The "Reading Guide" and "Chapter Highlights" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter first describes Jane's low mood on the day she signed her will and her self-reproach during her afternoon nap; Seth then explains that the universe was born from a concrete dream world with its own inner laws, that the earliest species had only dream bodies or pseudo-forms and could not reproduce physically, that they later took on physical forms, and that mixed-species populations once appeared; physical experience is woven from dream events and objective actions, there is no linear evolution, only a big bang of consciousness; myths are three-dimensional distortions of multidimensional reality.
Key Points of This Chapter
- The universe was born from a concrete dream world with its own inner laws, not a realm of mere imagination.
- The earliest species possessed dream bodies or pseudo-forms, could not reproduce physically, and operated within psychological time.
- The dream bodies later took on physical form, but this did not happen to all species at the same time; mixed-species populations and hybrids once appeared.
- Physical reality is woven from dream events and objective actions; there is no linear evolution, only an explosion of consciousness.
- Myths are distorted manifestations of multiple events in the three-dimensional world, and are the only way to understand the facts.
Main Text
The Day the Will Was Signed
This session began at 9:17 p.m. on Wednesday, December 5, 1979. It was a very short session, but the content is not easy to understand.
Rob described the situation that day: Jane and he signed their will that day, with their lawyer and the lawyer's wife serving as notaries. Jane was somewhat depressed in the morning and could not write well, because the obvious implications of the will made her unhappy. Following a new impulse, she took a two-hour nap; however, when she woke up, she was morbidly displeased with herself for having slept two hours, feeling that she had wasted two hours. At dinner she was quieter than usual, although she said she wanted to have the session.
From Rob's description, one can see that they finished signing the will that day. Rob had hoped that the will would cheer Jane up, because the will would make excellent arrangements for matters after their passing; but clearly it had the opposite effect. Jane was not cheered up, and at the same time she berated herself even more for her nap—she trusted her impulse and napped when she wanted to nap, but after waking up she felt that there was not much time to begin with, so why waste two hours. One can see that as the channel for Seth, she was mostly rather subdued, and today's delivery was not the exuberant kind either. This was Rob's description.
Then Seth came through to say good evening, with many pauses in between.
The Universe Was Born from a Dream World
Seth said that when he spoke of the dream world, he did not mean those imaginary realms, but rather pointed to that world of concepts, thoughts, and mental actions, from which all the forms you know emerge.
That is to say, our universe was born from a dream world. This dream world is not the kind of fanciful, merely imaginary realm that most people think of—do not equate the two. It is a dream world with very definite concepts, thoughts, and mental actions, a creative dream world that, like our real world, carries deep inner creativity. It is not casually thinking "I fly through the sky, I go to an alien planet," but something very concrete—for example, if you want to build a spiritual home, you have to think about how to build that spiritual home, how to realize it concretely, from the technical level, the software platform, marketing, content services, course arrangements, personnel management, and so on—you have to think that concretely. Such a dream world is more an inner universe than an inner world.
So what is the difference between an "inner universe" and an "inner world"? Many people think, aren't they the same? In principle they are similar, but there is an essential difference. The inner universe is a real, very concretized universe; whereas the inner world, the internal world, need not be concretized—it can be fanciful, it can be without any scruples or limitations. Why? Because this inner universe must consider and take into account the relationships among all existences in the universe and their mutual achievements. In other words, the inner universe has the laws of the inner universe, while the inner world needs no laws and no rules. The inner universe of course has laws—your inner world is a world of consciousness, and consciousness is composed of energy, possessing those basic attributes.
You have a small universe within you, and this small universe has its own order. Each consciousness should create, blossom, and live itself out in its own position; the whole system has inner laws, inner composition, and a process of concretization. The inner world, by contrast, is imaginary and can be anything.
Your physical reality is merely a materialization of that inner organization. All possible civilizations, including human civilization, first exist in that inner mental realm; the inner universe must form first.
The Initial Pseudo-Forms
Seth then continued:
In the beginning, then, the species did not have the forms that they now have. They had pseudo-forms, dream bodies if you prefer, and they could not physically reproduce.
At the very beginning of the universe, those species did not have the forms we now have. In a dream-universe world, they all had pseudo-forms, called pseudo-forms. At the same time you could call them dream bodies, translucent forms, or call them consciousness bodies, astral bodies—whatever you call them. In any case, they were hazy forms—they had form, because without form you could not call them forms, but they were different from the present physical bodies, more like translucent astral bodies, or what some people call etheric bodies. Whatever body you call them, they were that kind of half-material, half-form energy body.
These dream bodies experienced time completely differently. The reason we have such a definite experience of time is mainly because of the neural transmission of the physical body and the experience of the outer senses; that is why in dreams we cannot experience time either, because we are no longer using the outer body. And these earliest dream bodies were the same—there was no materialized physical existence, no outer senses, so they could not feel time at the neural level either.
In the beginning, the entire earth operated in a kind of dream world, and in your terms, time could be speeded up or lengthened. It was a kind of psychological time.
Just like when we dream, we can dream a whole lifetime in one night, or we can experience several very small scenes in one night. Forms appeared, and then disappeared. Here Seth did not explain too much, because the appearance and disappearance of forms both involve the question of time, but at this point time was indeterminate, it was psychological time, and could be lengthened or speeded up at will.
From Dream Bodies to Physical Forms
Gradually, however, in your terms, the dream bodies took on physical form.
From the perspective of our time, the dream bodies—those nonphysical astral bodies or etheric bodies existing as energy—took on a physical form, which is our physical body. The appearance and disappearance of forms mentioned earlier refers to this energy body appearing at the very beginning, and then disappearing, becoming the physical body. Moreover, at the very beginning, physical reproduction was impossible; we could not reproduce through the physical body.
However, that did not happen to all species at the same time. Not all species were like this—some had physical bodies, some did not; at the beginning it was rather chaotic.
For a while there was a mixed population of species on the earth.
There were both species that had already taken on completely physical forms—fully physicalized, fully materialized—and species that had not yet taken on physical forms, as well as those astral bodies, etheric bodies, energy bodies; both existed at the same time.
The forms were complete, however, whether or not they were physical. Birds were birds, fish were fish.
The forms were already determined—birds were birds, fish were fish; it was not the evolutionary concept of birds turning into fish or fish turning into birds. At the beginning there were also other different species, such as hybrids of humans and animals, hybrids of animals and humans, and many other mixed breeds, some of which, in your human terms, lasted for quite a long period of time.
You can see from the Classic of Mountains and Seas or The Investiture of the Gods that this period was very long, with many mixtures of humans and animals. Look at where the ancestors of our Chinese civilization came from: Fuxi and Nuwa were a brother and sister, both with snake-like bodies, human heads, human upper bodies, and snake-like lower bodies—these were half-human, half-animal beings. So this period may also have been very long. And this applied to all realms, not just animals and humans.
Dream Trees
There were dream trees with dream leaves that gradually became conscious within that dream, turned physical, and became more and more focused in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought about physical trees.
There were dreaming trees, and the trees in the dream had dream leaves, and within the dream they gradually became conscious and turned themselves into materialized real existence—it was the dream seeds that took root and sprouted in the real world. This process seems sketched in just a few strokes, but if you imagine this process, it is extremely interesting, and it also challenges the limits of human cognition. You cannot understand it through reason alone; only reason plus intuition can understand it. There was a tree that yearned too intensely for its own physicalization, dreamed too realistically, imagined the swaying of every leaf—at that point, within the dream it became a dream seed, and this dream seed, through the manifestation of energy, became a real seed in the physical world, and then took root and sprouted.
Dream Connections
There may be other terms I could use, but in some ways the dream world is advantageous.
Seth said there might be other words better or more advantageous than "dream world," because dreams seem rather ethereal and insubstantial, not so solid. But he emphasized using dream connections—why does he keep saying the birth of the universe was like a dream world? Because he deliberately wants you to make a connection with dreams. Why? Because dreams are familiar to every reader; everyone knows what dreams are. And dreams represent the closest standard to that subjective reality from which your physical world emerges.
Our physical reality emerges from dreams; the birth of the universe is "turning dreams into reality," just as many things in our dreams also happen in reality. This is the closest standard, the way you can best understand how the universe was born.
Dreams seem chaotic, obscure, dubious, or even meaningless precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused upon daily reality that dreams appear like static, objective background noise.
Why do you think dreams are chaotic, obscure, and dubious? Precisely because you focus too much on physical reality, so from your cognition, dreams are just background noise, an insignificant background in your life—I had a dream yesterday, I had a dream the day before; past dreams are not that important to you.
Seth then continued:
To someone not focused upon physical experience, or inexperienced with its organization, physical experience would also appear chaotic.
That is to say, in our real life, there are some people who have no experience with our physical experience, or who have already detached from our physical experience. To those people, the world that seems so logical, so consistent with objective reality, so real to us, appears just as chaotic, just as dreamlike and meaningless. So you see many people in special mental states, whose cognition of our world is the same as our cognition of dreams. He stands on a street corner, in a real world, and cannot figure out what is happening; it is chaotic. Go to a psychiatric ward and ask someone with a mental illness, and the world he describes to you is just like the world people describe in dreams—chaotic, illogical, even meaningless; he lives in another world of his own. You feel that something so real is so illusory to him, and you conclude that he is ill. This example illustrates why our feelings about dreams and reality are different.
The Big Bang of Consciousness
Again, the world was created in the same way that any idea is created.
The creation of the universe is the same as the creation of an idea—however your thoughts are produced, that is how the universe was produced. The expansion of the physical world is the same as the expansion of any idea.
I speak for your enlightenment of the world that you know, the earth that you know, but there are of course probable earths as real as your own, coexistent with your own, all connected in one way or another, each carrying hints and clues about the others.
Probable worlds, probable parallel universes, are as real as our earth and coexist with it. You ask where that earth is? It is right on this earth, only with different space-time, different dimensions, but coexistent, and internally connected. Each earth in each parallel world also carries hints and clues about the other earths.
In scientific terms, there was no linear evolution, but instead explosions of consciousness, expansions of abilities, occurring in all parts of all species, and these are still continuing. They are the inner workings of consciousness used to express itself.
There was no physical big bang, but there was a big bang of consciousness, an expansion of the abilities of consciousness unfolding in all parts of all species. This explosion is the outer display of the inner manipulation that consciousness uses to express itself—consciousness is thoughts, ideas, and it is constantly expanding.
Later in this book I will discuss some of these, but they represent intuitive challenges to new understanding.
It is a deeper kind of cognition, to be introduced later. For example, the behavior patterns of animals are by no means as fixed and completed as you assume—we think that animals have evolved to today and their behavior patterns are already fixed, but that is not so.
And Seth said:
Your physical experience is interwoven with dream events and what you call objective behavior.
Myths
Were it not for your myths, you would not discover any facts. Many people hate myths, saying, give me the truth, I don't want myths; Seth said, were it not for your myths, you would not see any facts at all. You say, I don't want myths, I want to see facts directly—then you will see nothing at all.
Regarding myths, Seth discussed them at length in several dedicated chapters, which should be in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events1, where he talked a great deal about the question of myths. What are myths? Myths are a manifestation of multi-dimensional events in our three-dimensional world, and they can only manifest as what we now see. What you see is a three-dimensional projection of something multi-dimensional; it must be incomplete, it must be distorted, because it is itself multi-dimensional, while our world can only be three-dimensional. This distortion of the multi-dimensional world into three dimensions is the only way we can understand this world. You ask, why can't you directly present me with a multi-dimensional existence? I'm sorry, even if it were presented, you could not see it, you could not feel it. You can only feel its existence in the three-dimensional world, which is to say, you can only feel the myth. Although it is not the most real thing, although it is distorted, the source behind it is real; through this distorted thing we explore its source, just like looking into a funhouse mirror—it has already greatly distorted the form, but you also know that the person in the funhouse mirror exists. You only need to understand why it distorts and how it distorts, and through your own imagination and exploration, you can gradually find the true appearance that the funhouse mirror should reflect. This is the importance of myths to humanity.
This session was very short, and the oral delivery ended there. We will still follow Seth's chapters and not merge it with other sessions—this session is short, so we will keep it short.
注释与核实
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This claim could not be verified. ↩