizations—obviously affect the well-being of your species, and those cultures are formed by your ideas, and forged through the use of your imaginations and your intellects.
    Certain bloodlines, in your terms, were extinguished because of your beliefs in Christianity, as people were killed in your holy wars. Your beliefs have directed who should go to war and who should not, who should live and who should die, who should be educated and who should not, who should be isolated from society and who should not—all matters directly touching upon the survival of certain families throughout history, and therefore affecting the species as a whole.
    I am not here specifically blaming Christianity, for far before its emergence, your ideas and beliefs about good and evil [were] far more important in all matters regarding the species than any simple questions of genetic variances, natural selection, or environmental influence. In man’s case, at least, the selection of who should live or die was often anything but natural. If you are to understand the characteristics of the species, then you cannot avoid the study of man’s consciousness.
    Now. —master events, then, involve “work” or action whose main thrust exists outside of time, yet whose effects are felt within time.
    Such effects may appear suddenly within time’s context, rather than slowly emerge, say, into that framework. It is, of course, that kind of outside-of-time activity that in your terms explains the origin of your universe. There are dimensions of activity, then, that do not appear within time’s structure, and developments that happen quite naturally, following different laws of development than those you recognize. It is not just that highly accelerated versions of time can occur at other levels of actuality, but that there are dimensions in which those [versions] are no impediments to the natural “flow” of events into expression.
    Your closest approximation will be, again, your experience with time in the dream state—or instances in which complicated problems are suddenly solved for you in dreams or in other states of consciousness, so that the answers appear full-blown before you.
    There are “durations,” then, that have nothing to do with time as you understand it: psychological motions that manipulate time but are apart from it. Any sudden emergence of a completed universe would then imply an unimaginable and a spectacular development of organization—that it did not just appear from nowhere, but as the “completed physical version” of an inner highly concentrated endeavor, the physical manifestation of an inspiration that then suddenly emerges into physical actuality.^{2 [928]}
    That kind of activity, that kind of “work,” exists behind all of the structures and organizations and experiences with which you are familiar.
    The world of ideas everywhere permeates physical reality, but ideas, even when they are unexpressed, possess their own organizations, correspondences,^{3 [928]} their own spheres of motion and development. Master events emerge from that reality of idea, now, from which all ideas originate, uniting these through the use of natural correspondences. Every physical manifestation that you know has its nonphysical counterpart, in which it is always couched, from which it came, and to which it will return.
    Your historical time is, say, but one species of time that dwells upon the earth. There are many others. Time itself emerges from idea, which is itself timeless, so in those terms there was no point where time began, though such a reference becomes necessary from your own viewpoint.
    It is probably almost impossible for man to see that he forms the idea of historical context through his own associations and focuses. The heavy, specialized use of socalled rational thought has often caused him to narrow even his neurological recognition of other kinds of experience that might enlarge his view. In dreams there is greater leeway in that regard. Consciousness becomes more familiar with its own inner motion, and even with the kinds of work and actions it performs outside of its usual waking prejudices. The story of the Creation, as Biblically stated, is the symbolic representation of a master event—a legend that became its own event, of course, forming about it whole arts and cultures, religions and disciplines. The same applies to Christianity itself, for all of the seemingly historical events connected with the official Christ did not happen in physical reality. They happened at another level of actuality, and were inserted into your time framework—touching a character here, a definitely known historical event there, mixing and merging with the events of the time, until the two lines of activity were so entwined that you could not unravel one without unraveling the other.
    History happened in certain definite forms because of a belief in events that did not, in your world of facts, occur. The main, brilliant thrust of those inner events, therefore, splashed out upon the human landscape, propelling peoples and civilizations.
    The Christ story in the beginning was not nearly as singular and neat as it might now seem, for the finally established official Christ figure was one settled upon from endless versions of a god-man, with which man’s psyche has long been involved: He was the psychic composite, the official Christ, carrying within his psychological personage echoes of old and new gods alike—a figure barely begun, to be filled out in time, although originating outside of it.
    Such master events cause physical events, but they do not emerge originally from them.
    Paul (Saul of Tarsus) had his vision. Now the vision (in which Paul not only saw the light of Christ, but heard his voice) happened in the world of fact. It occurred—but Paul did not see, or communicate with, a person of divine heritage, sent by his father to earth, who lived the life of the official Christ, and who was crucified. Paul had a vision in response to the needs, desires, and dictates of his own psyche as it was connected to the world of his time, following the patterns of stories about Christ that he had heard that had begun to release within him a great yearning that was, in that vision, then, expressed.^{4 [928]}
    Christianity for many centuries served as an amazingly creative organizational framework, that expressed the vast complexity of the soul’s reality. It also in its way managed to even focus some of man’s less handsome attributes toward ends that were less reprehensible than in the past. Master events of that particular nature bring about a completely new interpretation of historic events. Their intensity, power, and seemingly impelling nature exist precisely because their origins are not physical, but are drawn from the psyche’s deepest resources.
    Time overlays are versions of master events, in that they occur in such a fashion that one “face” of an overall event may appear in one time, one in another, and so forth.
    Time overlays are the time versions of certain events, then. These time overlays always exist. They may become activated, however, by certain associations made in your present, and therefore draw into your present time some glimpses either from the future or the past. So-called present time is thickened, then, by a psychological realization on deep levels of the psyche that all events are interrelated, and that the reincarnational experiences of any given individual provide a rich source of experience from which each person at least unconsciously draws.
    Such usually unconscious knowledge is of great benefit to the species itself, so that at certain levels, at least, the knowledge of the species is not imprisoned within any given generation at once, but flows or circulates within the overall larger reincarnational picture. Probabilities are very much involved here, of course, and it is easier for particular events to fall within one time sequence than another.
    I do not want you to feel that you are fated to experience certain events, however, for that is not the case. There will be “offshoots” of the events of your own lives, however, that may appear as overlays in your other reincarnational existences. There are certain points where such events are closer to you than others, in which mental associations at any given time may put you in correspondence^{20 [931]} with other events of a similar nature in some future or past incarnation, however. It is truer to say that those similar events are instead time versions of one larger event. As a rule you experience only one time version of any given action. Certainly it is easy to see how a birthday or anniversary, or particular symbol or object, might serve as an associative connection, rousing within you memories of issues or actions that might have happened under similar circumstances in other times.
    Actually, that kind of psychological behavior represents the backbone of social organization as far as the species is concerned, and it is the usually hidden but definite past and future memories of reincarnational relationships that cement social organizations, from small tribes to large governments. To a certain extent, of course, you have been or will be each related to the other. In that light all of the events of time rub elbows together. You brush against the elbow of a future or past event every moment of your lives.
    In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or deadended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures. Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support.
    As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threatened but retain its prominence—for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended.
    Earlier I mentioned several times that we must reach a point at which you are able to see around the corner of seemingly contradictory material,^{21 [931]} and this is one of those occasions. Time overlays present you with a picture in which you have free will—yet each event that you choose will have its own time version. Now those time versions may be entirely different one from the others, and while you certainly initiate your own time version, in terms of usual understanding there is no true place or time in which that version can be said to actually originate.
    Such a time version suggests an occurrence in time, of course, and yet the event may leave only a ghostly track, so to speak, being hardly manifest, while in another life the time version may be of considerable prominence—while in your own experience it represents a fairly trivial incident of an ordinary afternoon.
    The inner core of events, however, is held together by just that kind of activity. You are at every hand provided an unending source of probable events from past and future, from which to compose the events of your lives and society. Again, let me remind you that all time exists simultaneously.
    In an experience last evening in the dream state, Ruburt received fresh evidence by viewing for himself portions of two other lives—merely snatches of environment, but so dearly filled with precious belongings and loved ones, so alive with immediacy- that he was shocked to realize that the full dimensions of existence could continue so completely in such detail and depth at the same time as his present life.
    It seemed that he could step from any one such existence to the other as you might walk from one room to the other, and he knew that at other levels of the psyche this was indeed possible— and, of course, at other levels of the psyche those psychological doors are open.
    Ruburt has had particular difficulty, however, with “the theory of reincarnation,” ^{22 [931]} because as it is usually described, it seemed that people used it to blame as the source of current misfortune, or as an excuse for personal behavior whose nature they did not otherwise understand, and it has been so maligned. Its reality, however, serves to generate activity throughout time’s framework as you understand it, to unite the species, to reinforce structures of knowledge, to transmit information, and perhaps most of all to reinforce relationships involving love, brotherhood, and cooperation between generations of men and women that would otherwise be quite separate and apart from each other.
    Through such relationships, for example, say, the cavemen and the people of the 22nd century rub elbows, where in strict terms of time the species would seem to be quite disconnected from its “earlier” or “later” counterparts.
    Through such behavior the overall value fulfillment purposes and intents of the species are kept in focus, and those necessary requirements then planted in whatever space or time [is] required. Again, free will still operates in all such ventures.
    Now while it seems that your world contains more and more information all the time, your particular brand of science is a relatively narrow one, in that it accepts as valid only certain specific areas of speculation. The areas outside of its boundaries become taboo, so that the realm of the unknown is no longer the material universe or the mysteries of space, but the interior universe and the mysteries of the mind as these are experienced or suspected to exist outside of those official areas. To that degree, the unknown is more feared by science than it ever was by religion. Religion was hampered—and is—by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. Reincarnation suggests, of course, the extension of personal existence beyond one time period, independently of one bodily form, the translation or transmission of intelligence through nonphysical frameworks, and implies psychological behavior, memory and desire as purposeful action without the substance of any physical mechanism—propositions that science at its present stage of development simply could not buy, and for which it could find no evidence, for its methods would automatically preclude the type of experience that such evidence would require.
    People can become quite frightened, then, of any kind of experiences of a personal nature that imply reincarnational life, for they are then faced with the taboos of science, or perhaps by the distorted explanations of some religions or cults. You therefore protect yourselves from many quite natural upthrusts that would on their own give you experience with your own reincarnational existences, and you are often denied psychological comfort in times of stress that you might otherwise receive.
    I do not necessarily mean that full-blown pictures of other existences would necessarily come into your mind, but that in one way or another you would receive a support or change of mood as those loved by you in other lives [in] one way or another sensed your need and responded.
    The entire nature of events, then, exists in a different way than you have supposed, only small portions slicing into the reality that you recognize—yet all underneath connected to a vast psychological activity. You might compare events to psychological consonants that underlay or underlie the more unusual features of physical psychological environment.
    Now: Again, master events are those that most significantly affect your system of reality, even though the original action was not physical but took place in the inner dimension. Most events appear both in time and out of it, their action distributed between an inner and outer field of expression. Usually you are aware only of events’ exterior cores. The inner processes escape you.
    Those inner processes, however, also give many clues as to some native abilities that you have used “in the past” as a species. Those inner processes do sometimes emerge, then. Here is an example.
    One morning last weekend (Saturday) Ruburt found himself suddenly and vividly thinking about some married friends. They lived out of town, separated in time by a drive of approximately [half an hour]. Ruburt found himself wishing that the friends lived closer, and he was suddenly filled with a desire to see them. He imagined the couple at the house, and surprised himself by thinking that he might indeed call them later in the day and invite them down for the evening, even though he and Joseph had both decided against guests that weekend.
    Furthermore, Ruburt did not like the idea of making an invitation on such short notice. Then he became aware that those particular thoughts were intrusive, completely out of context with his immediately previous ones, for only a moment or so earlier he had been congratulating himself precisely because he had made no plans for the day or evening at all that would involve guests or other such activities. Very shortly he forgot the entire affair. Then, however, about fifteen minutes later he found the same ideas returning, this time more insistently.
    They lasted perhaps five minutes. Ruburt noticed them and forgot them once again. This time, however, he decided not to call his friends, and he went about his business. In about a half hour the same mental activity returned, and, finding himself struck by this, Ruburt mentioned the episode to Joseph and again cast it from his mind.
    By this time it was somewhat later in the day. Ruburt and Joseph ate lunch, and the mail arrived. There was a letter written the morning before (on Friday) by the same friends that had been so much in Ruburt’s mind. They mentioned going on a trip (on Saturday), and specifically asked if they could visit that same afternoon. From the way the letter was written, it seemed as if the friends—call them Peter and Polly—had already started on their journey that (Saturday) morning, and would stop in Elmira on their return much later toward evening. There was no time to answer the letter, of course.
    Peter and Polly would be on the road, it seemed, unreachable by phone, though they had included the number of their answering service, and had also written that they would call before leaving—yet no such call had been received.
    It would be simple enough, of course, to ascribe Ruburt’s thoughts and feelings to mere coincidence. He remembered the vividness of his feelings at the time, however. It looked as if Peter and Polly were indeed going to arrive almost as if Ruburt had in fact called and invited them. That evening the visit did take place. Actually, some work had prevented the couple from leaving when they intended. Instead, they called later from their home to say that they were just beginning their trip, and would stop on their way.
    Ruburt was well prepared for the call by then, and for the visit. Now the visit and Ruburt’s earlier feelings and thoughts were part of the same event, except that his subjective experience gave him clues as to the inner processes by which all events take place. More is involved than the simple question: Did he perceive the visit precognitively? More is involved than the question: Did he perceive his information directly from the minds of his friends, or from the letter itself, which had already been mailed, of course, and was on its way to Ruburt at the time?
    What you have is a kind of inner backbone of perception—a backup program, so to speak, an inner perceptive mechanism with its own precise psychological tuner that in one way or another operates within the field of your intent. This is somewhat like remote sensing, or like an interior (pause) radar equipment that operates in a psychological field of attention, so that you are somewhat aware of the existence of certain events that concern you as they come into the closer range of probabilities with which you are connected.
    In a certain fashion you “step into the event” at that level. You accept or reject it as a probability. You make certain adjust become part of the inner processes—affecting, say, the shape or size or nature of the event before it becomes a definite physical actuality.
    For centuries that is the main way in which man dealt with the events of his life or tribe or village.^{3 [932]} Your modern methods of communication are in fact modeled after your inner ones. Ruburt’s thoughts almost blended in enough to go relatively unnoticed. They were almost innocuous enough to be later accepted as coincidence. They did have, however, an extra intentness and vitality and peculiar insistence— qualities that he has learned are indicative of unusual psychological activity. The point is that in most such cases the subjective recognition of an approaching event flows so easily and transparently into your attention, and fits in so smoothly with the events of the day, as to go unnoticed. You help mold the nature and shape of events without realizing it, overlooking those occasions when the processes might show themselves.
    When they do, you might question: Could it be possible that you really were perceiving an action ahead of time? Later, some people more stubborn than others might try to “prove” that some events are definitely precognitively perceived—but the point is that all events are precognitively perceived, and that you actually step into an event, become part of it, reject it, accept the certain version you have “picked up,” or exert yourself to make certain changes that affect the nature of the event itself.
    Even the conscious mind contains much more information about the structure of events than you realize you possess. The physical perceiving apparatuses of all organizations carry their own kinds of inner systems of communication, allowing events to be manipulated on a worldwide basis before they take on what appears to be their final definitive physical occurrences in time and space.
    Individually and globewide, value fulfillment is in a fashion the purpose of all events. Value fulfillment, again, is the impetus that drives the wheels of nature, so to speak. As the origin of your world did indeed emerge from the “world of dreams,” so the true root of all events lie in such subjective activities, and the answers to individual challenges and problems are always within your grasp, ready to appear in physical actuality!
    In the next chapter I hope to show you the importance of value fulfillment in your own life, and give you clues that will allow you to take better advantage of your own subjective and objective opportunities for such development.

2. [919] This paragraph of Seth’s at once reminded me of some of his most evocative earlier material on animal consciousness. He gave it in the 832nd session for Chapter 5 of Mass Events (on January 29,1979), and I quoted it in the Preliminary Notes to the Preface for Dreams: “Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals. . . . ”
3. [919]I think that Seth’s insight here—regarding “the far more dependable behavior of the other species” —is excellent indeed. In an original way he stressed the interdependence of all life forms on earth. I like to keep such penetrating remarks before me, and wish the reader would too, for I often fear they’ll become lost from conscious view within his material. (As an example, I doubt if this one will be referred to in the index for Dreams.) But I also think that intuitively we know the truth Seth so briefly expressed here, and that it never has been or ever will be really lost.
    One of the poems Jane wrote for me a year ago, when I became 60 years old (in June 1979), fits in well here also. In Chapter 2 for Volume 1 of Dreams, see Note 3 for Session 885:

2. [928] I suggest a rereading of Chapter 2 for Dreams, in Volume 1.
3. [928] In this Chapter 9 of Dreams, once again see Section C of Note 7 for Session 920.
4. [928] In the New Testament, see Acts 9:1-9, wherein Luke the Evangelist describes the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. Jane had told me earlier in the week that she didn’t think Paul had received a vision or communication from Jesus Christ.
20. [931] In this chapter, see the third section of Note 7 for Session 920. I presented Seth’s comments on an example of correspondence involving Jane and me, along with his short, more generalized discussion of the phenomenon.
21. [931] Seth discussed his “seemingly contradictory material” throughout Session 918, which is the last session for Chapter 8 of Dreams, and up to 9:46 in Session 919 for Chapter 9. While researching this little note, I was once again startled to realize that Jane had delivered those two sessions over 13 months ago— early in June 1980.
22. [931] Although Jane has had “particular difficulty” with the theory of reincarnation, both through Seth and in her poetry she’s always kept psychic windows open through which she can view and express reincarnational ideas and emotions. Poetically, this will be obvious when If We Live Again is published late this year. (Probably in December. We expect to receive from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for the book, for our review, any day now.) In her poetry the young Jane was using ideas akin to reincarnation before she even knew the word—subject matter that was strongly disapproved of by the Catholic priests who visited Jane and her bedridden mother at home.
    I’ve noted before that Seth himself has no reservations at all about expressing reincarnational material. Listening to some of the tapes students made in Jane’s ESP class—in the early ’70s, say—I hear Seth being allowed to spontaneously give regular students and first-time visitors often quite detailed and penetrating insights into their other lives; explaining how events and emotions from other existences can intermix with their counterparts in present lives. Jane still picks up such information from others, but now she seldom expresses it through Seth. I think her deep concern about leading others astray, related as it is to her early religious training, is the inhibiting force here. Then see Notes 9 and 19 for this session; their contents show that she hasn’t closed a certain window into the dream state, either.
3. [932] I see correlations between Seth’s material here and my speculations at the end of the 922nd session (for this chapter), concerning his apparently unlimited capacity for oral history.

    As I have frequently mentioned, you have a hand in forming all events to one extent or another, and at certain levels you are therefore involved in the construction of those global events that affect the world, whether they be of so-called natural or cultural nature.
    Earlier, I also spoke about the importance of dreams in man’s early background, and their importance to you as a species. Here, I want to stress the social aspects of dreams, and to point out the fact that dreams also show you some of the processes that are involved in the actual formation of physical events: You actually come into an event, therefore, long before the event physically happens, at other levels of consciousness, and a good deal of this prior activity takes place in the state of dreaming.
    Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions),your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.
    Group dreaming was at one time taken for granted as a natural human characteristic—in a tribe, for example, when new locations were being sought, perhaps in time of drought. The various tribal members would have dreams in which the problem was considered, each dreamer tackling whatever aspect of the problem that best suited his or her abilities and personal intents. The dreamers would travel out-of-body in various directions to see the extent of drought conditions, and to ascertain the best direction for the tribe to take in any needed migration.
    Their dreams would then be shared by the tribe in the morning, or at special meetings, when each dreamer would give a rendition of the dream or dreams that seemed to be involved. In the same way, other dreamers would simply check with the dreamers of other villages or tribes—perhaps a hundred or even more miles distant. Some such dreams were extremely direct, others were clothed in symbolism according to the style of the dreamer, but in any case the dream was understood to have a public significance as well as a private one.
    The same still applies, though often dreams themselves are forgotten. Instead, for example, for news or for advice you watch your morning television news, which provides you with a kind of manufactured dream that to some extent technologically serves the same purpose. Instead of sending cameramen and newspaper people to the farthest corners of the earth, early man sent out aspects of himself to gather the news and to form it into dream dramas. Oftentimes much of the material did not need to become conscious: It was “unconsciously” acted upon, turned directly into action. Now such dreams simply act as backup systems, rising to the fore whenever they are needed. Their purpose was and is to increase the value fulfillment of the species and of the individual.
    Psychologists often speak of the needs of man. Here I would like to speak instead of the pleasures of man, for one of the distinguishing characteristics of value fulfillment is its pleasurable effect. It is not so much that man or nature seeks to satisfy needs, but to exuberantly, rambunctiously seek pleasure—and through following its pleasure each organism finds and satisfies its needs as well. Far more is involved in the experience of life, however, than the satisfaction of bare needs, for life is everywhere possessed with a desire toward quality—a quality that acknowledges the affirming characteristics of pleasure itself.
    In your terms, there is a great pleasure to be found in both work and play, in excitement and calm, in exertion and rest (long pause), yet the word “pleasure” itself has often fallen into disrepute, and is frowned at by the virtuous.
    One of the main purposes of dreaming, therefore, is to increase man’s pleasure, which means to increase the quality of living itself. Dreams are mental work and play combined, psychic and emotional rich creative dramas. They also involve you in the most productive of enterprises as you begin to play with versions of events that are being considered for physical actualization, as on a personal level you “view” the probable events which your family, tribe, organization, community and country will actualize.
    Man explored the physical world in the dreaming state long before he explored it physically. Such dreams gave him the assurance that other lands existed outside of his own, and spurred him onward into those physical expeditions in which the species has always taken a particular delight.
    A man or woman might [be] while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be. This was in a way as startling an experience as it would be to you to find yourselves on some distant planet. (You do, for that matter, explore space in the same fashion, and on at least some occasions your own “visitors from outer space” are dream travelers from other dimensions of reality. Period.)
    In such a fashion man learned the location of the oceans upon the earth—or at least was given the assurance that such large bodies of water existed, along with clues as to their locations, and the placement of the stars overhead.
    Also in the same manner dreams were an aid in navigation, so that they served to let sailors know when land was near before it could be physically perceived—and there is no human activity to which dreams and group dreams have not contributed.
    They were of great aid, of course, in human politics, so that through dreams the intents of tribal leaders, say, were known to the others. Some people within the tribe specialized in such dreams, and again, dream content was and is directed by the individual intents, purposes and interests of the dreamer. In a certain manner dreaming, then, helped sharpen such individual tendencies while still directing them toward the public value fulfillment. The person interested most in herbs and plant life would also find that nightly dreams mirrored that daytime preoccupation, so that nightly dream excursions might find the dreamer examining strange herbs in another location than the native one. Or he might be given knowledge as to how the herbs could best be used for healing purposes. People are natural mimics, as are some animals and birds, so when tribal members related their dreams, they did not just tell them but acted them out with great mobility, carefully mimicking whatever animals or people or elements of land they may have encountered.
    The origins of drama began in just that fashion. Tribal leaders were usually chosen only after long “dream investigations,” in which the new leader’s name cropped up, say, time and time again in the people’s dreams. They expected to receive counsel from their dreams. Such information was then aired and shared, studied and examined along with all physical considerations that applied before important decisions were made.
    You do still continue such activity, again, [although] you have turned your conscious minds away from those directions. Most of it does not become conscious because you do not want it to. In some areas, however, with the acceleration of physical travel, certain kinds of dreams have become more highly pertinent. Families in your society are often broken up, parents and children living quite apart in other portions of the country or in different countries entirely, so dreams that connect you with such relatives have risen to the fore, so to speak. People often keep track of changes in hometowns that they may not have visited for twenty years except in the dream state, when they familiarize themselves with the alterations that have happened, visit beloved streets and houses, or view old classmates.
    Very few people make any attempt to check out such information in physical terms. There is an entire global dream network, in other words, that goes quite unrecognized—one of spectacular organization in which exchanges of information occur that give you the basis for the formation of recognized physical events.
    If small families kept track of their own family dreams, for example, they could discover unsuspected correlations and sense the interplay of subjective and objective drama with which they are always psychologically involved. Notice what kind of information you seek out from the newspapers, for example. Do you read the front page and ignore sports, or vice versa? Do you read the gossip column? The obituary? Do you seek out stories of lurid crime, or look for further incidents of political chicanery? The answers will show you the kind of material you look for most often. You will to some extent specialize in the same kind of information when you dream. You will organize the contents of your mind and the information available to you according to your own intents and purposes.
    One person’s dreams, therefore, while his or her own, will still fit into an important notch in the dreams of a given family. One person might, because of his or her own interests, seek largely from dreams warnings of difficulty or trouble, and therefore be the family’s dream watchguard—the one who has, say, the nightmares for everyone else. That person will also serve a somewhat similar role in the waking state, as a member of a family. The question in such instances is the reason for such a person’s overconcern and alarm in the first place—why the intense interest in such possible catastrophes, or in crime or whatever?—and the answer lies in an examination of the person’s feelings and beliefs about the nature of existence itself.
    As far as group dreaming is concerned, however, there are still some people who have always served as watchdogs in that regard, while others even in the dream state operate as healers or teachers or explorers or whatever. There is no craft that was not first conceived of by an individual dreamer, who later transferred it to the social world of activity.
    In the dreaming state, then, the needs and desires of families, communities and countries are well known. The dream state serves as a rich source for the world’s knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology. This is a highly important point, for “the technological world out there” was at one time the world of dreams. The discoveries and inventions that made the industrial world possible were always latent in man’s mind, and represented an inner glittering landscape of probability that he brought into actualization through the use of dreams—the intuitive and the conscious manipulation of material that was at one time latent.
    Value fulfillment will always provide inner directions that remind man constantly of the best ways in which such technology can be used. The need to possess such knowledge is uppermost in man’s mind now, and so it also becomes a vital dream topic or subject. In the dream state, then, to one extent or another man seeks solutions to the problems of his age.
    Now: Dreams occur at so many levels of reality that it is quite impossible to describe their true scope. For one thing, that scope includes levels that are consciously unknown to you. Dreams serve as backup systems also, for example, in the important communications between various peoples or nations—and, particularly when physical communication is cut off between such groups, dreams provide the continuation of information’s flow from one part of the species to another.
    There are dreams of different import, some triggered genetically, that serve as sparks for particular kinds of behavior— dreams, in other words, that literally span the centuries in that regard, coiled latently in the very chromosomes; and no level of consciousness is without some kind of participation in dream states. In that regard even electrons, for example, dream. Dreaming touches upon both microscopic and macroscopic events, or realities, and is not simply a human characteristic, appropriately appearing within your own range or within your own species. It is instead one area of subjective experience that is everywhere prevailing within the universe.
    As I have mentioned many times, animals then dream, as do plants, insects, and all forms of life. All molecular constructions exhibit that certain kind of introspective activity, as if the inner working of some giant computer was intimately in touch not only with its own programming and the probabilities connected with it, but with a deep psychological awareness of the activities of the electrons and various visible and invisible particles that form its own physical construction.
    You are bound to have, then, many larger dream formations that can only be called group dreams—subjective events in which your own dreams happen, and in which your own dreams take part. You expect all of the elements of the physical world, however diverse, to fit together and form a certain kind of permanency and order. It should be no surprise, then, that this same kind of “fitting together” includes subjective life also—or that, say, your private dreams are also fragments in a vaster dream reality. They are as important to the operation of that reality as electrons are to your physical one, providing inner pathways for the accumulation of wisdom and pleasure.
    There are certain kinds of dreams in which the various species then communicate, and in which the energies of the environment and its inhabitants merge. These include a kind of horizontal psychological extension, the translation of one kind of dream into another kind—the transference of information from one system to another, in which the symbols themselves come alive.
    I can only hope to evoke some feeling within you that is reminiscent of your own actual behavior at those hidden levels of dreaming activity, but they have remained highly pertinent in the development of all species with their environments, keeping the intents and purposes of one alive in the other. I have told you that in actuality, now, no genetic knowledge is gone from the earth. It does not vanish. It is retained in latent form within a kind of backup system, so that in terms of probabilities each species carries within its own genetic patterns the blueprints and specializations of each other’s genetic sequence.
    Those sequences follow the pursuits of value fulfillment so smoothly that they can be reactivated whenever the conditions are fortunate—for even the animals are not concerned with simple survival alone, nor the plants, but with what I can only call emotional qualities: qualities that seek a full appreciation and creative extension of those conditions of consciousness that stamp each species as itself and yet join it with all others.
    In a fashion your own dreams operate or appear as electrons in other realities. That is, they change their form, their subjective force or direction, and become part of the working mechanics of the universe. The same applies to your own thoughts. They are not “wasted” after you have thought them, or simply discarded. They do not become extinct either, but go on to serve other functions in the universe than those with which you are presently aware.
    This all involves a lush multitudinous creativity. The pleasure principle can probably be likened most to the latent appreciation of beauty that is everywhere apparent if you look for it: the ecstasy of each form of life for the wonders of its own existence, in which love’s values go beyond themselves, and yet a condition in which each species or life form “realizes“ that its own fulfillment adds immeasurably to the existence of all other forms.

    In a fashion dreams allow for a curious mixture of learning processes, while at the same time serving to introduce surprising developments. Period. That is, dreams promote the conservation of knowledge. They are an aid in the development of skills. They conserve available information by weaving it through the other structures of your experience.
    At the same time dreams have their startling qualities, promoting the insertion of unexpected developments, in which case they appear to deal with the breaking down of conserving principles. In this fashion they also mirror your more exterior behavior, conserving what you know already, and yet introducing new patterns, new spontaneous orders that would sometimes seem to run against conservative issues. They reinforce the past, for example, when you dream of past situations. They also seem to undermine the integrity of the past by showing it to you in an unfamiliar light, mixing it with present and future tints.
    Many people might wish that I would add many more methods to help you study dreams and their nature. In such a manner also dreams suggest nature’s spontaneous order throughout the centuries, and allow you to look at the species in a truer light. Your lives, for that matter, are dependent upon the curious relationships that are involved: You would not get by for one day if the conserving principles and the unexpected did not exist exactly as they do. There is so much you must learn and remember in life, and so much you must spontaneously forget—otherwise, action itself would be relatively meaningless.
    You perform far more actions in a day than you recall. You do not know how many times you lift your arms, speak a sentence, think a thought. With the kind of consciousness you possess, an overreliance upon conserving principles could then end up in a reduction of life’s proce&ses.
    In private living and in so-called evolutionary terms, however, life necessitates the intrusion of surprising events, unforeseen actions, leaps of insight or behavior that could not come alone from any accumulation of knowledge or simple conservation of energy, but seem to suggest entirely different new developments.
    Dreams often serve as the frameworks in which sudden remarkable insights appear that later enable a man or a woman to envision the world in a way that was not earlier predictable. The world’s activities always include the insertion of surprising events. This is true at all levels of nature, from microscopic to macroscopic. As I have said before, all systems are open. The theories of both evolutionists and creationists strongly suggest and reinforce beliefs in the consecutive nature of time, and in a universe that begins in such-and-such a fashion, continuing on to such-and-such an end—but there are horizontal events that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal entry points and exit points in all experience. These allow for the insertion of unofficial new energy, the introduction of surprising events. Period.
    Again, it is very difficult to explain such activities. They can affect—and do affect—the rise and fall of civilizations. You are used to reading nature in a particular manner, however, and to experiencing events at surface levels. You are naturally equipped to appreciate a far richer blend, and as I have often said, you are yourselves possessed of a need to explore the subjective ramifications of your existence.
    As “the times change” you tire of the old ways. Even your dreams begin to reach out into new avenues. The relationships between nature’s natural conservative behavior and nature’s need for innovation are stretched. More and more remarkable events begin to occur, both in private and mass experience, in physical and mental behavior, in the events, say, of both stars and man.
    People want, then, to throw aside old structures of belief. They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. They begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion, that attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten. They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. At such times the conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as they did before. Surprising events that were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the behavior they expect from others.^11-JS1 You are in such times now.
    Old honored explanations suddenly appear withered. Unpredictable remarkable events seem more possible. The kind of work done in dreams to some extent is changed. They become more active, more intrusive. Predictable behavior, even of the natural elements, is harder to take for granted. Man begins to sense more and more at such times the vaster dimensions of behavior upon which that appearance of conservation resides.
    There are considerable changes that occur under such conditions in man’s subjective experience. Man’s feelings about himself change too, but little by little his trust in unpredictability grows. He is more willing to assign himself to it. The species begins its own kind of psychic migration. It begins to sense within itself further frontiers and the possibilities for action. It begins to yearn for the exploration of mental lands, and it sends portions of itself out as couriers. End of dictation.
    Now: Ruburt is that kind of courier. There are many in all areas of life, and this involves not only an excitement on the part of your own species, but the same kind of curiosity and excitement on the part of other species as well. Again, most difficult to explain—but those connections that exist between all species and the environment are themselves affected. The horizontal communications stretch and expand to allow for later developments in terms of probabilities, for consciousness always knows itself in more than one context, and it is possible for nature to experience itself in ways that would seem to be most improbable when the properties of conservation and learning are at their strongest spring.
    End of session.
    The same curious mixture of nonpredictable and predictable activity operates in genetic patterning also, in which the genetic systems are largely set up to achieve the retention of specific characteristics, and yet can also demonstrate behavior that seems to be genetically unfaithful, distorted, or to introduce alterations that might appear to be travesties upon genetic integrity.
    Those odd genetic happenings, however, as I have tried to explain, often provide a resiliency and a widening of probabilities that are most necessary for overall genetic balance. Dream actions can indeed—and often do—affect genetic alterations, acting as triggers for altered cellular action. There is a give-and-take between the seemingly separate mental and physical aspects of your lives at every level of experience, and at every level within nature’s seeming boundaries.
    There are decisions in which each individual plays a part that are made in fields of activity that you usually do not even realize exist. Period.
    The people of a nation can at any given moment decide to activate or experience a particular event almost entirely in the physical realm, or to separate its elements in such a way that half of it is experienced physically and the other half in dream reality. Transformations of energy occur of course constantly, so that, say, a probable physical storm can instead appear as an economic one.
    It can appear as an emotional storm on the part of large numbers of people. It can instead appear as a series, say, of frightening dreams. Period. At each point of its existence such an event can weave in and out of such manifestations, largely dissipating itself. Period. An adverse physical situation, such as an illness, may turn into “a frightening dream,” yet in all such cases the necessary standards of self-integrity are maintained.
    The same alterations apply of course for fortunate events, which may be experienced through full physical expression, or through a series of manifestations that might also involve social or economic happenings, or the occurrence of splendid weather conditions, dash—the insertion of excellent, almost perfect summerlike days, or whatever. The predictable and nonpredictable serve, then, to form the boundaries of physical experience.
    The more open you are to such ideas the greater the flow of your experience can be.
    As Ruburt himself often mentioned in his own book, The God of Jane, you should never accept as fact a theory that contradicts your own experience. Man’s experience includes, for example, all kinds of behavior for which science has no answers. That is well and good. Science cannot be blamed for saying that its methods are not conducive to the study of this or that area of experience—but science should at least be rapped on the knuckles smartly if it automatically rejects such behavior as valid, legitimate or real, or when it attempts to place such events outside of the realm of actuality. Science can justly be reprimanded when it tries to pretend that man’s experience is limited to those events that science can explain.
    It is instead, of course, quite possible that your predictable world exists not in spite of but because of those surprising, unpredictable, unofficial occurrences. Period. There is a kind of larger spontaneous order of which the seemingly unpredictable elements of your world provide their own clues.
    By taking notice of seemingly unpredictable events, by changing your focus, you can indeed begin to sense the larger patterns of such a reality. And that reality leaves many traces in your own experience. It everywhere provides hints and clues as to its own actuality and your own participation in varying fields of expression that have not been given any official recognition.
    Within the patterns of human experience, then, lies evidence of man’s greater ability: He rubs shoulders with his own deeper understanding whenever he remembers, say, a precognitive dream, an out-of-body—whenever he feels the intrusion or infusion of knowledge into his mind from other than physical sources. Such a creature could not be the puppet of a genetic engineering accidentally manufactured in a universe that was itself meaningless. Period.
    If man paid more attention to his own subjective behavior, to those feelings of identification with nature that persistently arise, then half of the dictates of both the evolutionists and the creationists would automatically fall away, for they would appear nonsensical.^{4 [937]} It is not a matter of outlining a whole new series of methods that will allow you to increase your psychic abilities, or to remember your dreams, or to perform out-of-body gymnastics. It is rather a question or a matter of completely altering your approach to life, so that you no longer block out such natural spontaneous activity.
    The entire picture of physical life as you understand it must be of course experienced from your own viewpoint, but its complexity, its order and magnificence of structure and design should be understood as composing but one example of the infinite number of realities, each constructed by the propensities and characteristics of its own nature and the nature of its own consciousness.
    The word “unconscious” is in a fashion meaningless. There are endless versions [of consciousness], of course, with their own worlds, forming organizations of meaning and purpose. Some of these mingle with your own and vice versa. The “inner structure” is one of consciousness, and the deeper questions can eventually only be approached by granting the existence of inner references.
    The nature of time, questions concerning the beginning or ending of the universe—these cannot be approached with any certainty by studying life’s exterior conditions, for the physical references themselves are merely the manifestations of inner psychological activity. You are aware of the universe only insofar as it impinges upon your perception. What lies outside of that perception remains unknown to you. It seems to you, then, that the world began—or must have begun— at some point in the past^{1 [938]}, but that is like supposing that one piece of a cake is the whole cake, which was baked in one oven and consumed perhaps in an afternoon.
    The inner references of reality involve a different kind of experience entirely, with organizational patterns that mix and merge at every conceivable point. You tune your consciousness while you sleep as one might tune a piano, so that in waking reality, it clearly perceives the proper notes and values that build up into physical experience. Those inner fields of reference in which you have your existence are completely changing themselves as your experience is added to them, and your own identity was couched in those references before birth as you understand it.
    You are one conscious version of yourself, creating along with all of your contemporaries the realities of the times. When I use the term “contemporaries,” I refer to all of the species. You read your consciousness in certain fashions, but it is quite possible to read the consciousness of the world in other ways also.
    (Scientists do not know how many species exist on earth—only that they total in the billions.) If you read it sideways, so to speak, you would still end up with an orderly universe, but one in which the nature of identity would be read completely differently, stressing adjacent subjective communications of a conscious kind that form other kinds or patterns of subjectivity and psychological continuity. These result in the formation of “personalities” or entities who are aware of their own identities by following different pathways than your own, while also in their way contributing to the formation of your universe even as you do.
    Your numbering of the species is highly capricious. Again, you recognize as alive only those varieties of life that fall within certain ranges of attention. You objectify and diversify. The lines drawn between the self and what is nonself, between an organism and its environment, are highly arbitrary on your part. There are psychological patterns, therefore, that completely escape your notice because they do not follow the conventions that you have established. These combine what you diversify, so that you have hidden psychological values or psychological beings that combine the properties of the environment and the properties of selfhood in other combinations than those you know.
    They would seem to be the spirits of nature,^{2 [938]}as you would be more or less bound to interpret them from your viewpoint. They would certainly be psychological relatives, but with their own time schemes, languages, and psychological affiliations. These do exist along with the kinds of consciousness that you recognize within the structure of physical life. When you dream, however, you often come in contact with these cousins of consciousness. It is not simply that they communicate with you, or you with them, so much as it is that in sleep the conventional properties that you have learned are somewhat loosened and abandoned. You see “the lights around the corner,” so to speak.^11-JS2 You see a species of consciousness, a species that must remain unexplained in any normal explanations of evolution, and these hint at the communications that exist at all levels, protecting not only the genetic references necessary to your own kind, but the combinations of other forms of organization that exist adjacent to your own, yet connected to them. You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore.
    At one time, however, you encountered such other formations in a different light, of course, seeing many similarities between their behavior and yours—certain characteristic ways of perceiving at least some experience that elicited your response and recognition.
    At one time, then, you were more open in a fashion to the kinds of consciousness that you admitted into your circle of reality. At one time, in those terms, you did not draw the lines as finely as you do now. Instead you included such cousins of consciousness into your midst, accepting a kind of comradeship— for to some extent at least you could see the different versions of humanity that resulted from a change of focus, an adjacent affiliation of humanized energy with the environment. Quite simply, you felt that in certain terms you had other brothers and sisters in the world that were like you but unlike you, that put together the contents of the universe in their own fashions. Such species, of course, can nowhere appear within the dictates of evolution or be perceived as realities except under those conditions when you relax your usual conventions of perception and behavior.
    Nevertheless, encounters between you occur frequently— in the dream state as stated, in alterations of your usual focus, and in your arts, where you are less arbitrary in your definitions. As you began to bring your own physical reality into harder, clearer focus, you stopped with your own view of human consciousness, shutting off completely and rather arbitrarily those other elements in order to more clearly frame and define the boundaries of physical order. It seems to you now that such personalities are not physically perceivable, but at one time you could bring them into the range of your perception.
    You ended your classifications where you did, however, preferring to see man as the king of intelligence. This meant that you abruptly drew the line where it now seems it must have been drawn. You continued that companionship, however, at other levels of activity, levels that are still open and that must be taken into consideration whenever we approach any discussion of dreaming and the dreaming world.

4. [937] In the Preface for Volume 1 of Dreams, see Session 881, with its Note 1. Then I suggest a review in chapters 1 and 2 of all of the material pertinent to evolution and creationism.
1. [938] According to generally accepted scientific theory these days, our solar system is some 4.6 billion years old. The universe itself originated between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago.
2. [938] In Chapter 2 of Dreams, in Volume 1, see Note 5 for Session 885, as well as my comments about naturalism at the end of Note 3 for the last (937th) session.

We will begin a new chapter (12), entitled: “Life Clouds.”
    Joseph (as Seth calls me) used the term today in a discussion, and it is an excellent description of the way in which your universe was “initially” seeded.^{14 [939]}
    Understand, however, that the term “dream cloud” would serve as well. [Yet] it is an evocative reference to the way that All That Is packaged itself in the formation of its numberless realities. Such life clouds “still” exist—and you had better put the word “still” in quotations. Each seed of life, of living, contains within itself its own protective coating, its own placenta of necessary nourishment and environmental circumstances, its own system and branches of probabilities.
    Those branches of probabilities act like remote sensors, seeking out those conditions that will be suited to the seed’s best value fulfillment and development. In the simplest of terms, the life clouds will send forth their contents where circumstances best meet their own requirements. On the other hand, the life clouds can seed their own worlds completely. Space itself already speaks of a creation “begun,” for no matter how empty space may seem to be it simply appears like a vast cathedral, or tent or pyramid of form, for the moment perhaps vacant inside, with walls so distant that they go unperceived.
    Probabilities may be swirling everywhere, yet remain of course unperceived in any given instant, so that you might in this odd strange analogy hear a dim brief whirr, as in the whirling of winds, and think it unimportant—while what you heard instead was an entire world of probabilities speed past where you stood.
    Your own entire structure of life, therefore, with its acute and precise definitions in the package of reality, is a living life cloud that may or may not be perceived in other realities. That cloud contains within it ever-freshening sources of new creativity. When you dream or sleep or think, you automatically add to other dimensions of a life cloud or dream cloud that emerge from the very actions of your own subjective motions.
    Even infinity is being everywhere expressed in each moment, for infinity itself is not something apart from what the universe is. As the universe is a portion of infinity’s creativity, in that light there are new species appearing all of the time, whether or not your own situation allows you to perceive that emergence. You yourselves may be portions of that emergence. From your threshold or focus you would be relatively unaware of your own motion on a new time threshold— for to the beings on that threshold you would have already arrived, while to you in your present their existence would at best be theoretical, as if they were future selves. From your standpoint they would be, of course.
    At other levels your dreams mix and intertwine not only with those of your contemporaries, but with those of all times and places, living or dead in your terms. Each universe—such as the one you know—serves as a small colony of existence, and is infinite within the characteristics of its own nature.
    Some of this evening’s material will only have meaning to you in the dream state, for that matter, and the words of the book may stir some of those meanings into your attention. Each portion of all such life clouds seeks value fulfillment, again, but that term itself is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning.^{15 [939]}
    This purpose or meaning does not exist apart from your own existence, however. You are a part of life’s meaning and purpose—but those purposes, “coming from”, coming from the source of your own being, are too great to be expressed or described within the structure of your personhood as you understand it. Such understanding is often experienced or sensed, however, sometimes as you are listening to music or when you are deeply stirred by emotion, and when you do not place a great distance between it and yourself.
    Attending to the life that you have with love, beginning “where you are,” will best allow you such a feeling for your own meaning.
    What do I mean by such attention? Attention to the moment as it is presented. Attention to the table of rich reality as it appears before you. Attention to the kind of person you are, and to the loving appreciation of your own uniqueness. To attend to your life in such a fashion brings you into a clearer communication with the inner action of your own existence.
    I have not given you a multitude of methods or suggestions, telling you how to decipher or understand your own dreams, though I have mentioned such topics often in this book and others.
    I have not given you complicated methods concerning out-ofbody travel, and yet all of our books, by changing your attitudes, will help you bring about changes in yourselves that will automatically enhance such activities. They will begin to take their natural places within your world. No methods will help you otherwise.
    I do not want you to think that the answers to your questions lie prepackaged in the dream state, either, relatively inaccessible except to those who possess unique talents or some secretive knowledge of the world of the occult. Many people, long before the time of printing or reading, learned to read nature very well, to observe the seasons, to feel out “the seasons of the soul.” The answers, therefore, lie as close as your own back-door steps, for at the thresholds of your beings you automatically stand in the center of knowledge. You are never at the periphery of events.
    Regardless of your circumstances, your condition in life, your training or your aptitudes, at your own threshold you stand at the center of all realities—for at your center all existences intersect. You are everywhere part of them, and they are of you. Each portion of the universe carries the knowledge of all other parts, and each point of a reality is that reality’s center. You are, then, centered in the universe.
    Again, even your dreams and thoughts go out to help form new worlds.
    Such considerations should naturally spark within you far vaster and yet far more intimate insights—insights in whose light the hazy rhetoric of prepackaged knowledge begins to disappear. As it does, so the speakers within each of you can rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness without being considered blabbermouths or mad men and women, or fools, without having to distort their information simply to bring it to your attention. The speakers are those inner voices that first taught you physical languages. You could be equally correct in calling them the voices of electrons or the voices of the gods, for each is a representation of All That Is, overflowing like a fountain both with knowledge and with love.
    When you stand at your physical doorstep you look inward at an incredible glowing psychological venture. I am not using symbols in such statements, and hidden within them are important homey clues. Period. Each spoon that you touch, each flower that you rearrange, each syllable that you speak, each room you attend to, automatically brings you in touch with your natural feeling for the universe—for each object, however ’homey or mundane, is alive with changes and comprehension.
    I do not, therefore, want you to concentrate your efforts in memorizing methods of perceiving other realities, but to realize that such insights are everywhere within your grasp. If you understand that, then you will rearrange the organization of your own thoughts quite by yourself. You will begin to read your own thoughts as easily as you now read a book. It is far more important to read your own thoughts than it is to learn to read the thoughts of others, for when your own feelings are known to you, you easily see that all other feelings are also reflected in your own. When you look away from the world you are looking at it more closely. When you read sentences like the last one you are somewhat freeing your own minds, opening greater organizations. Your life is one dream that you are remembering.
    You are remembering it and creating it at once, watching it grow from the attention of your own love and knowledge, and as you seem to stand at its center, so you stand at the center of all of your dreams, which then spin themselves seemingly outward.
    Your physical universe began, again, then, from a dreaming center.
    You have lived in a world in which you believed you must struggle to survive—and so you have struggled.
    You have believed that the natural contours of nature were somehow antagonistic to your own existence, so that left in the hands of nature alone you would lose your way. You have believed that in the very framework of your psychology. In your experiences, therefore, all of these things have largely proven true.
    Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. That world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so forbidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift.
    I hope I have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire.
    That inner psychological universe is a psychic gestalt, propelled, formed, sustained or driven by value fulfillment, love and desire, by the loving values that have no limit. The universe does not give up on itself, or on any of its creatures. It is ruled by a different set of principles, a different set of values, and by inner cooperative exuberance.
    You may need some time before the old beliefs become less prominent, and finally fall into their proper decay—a decay, incidentally, that does indeed have its own kind of majesty, energy, and beauty. But the inner natural leanings of all of consciousness within the realms of your being now yearn for constructive change, clearer vision, to experience again their inherent sense of corporal spirituality, physical and psychic grace. They want to sense again the effortless motion that is their natural birthright.
    I hope that this book to some extent or another puts each of you in touch with your own inner psychological motion, your creative breath, so that you are invigorated and sense within your own minds and spirit a new promise, a new intent, and the exhilaration of earthly and spiritual strength. You dwell in a state of natural grace that is quite alive and vital whether or not science decrees that consciousness possesses its own intent. Nature is supernatural all the while, of course.
    End of chapter. End of session. End of book.

14. [939] When Seth quoted me as referring to a “life cloud,” he went back to the discussion Jane and I had at lunch today, concerning recent news reports and articles: Some prominent astrophysicists, mathematicians, and astronomers have announced their belief in a theory of “panspermia”—that in ordinary terms of time life on earth was “seeded” from space, instead of arising by pure chance in some primordial ooze or sea on our planet. Those men believe in evolution—that once it originated, life, as Charles Darwin proposed, has ever since been growing in complexity and “evolving” through natural selection and random mutations, or DNA copying errors, into the life and beings we see and are today. Among other signs, the rebel scientists cite the evidence for vast clouds of microorganisms in space, and the identification in certain meteorites of bacterial and fungal microfossils, along with a number of amino acids. They claim that even at 4.6 billion years, the earth mathematically is not old enough for life to have had the time to evolve (beginning about 3.8 billion years ago) into its enormously complex current forms. That lack of ordinary time in evolutionary theory is a question Jane and I have often wondered about.
    The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. All That Is, I said, might have offered those same incipient forms to the living earth many times, only to have the earth reject them or fail to develop them for many reasons. But even these latest scientific theories are based upon ideas of a past, present, and future; their proponents do not consider that basically time is simultaneous—that the universe is being created now. We had an interesting discussion. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, see sessions 882 and 883.
15. [939] Seth may think that his own term, “value fulfillment,” “is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning,” but over two years ago, in Chapter 2 of Dreams, he gave what I think is an excellent interpretation of that quality. In Session 884 for October 3, 1979, he came through very emphatically in one of Jane’s best sessions:
    “Value fulfillment 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.”