Mike's commentary · Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, Session 908

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" 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 begins with the phenomenon that improvements in a painter's work can only be left for the next painting, explaining that the reasoning mind relies on limited information within space and time and proceeds by trial and error, whereas the dream state provides direct cognition unrestricted by space and time. Dreams are connected with gene activation, the embedding of civilizational elements, and the reincarnational level; talents in mathematics, music, and the like come from direct cognition rather than reasoning training. The reasoning mind is only one method of organizing information; dreams can also connect genes with reincarnation and transmit culture, and different reincarnational selves can share dreams. Finally, it is suggested that when painting, one should use direct perception and a playful attitude.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The reasoning mind relies on limited information within space and time, operating through trial and error, hypothesis, and deduction.
• The dreaming state provides direct cognition unrestricted by space and time, and its information is processed by other levels of the psyche.
• Gene activation, the embedding and re-embedding of civilizational elements, and the reincarnational level are all connected with dreams.
• Talents such as mathematics and music come from direct cognition, not from training the reasoning mind; the reasoning mind is only one method of organizing information.
• Dreams can connect the genetic and reincarnational systems and transmit culture; different reincarnational selves can participate in the same dream; painting should make use of direct perception and a playful attitude.

Main Text

Opening

Today, let's continue introducing Session 908 of Volume 1 of the Seth book Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment.

This session began on Wednesday, April 16, 1980, at 8:49 p.m.¹ Rob began by saying that this morning he had shown Jane an oil portrait he was working on. After Seth had given him material about art in the private session on April 9, he had started a week earlier to paint his "imaginary male head." He explained to Jane that although it was not yet finished, the portrait already contained improvements that he knew he would develop further in the next painting. Rob said that while painting this one, he already knew what improvements should be made in the next one.

Once he began painting in a certain pattern, it became more or less fixed within that expression — when a painter begins to paint, once he has chosen the way he will express the painting, then the form of that expression, that is, the pattern, is already fixed. If a person is to finish that painting, it is inevitable that he must go through such a process. And those additional improvements that are felt must wait until the next effort. Because this time the pattern is already set — pattern refers to the way of expression, the form of expression, the method of expression.

So between the present and the future, a creative tension is established, a kind of impatience he often feels, a desire to jump to the next step, even while he is still painting the current picture. He wanted to ask Seth to comment on tonight's painting, if he would.

What he is describing is a problem a painter encounters in the creative process: improvements to his own work can only be expected in the next painting, while this one is still being painted. At this point he has already become aware of his shortcomings and of what could be improved, but he has to patiently finish the current painting, and he describes this feeling as a kind of impatience. This is also a situation that many of us encounter in other similar kinds of work.

The Reasoning Mind and the Dream State

Seth came through and directly began introducing the content of this book. Seth said that, as has been mentioned before, the reasoning mind represents a mental activity of humanity within the framework of time and space.

Once again, the reasoning mind involves the method of trial and error. It sets up hypotheses, and its very existence depends upon the paucity of available knowledge -- which is the knowledge it seeks to develop.

The reasoning mind exists precisely because it lacks knowledge, and it needs to deduce the knowledge it wants. If there were no such lack, it would not do this -- this is a very simple principle. As long as the reasoning mind exists, it proves that we humans lack this knowledge.

In our dreaming state, the characteristics of the reasoning mind change completely, and from a waking point of view, its activities may seem distorted. What actually happens, however, is that in the dream state, you are provided with a certain kind of direct knowledge that often seems to exceed the bounds of ordinary terms.

What is it like when you dream? You obtain a certain kind of direct knowledge, whether it is telepathy or some matter or other, and you have that feeling of "getting it instantly." But after you get it instantly, you of course do not know how you obtained such insight and understanding. For example, someone in a dream seems to tell you something, and without them describing it in detail, you immediately understand what they mean.

Moreover, that direct knowledge is not organized according to the framework understood by the reasoning portion of your mind, nor is it obtained through your ordinary logical way of thinking. Therefore, in dreams, you more or less encounter a large amount of information that you cannot classify. Most of the information in dreams is obtained in this direct way, and this directly obtained knowledge is something your reasoning mind cannot understand, so it also cannot be classified by your reasoning mind.

Because the information has not been sorted and processed by your reasoning mind, it comes directly -- information that comes directly in this way, direct cognition that bypasses the reasoning mind, leaves you not knowing where to file it, not knowing how to categorize it. And that information may not conform to the time and space you recognize; it escapes the limitations of time and space, so you do not know how to classify it -- because when we ordinarily organize events and process our experiences, we use the reasoning mind, and that is always done within the scope of time and space.

Dreams and Their Relationship to Genes and Civilization

Seth says that in fact many important issues are connected with the dreaming state. Many important things happen in dreams, are connected with the dream state. What kind of important things? For example, genetic mutations—how do genetic mutations happen? They happen in dreams. This is what Seth means.

For example, these important issues may involve the activation of certain types of genes.

In addition, this kind of important issue also involves:

• A kind of information processing on the animal side—in dreams we may process certain questions about the emotional reality of animals;
• The embedding or re-embedding of civilizing elements—that is, how the era we live in, or the era of other events we encounter in dreams, how can the knowledge we gain in dreams be embedded and combined together.

What does embedding mean? It means you experience something in a dream, and then you interpret it using the culture and civilization of your own time—that is called embedding. And re-embedding? For example, the events you experienced in a reincarnational life were events experienced in that era, and at that time the civilization had already been embedded once—this civilizing element had already been embedded once in the experience of your own reincarnational personality. Then when you experience that reincarnational experience again in the dream state, you will use your present civilization to embed it once more—that is called re-embedding. So you need to understand that every word and every term Seth uses has a deep hidden meaning within it.

Seth says that all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming. I have not touched upon these subjects before—he has spoken about dreams before, but he has not spoken about these things, including the fact that dreams can cause genetic recombination and changes in certain genetic abilities, or the embedding of civilizations, the embedding and re-embedding of civilizing elements.

Because I want to present them within the larger framework of the origin of humanity, and the emergence of humans as a species in history.

Again, he wants to discuss this matter within a grander historical background, rather than touching upon this question when discussing individual dreams, because it is itself a grander human event.

I also want to make certain points, stressing the importance of dreams as they intrude upon and help form the cultural environment.

Why not discuss it back then, and only emphasize the importance of dreams in the formation of the cultural environment when discussing the birth of humanity and the universe, when discussing the birth of the human species? Because only on this macroscopic scale can you have a macroscopic understanding—in the formation of what we humans know as our own cultural environment, what we call civilized society, dreams played an important role.

Dreams sometimes also help to show the advantageous courses taken by an individual, or by a group of people, and therefore help to clarify the directions in which free will can be most advantageously directed.

Apart from the fact that human civilization on the macroscopic level is born from dreams, with dreams playing an important role in the middle, on the individual level—for each of you, or for a certain small group—this group of people refers to the group of reincarnational selves, including their counterparts, or their probable selves, or their reincarnational selves—dreams also give this group of people certain insights, letting them know which are the most advantageous courses they can take.

And then it can also help to clarify free will—your free will is connected with the guidance given to you in your dreams, by your own dreams or by the dreams of your other probable selves. In other words, under what influence is your free will directed outward, directed into what you think of as free will.

Seth says, I want to cover all of these questions about the individual, the microscopic, and about humanity, the macroscopic—I want to cover all of these questions within what I intend to explain about "the influence of dreams upon you."

How the Reasoning Mind Works

Next, Seth says let us return for a moment to the reasoning mind and the subjects of its uses and characteristics. He sets dreams aside for the time being and continues to clarify the matter of the reasoning mind.

As far as the reasoning mind is concerned, it must seek information as if outside itself, because it operates in tandem with the body's senses, and those senses give it only limited data about the environment at any given time.

The reasoning mind must seek information outside itself, otherwise it cannot function. Because it can only obtain its present information, and if you want to make a judgment, you must know information about the past or the future in order to judge. For example, whether you should put on a down jacket tomorrow, you must have some foreknowledge and prediction of tomorrow's weather. And you cannot live in tomorrow, you can only live in the present, so you do not know whether tomorrow will be cold or not. Today's eyes cannot see tomorrow morning's dawn, and today's legs cannot walk tomorrow's streets.

So if the mind wants to know what will happen tomorrow, or what is happening right now outside the realm of the physical senses, then it must try to rely on reasoning, to deduce it from the information available to it.

It must rely on observation, and then make its own inferences, reasoning from limited data. In a way, it must first divide, and then draw conclusions -- first divide what is present data and what is my inference. As for the whole that cannot be perceived from the physically available portion, it must try to reason out its nature. What is meant by the perceived whole? For example, the perception of the future, the present, and the past as a whole -- it does not have that; it only has memory of the past and perception of the present environment. It takes memory and past knowledge and experience, adds the present information, and then reasons out what will happen tomorrow or in the future. And the future as a whole is one part of the whole of our existence, but we humans cannot perceive the future, so we can only reason out the future.

Mathematical Genius: An Example of Direct Cognition

Then Seth began to give an example:

Children begin to count by using their fingers.

When we were little, we did arithmetic by counting on our fingers: one plus one equals two, you put one finger next to another finger, count them again and it equals two; two fingers plus three fingers, count them and it equals five. This is direct perception, the kind of experience we get through the physical senses and the outer senses. From this we can then reason things out, for example twenty plus thirty equals fifty, two hundred plus three hundred equals five hundred. Later on we no longer count one by one, but we have acquired the ability to calculate, and this calculating ability is produced by the reasoning mind.

All the natural sciences that we humans study -- whether mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, or computer science -- make use of the reasoning mind. The method is always the same: first take a direct sensory experience, abstract it, summarize it, derive a pattern from it, and then reason from that, using the formula to reason out other unknown things.

Throughout history there have been people who displayed in their minds the most astonishing mathematical feats, accomplished almost in an instant. Some of them, if they lived in your world, would put computers to shame.

There really are people who calculate faster than computers, and we have seen this kind of mental calculation ability on "The Brain" or on many other programs. And these achievements mostly occur in children who are far too young to have possibly learned scientific mathematics. Often these miraculous feats occur in people who in other respects are regarded as idiots -- they have no ability to carry out intellectual reasoning.

The most typical example is the movie Rain Man, played by Dustin Hoffman; his brother is played by Tom Cruise². If you watch that movie, you will see that the Rain Man has an innate mathematical genius. There is also A Beautiful Mind³ and so on, and these films all display this kind of mathematical miracle. And the greatest characteristic of these geniuses is that they have not received a systematic education -- either they are too young, showing their gift at only a few years old, or they have been regarded as idiots from childhood.

Indeed, when a child is involved, the more he goes into the use of the reasoning mind, the more his mathematical ability deteriorates.

If a small child shows this kind of mathematical genius from an early age, and you put him into the traditional subject of mathematics education, teaching him how to reason, how to use formulas, how to use theory, then his mathematical gift will get worse and worse. This is also something many people do not understand: why is it that many gifted children, after they grow up, even after they enter middle school or high school, lose their genius? With Seth's explanation, I think you can understand: it is not that their genius degenerated on its own; it is that traditional education wiped out their genius. Because this ability of theirs is obtained through direct perception; they do not need the reasoning mind. But our traditional education emphasizes the role of the reasoning mind and discards the ability of direct perception. If you insist on telling him to use the reasoning mind to solve problems, then it is ruined -- he becomes like an ordinary child who can only use the reasoning mind.

In our country, this problem was also discovered quite early. In the 1980s, our country still had a fairly open-minded attitude toward these miraculous paranormal abilities and special powers, and set up many classes for gifted children; the University of Science and Technology of China established the Special Class for the Gifted Young⁴, taking those talented children and educating them in special ways. But what happened afterward? Although some special methods were used, they still wanted to fit these children into the traditional reasoning-based educational method. So although the students in these gifted classes achieved extraordinary results at a young age -- they might have graduated from university at fifteen -- afterward it was very difficult for them to become the mathematical geniuses we might have predicted -- to become great mathematicians, or to become the kind of people who win Nobel Prizes. The reason is still here: we acknowledge their genius, but we want to educate them with methods far more stupid than they are, wanting to use our theoretical reasoning mind to educate these gifted children.

Others who are classified as mentally deficient, children or adults, retain extremely precise abilities. They can tell on what day of the week any past or present date falls.

For example, if you ask him what day of the week April 6, 1965 was, he opens his mouth and tells you it was a Thursday. He did not calculate it; for him the answer just pops out of his head directly. If you want to know how he calculated it, then you had better learn about the latest quantum computing -- quantum computing just gives the answer directly, it skips all the intermediate computational processes, or rather it has no computational process at all; what it gives you directly is the answer. When you want to know how it computes, the quantum computer can no longer work properly. When you want to know how this genius calculated that that day was a Thursday, then that genius is no longer a genius. So do not try to use human rationality to understand a genius.

Others, while engaged in all kinds of important tasks, are able to retain a precise memory of everything that has happened from any given point in time.

There is another type of person who is born with a photographic memory. I have people like this around me: when you tell him about something, he can immediately tell you on what day of what year that thing happened, what happened that day, who was present that day, who said what, and he can even imitate the tone of voice and the manner of speaking so vividly that it is lifelike. He does not need to memorize deliberately; you can discuss any single point with him, and he can pull up that point, including the things that happened afterward, and he recounts them all as if they were family treasures.

Again, some children have great musical ability, or accomplished musical skills.

Composing, performing -- some children are born able to hear any piece of music once and reproduce it completely. I have seen a child who, after hearing any piece just once, immediately plays it on the piano, without the slightest error, not a single note wrong. He does not need education; he is born with this ability.

And some of these children continue on and become great musicians, while others lose their ability halfway -- some are not influenced by traditional education, and they continue on; others are destroyed, and their ability is suppressed.

So in these instances, what are we dealing with? We are dealing with direct cognition. We are dealing with the psyche's natural perception.

Direct cognition is one of the nine inner senses; it is cognition based on concepts. You know directly, without needing to learn. What are we dealing with? Direct cognition. This natural direct cognition of ours is what we were like before the reasoning mind arose and what we will be like after the reasoning mind disappears. In other words, before humans had the reasoning mind, and after the reasoning mind also disappears in the future, the way we humans acquire knowledge will be this way -- direct cognition. During our current period of time -- from the beginning of human civilization up to now, and including a period of time in the future -- we will use the reasoning mind, but we will not use the reasoning mind forever.

Some of these abilities show up in people who are classified as mentally deficient. We call them mentally retarded, but in fact they are the geniuses, and we are the mentally retarded ones. How arrogant we humans are, classifying them as mentally retarded and regarding ourselves as normal. It is only because all the powers of their reasoning mind have not been activated, so their innate ability of direct cognition comes into play.

So, is it good or bad to develop a child's intelligence too early? To have them do arithmetic and recite Tang poems from an early age -- is that good or bad? The answer is self-evident. This is why many people develop the intelligence of infants and young children too early, and many scientists have also raised objections.

In such cases, the reasoning mind has not yet fully developed on all its levels, so in one particular area, direct cognition and its brilliant abilities show themselves.

When a child has not yet received the education of the reasoning mind, in certain areas -- music, mathematics, painting -- his ability of direct cognition is preserved. Once this ability of direct cognition is preserved, its brilliant abilities manifest.

Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms, you could call it remote sensing.

Remote sensing here is similar in meaning to what we now call remote sensing in science: sensing from a distance. For example, satellites observing the Earth, using infrared or other cameras or remote sensing equipment and sensors to sense the Earth from thousands of kilometers away -- this kind of thing is called remote sensing. And what Seth is talking about is obtaining perception without direct contact. Normally our perception requires contact with something, but this is obtained directly. You do not need the process of counting on your fingers and then reasoning and then learning; you ask him what some number times some number equals, and he knows the answer directly.

Your physical body and your physical existence are both based upon a certain kind of direct cognition.

The communication between your cells, the acquisition of cellular knowledge, the tissues and organs, the functioning of your body -- all of these are based on direct cognition, not obtained through reasoning. Did you ever learn how your body functions? No. How could you possibly have learned in infancy how the body functions? But how does your body know how to function? Direct cognition. How do atoms and molecules combine? Direct cognition. They do not need to learn; only humans need the reasoning mind to learn.

And it is itself the origin of the functioning of the reasoning mind itself.

The human reasoning mind comes from direct cognition; the reasoning mind itself is also a result of direct cognition. So if you want to use the result of direct cognition -- the ability of the reasoning mind -- to study direct cognition, then you are deluding yourself, because the reasoning mind itself is born from direct cognition.

Animal Instinct and Human Thinking

Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without willpower. For example, a spider weaving a web, a beaver building a dam, a bird making a nest -- none of these count as achievements, because according to this reasoning, these creatures have no choice but to do these things.

According to the scientists' reasoning, a spider must weave a web or it will starve to death; a beaver must build a dam, or it cannot survive.

And by that same line of reasoning, I will not submit to it. You should also go on to say that man deserves no credit for his intellect either, because man must think, and man has no choice but to do so.

If man does not use his intellect to think, man dies -- he cannot even get food into his mouth. If we follow human logic, then human intellect is nothing to boast about either -- just as web-weaving is the spider's innate ability, thinking is man's natural ability. You are born knowing how to think; you cannot stop thinking even if you want to. Not thinking is actually an extremely difficult problem. So what is there to boast about? Can you weave a web?

Seth uses this method of "turning their own argument back on them," following the scientists' logic all the way through, and arrives at a very absurd conclusion. Where is the absurdity? According to the scientists, man thinks in order to survive, and there is no free will -- this is just like the spider weaving a web. Can you accept such a conclusion? Obviously you yourself cannot accept it. The scientists have deduced an obvious fallacy that even a person of very low intelligence could see through, yet they hold it up as truth.

But there are also pessimistic or foolish scientists who firmly believe this theory is correct, and then force an explanation:

Of course, because man and animals are both driven by their instincts, and man's claim to free will is merely an illusion.

He completely denies man's free will -- all of man's mental activity is merely for the sake of staying alive, or living better. Can you accept that? Are all of our human mental activities merely for the sake of staying alive? Clearly even you cannot agree. We will not expand on this further; you can already understand how childish this is. So Seth uses this method to mock the childishness of the scientists.

Yet man's reasoning mind, with its logic and deduction, and its fascinating ability to observe, is founded upon a direct perception -- a direct perception that drives his thought and makes thinking itself possible.

The reason humans have these abilities is that they are founded upon direct perception. Direct perception is the most fundamental human ability, and upon it rests man's conscious reasoning and logic. Even our ability to think itself is founded upon direct perception.

For through thinking, he can know how to think.

It sounds like a tongue twister. Humans now study how the human brain thinks -- is not the act of studying how the brain thinks itself also a kind of thinking? Is this not like a cat chasing its own tail? Is it not like riding a donkey while looking for a horse? How can you figure out how you think through thinking? It is inherently a paradox.

Even though the true process of thinking remains a mystery to the reasoning mind.

If you want to use thinking to figure out how thinking thinks, that is certainly impossible. So scientists have recently been constantly trying to create artificial intelligence, which is actually simulating the process of human thinking. But remember, artificial intelligence is called artificial intelligence -- "artificial" means man-made -- and here it is not the same as the human way of thinking. Although it borrows many methods from human thinking, it was different from the very beginning in its design. If you understand what machine learning is, you will find that although many of its methods use some of the wisdom of human thinking, compared with human thinking they are completely different methods, even though the results are relatively close.

To give a typical example, the most typical task in machine learning is object recognition -- how do you tell that this is a cat and that is a dog? We humans hardly need to learn; we know at a glance. Although when you were little you might not have known what a cat was or what a dog was, you still knew they were different. But if you want machine learning to recognize what is a cat and what is a dog, you have to give it a huge number of photos to learn from, and then give it algorithms. If you are interested, you can go study how machine learning can determine whether a photo shows a cat or a dog.

Dream Interpretation and Direct Cognition

In dreams, the reasoning mind relaxes its control over perception.

In dreams you relax the control of the reasoning mind, not that there is no reasoning mind—there is still a certain amount of reasoning mind in dreams, just not as clear or as effective as when you are awake. You will still have some of your own reasoning and judgments.

From your standpoint, you are almost faced with too much information. And when the reasoning mind reassembles its abilities as it is about to wake, it tries to grab what it can, and its net of reasoning simply cannot hold that much information.

What does this look like from the human perspective? It is that when we dream we obtain a great deal of information, and when you wake up you can only grab hold of some of it, and some of it slips away—the dream encounters far too many things, yet upon waking you can only remember a part of it. The net of consciousness, or the net of reasoning, can only scoop up some very key plots and links. This is our understanding of dreams.

But Seth says, on the contrary, it is not like this.

The information is indeed processed at other levels of the psyche.

It is not that those dreams not captured by your conscious mind are useless; they are being processed by other levels of your psyche.

Dreams also involve a kind of psychological perspective that has no concrete counterpart.

This kind of question is the most difficult to discuss. How to explain it? It means that the knowledge you obtain in dreams is all direct cognition, but the information obtained through this direct cognition has no limitations or framework of time and space. Yet when your reasoning mind wakes up, it wants to summarize and organize this dream knowledge—I had a dream, what did I dream about—and at this point the reasoning mind begins to function. You take those events or cognitions that have no markers of time and space, and you use your reasoning mind, which has concepts of time and space, to sort them out, or to weave them, weave them into a story, and then you give it an explanation saying "I dreamed of such and such, dreamed of so-and-so from the past, in some place from the past." And all of this is you using the reasoning mind to interpret what was obtained through direct cognition, and this interpretation itself is determined by your psychological perspective.

Let me give a vivid example. Suppose your real dream tonight had 100 events, like 100 thirty-second short video clips. These 100 events have absolutely no logical relationship of time and space: they might happen in this present life of yours, or in your past lives, or in certain future events, or in the life of a probable self, or in the experiences of you in another parallel time-space. This is your real dream, completely disorderly.

After you wake up, how do you interpret this dream? You have a psychological perspective, a kind of psychological mode of thinking or fixed pattern of thinking, which is related to your psychological state at this present moment. The same dream placed under different moods of yours will be interpreted differently: placed on you when you have just gone through a breakup, you will have one interpretation of it; placed on you when you have just fallen in love, you will interpret the same dream in a completely different way.

Then you use your reasoning mind to pick out 20 of these 100 short clips and arrange and combine them. How do you pick them? You pick them according to your reasoning mind, according to your psychological perspective. The other 80 you all ignore. And these other 80 are also being processed at other levels of your psyche, only they have been ignored by your reasoning mind—ignored by your consciousness. But that does not mean they were not processed or not experienced. At levels your consciousness does not know about, they are also being processed, just as your conscious mind processes those 20 scenes.

So our dream interpretation is all this kind of logic. Why did we suggest in the early period that everyone record dreams? In Seth Speaks, including the early The Nature of Personal Reality, we emphasized that everyone must record dreams. What is the reason for recording dreams? It is to make you emphasize that although the events in dreams have no logic, it tells you that dreams are also truly existent; they are just events happening in other time-spaces and dimensions, and they are just as real and valid as the events happening in your time-space and dimension.

But in that period when we had you record dreams, the emphasis was on the importance of dreams—but we ordinarily ignore the validity of dreams, thinking that only what happens in the real world matters, and what happens in dreams does not matter. At the same time you will remember, I told you from the very beginning not to interpret these dreams. Why not interpret them? You only need to record them. Because at this point you know the answer: all your interpretations are based on your present psychological perspective or a kind of psychological state, not the true and original appearance of that dream. If you over-interpret at this time, you will narrow down the information the dream is trying to convey into the version you have interpreted—the dream may have conveyed a very large amount of information, but you have narrowed it down to the part you can understand.

By the time you have learned this book, learned this material, you actually already completely understand dreams. At this point, recording dreams again and understanding and analyzing things has no great practical significance; it is just a way of playing a game. How you want to interpret your dreams is entirely up to you. If you are willing to play this game, then go play it; if you are willing to obtain some insights or knowledge from it, you can also try that. Among these large amounts of dream records, can you find some of your own unique reasoning mind and unique perspective? In searching through your dream material, can you find their counterparts—those symbols in dreams that can be equated with your real life? It would be better for you to treat it as a game or play, because that is already something beyond your consciousness and reasoning mind.

The Limits of the Reasoning Mind and the Deeper Role of Dreams

As far as physical existence is concerned, and as far as the utilization of free will that is highly dependent upon the perception of clearly visible action is concerned, the reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and reasonable.

As far as your physical existence, your ordinary behavioral and action perception, and your utilization of free will are concerned, the reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and reasonable. Without the reasoning mind, your existence in the physical world would be like that of an idiot — which is also why many geniuses give people the impression of being idiots in their behavior, because they lack the reasoning mind. But precisely because they lack the reasoning mind, their direct perceptual ability is preserved, and that is where part of their genius comes from.

Within the larger framework of existence, however, the reasoning mind is but one of countless methods of organizing information.

From the perspective of the larger existence, the reasoning mind is merely one of the countless ways we process information — one of the ways of processing information within the framework of space and time. The information itself has no limitations of the space-time framework; you merely use the characteristic of the space-time framework to process information, and the result that comes out is your reasoning mind.

If you prefer, you may also call the reasoning mind a psychological filing system.

How do you file things? How do you categorize events? Within the framework of time and space, how do you categorize your psychological experiences and mental activities? You can understand it as such a tool or system.

The dreaming self of yours possesses psychological dimensions that escape your attention. Those psychological dimensions have the function of connecting the genetic and reincarnational systems.

Above the psychological dimension that you are always aware of, within that dimension of psychological activity, it can connect with genes — including altering your genes, activating certain combinations of genes, making deep changes to genes — and it is also connected with your reincarnational system. Here again is pointed out one of the main functions of dreams: the main function of dreams is to make connections at the genetic level and with reincarnational experience. It is just that this function escapes our conscious awareness; our consciousness cannot judge it, and cannot even perceive its existence.

So many healings in dreams are deep, and are not within the range of our conscious control. Can they be brought about through some guiding words or some suggestions? No, it is a deeper level of consciousness at work.

Again, you must understand that the self you know is but a portion of your larger identity.

This you, including your body and your identity, is a part of the existence of a larger you. And this present you has also been materialized in historical eras outside of yourself — this identity is not the first time it has existed in this physical world; in your other reincarnations, such an identity of yours has already been embodied and materialized. Although for this life of yours, you feel that you are here for the first time.

You must understand why your physical body has grown into what it is, why your genes are the way they are, and the influence of your reincarnational self upon this life — all of these are understood with great clarity at the level of that larger self. And you, as one identity in the midst of reincarnation, cannot understand these things at the level of your consciousness, but that larger you understands them completely.

So you must understand that mental activity is the most powerful.

It can alter your genes, and it can obtain from reincarnation the abilities you desire — all of this is through your mental activity — and of course this mental activity includes both conscious mental activity and mental activity that you are not aware of.

Multiple reincarnational selves share the same dream

Generally speaking, you experience your own dreams from your own perspective.

So what a dream actually is depends entirely on your own perspective. Seth says, I am merely trying to give you a picture of the dream state, or a picture of the dream activity that you are usually not aware of. Dreams contain a great deal of information.

If you are having a dream in which you are still yourself from your own perspective, then another reincarnational self may also have the same dream from his perspective, in which, of course, you play a secondary role.

This idea is very interesting. You are having a dream, and in the dream you are still yourself from your own perspective, and you still know that the self in the dream is you. We have all had this feeling. Now suppose there is another reincarnational self, and he, from his perspective, is also having the same dream. At the level of the dream, all of you participate in it. All of your reincarnational selves participate in the dream.

You can imagine this scene: you are having a dream, and the you in the dream believes that you are the protagonist of the dream. You are experiencing things, talking with people, running into colleagues, friends, and relatives who died in the past. But the protagonist of the dream is you. And the dream itself is an existence of many dimensions. Another reincarnational you is also happening simultaneously. Remember, the reincarnational you in the dream is different from the one in our everyday reality. For example, this reincarnational you lives in the Tang Dynasty. But suppose we say, using human time, that he lives in the Tang Dynasty. Yet in the dream he appears at the same time as you. The present you and the Tang Dynasty you appear in the dream at the same time.

And the amazing thing is that in the dream you will run into someone you never even noticed. In your dream he is not important at all. He is just some passerby, some minor character. Then you experience your dream from your own perspective, and that passerby may be the Tang Dynasty reincarnational you. In his dream he is not a passerby. He is the protagonist of his dream. And at that moment, in his dream, you are the passerby.

In your dream, that reincarnational self may appear as a secondary character, and quite at the edge of your attention. You may not even notice him. And if the dream includes a drama or the concept of an invention, then that drama or that invention may appear as a concrete event in two historical eras. The extent of that depends on the ability of the two individuals living in those two times to interpret the information.

Suppose that in this same dream, two different reincarnational selves are both present. Suppose that in this dream some grand event occurs, some dramatic and important historical event, or the dream tells you of an invention, a new technology. Then both of you, in your two different historical periods, may bring that invention into being in the era in which you live. Whether you can actually create it depends entirely on how the two different yous living in those two different eras interpret and understand the invention or knowledge in that same dream.

Perhaps the person having this dream is Tesla, and in the dream he was told the design principles of the alternating current generator⁵, and he captured it. His ability to capture dream knowledge was very strong, and his ability to translate that direct cognition into the physical world was very strong, so he invented it. Today, almost all the electricity we humans use comes from Tesla's invention. But perhaps another person in the Tang Dynasty also dreamed of this thing, yet he had no idea what it was. In his historical era and cultural background, he did not understand why this thing would look the way it did.

At this point you can understand why there are so many legendary and wondrous things in ancient Chinese lore. For example, there was a skilled carpenter who made a bird out of wooden parts that could fly, and made a donkey that could pull things, with gears and mechanical structures inside. Zhuge Liang also made wooden oxen and wooden horses and so on⁶. There are many, many such ancient wondrous things that modern people find baffling, not knowing how they were made. Now you know how they were made. The same dream, but different people interpret and read it differently.

The Dream Dissemination of Culture

For generations, culture has not been transmitted only by material means.

For generation after generation, culture has not been transmitted only through material means such as words written on paper, murals carved on walls, or knowledge written in books -- culture can also be transmitted in dreams. This is something we humans did not know before. We can gain many insights and knowledge in dreams, spanning across time and space.

Abilities and inventions do not depend upon the migrations of peoples.

But from the traditional viewpoint, human development began from the two river valleys -- whether from the ancient Egyptian era or the ancient Chinese era, it all began with migration from the banks of rivers, and then civilization gradually developed and progressed. Seth says that human abilities and inventions do not depend upon this kind of development of human civilization.

But those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams.

Even your migrations -- where you move from and where you move to, where you establish cities, where there are water sources -- even these things were given to you in dreams. Not to mention how much of your cultural knowledge and the development of civilization came from your dreams. From ancient times, in the tribal period, where to move from and where to move to, where was more suitable for your survival -- even this information was given to you in dreams, let alone all the human civilizations you later established.

Those dreams told the tribes of men where they might find better homelands.

If he could tell you where to find a better homeland, could he not also tell you what kind of social structure or social model is better? Could he not also tell you which scientific inventions could improve human life?

Here we come to the earlier mention of "the process of the embedding and re-embedding of cultural elements or civilizational elements" -- in dreams, the embedding and re-embedding of civilizational elements or cultural elements. Here you can understand the deeper meaning of that statement: the same thing, under different cultural backgrounds, has different interpretations and understandings. Just like the example I gave earlier about the electric generator -- if it had occurred in ancient times, it would indeed have been embedded, but it would have been useless; yet in modern times, it became useful. And now if you dream again about how a generator works, it is of no use to you at all, because scientists have long since made things far more advanced than what you saw in your dream. So the embedding and re-embedding here is an iterative process.

After Seth finished, he said aloud that he was very pleased. This passage seems short, but in fact with such a brief section, he explained very clearly the birth of human civilization, the role of the reasoning mind, and direct perception as an inner sense, as well as the relationship between them. He said, the dictation is finished.

The Definition of Direct Cognition

Rob said, wait for me a moment. Then he said:

Direct cognition is knowing what you know.

This sentence sounds like saying nothing at all, but you can understand it on a deeper level. What is direct cognition? It is knowing what you know. In other words, you already know these things, you just do not know that you know them, and the ability to know what you know -- this ability is called direct cognition.

For example, you have already recorded all knowledge in your cellular memory, but you do not have a way to open it, and you have no way to use the reasoning mind. Yet your cells can open all this knowledge, and the cells are using direct cognition to open this knowledge. And one day, when you also possess this ability -- when your reasoning mind does not work in certain areas, and you directly use the ability of direct cognition -- then you are knowing what you once knew. It is that simple.

So this learning is a process of recollection, a remembering -- coming together again, an ongoing process. This is consistent with Plato's view. Plato established his own academy as early as 500 BC⁷, which was the predecessor of our modern universities, and this academy lasted for 900 years⁸. I will not go into all of Plato's many ideas, but I will mention just one of them: he believed that all human knowledge is a process of recollection, of being present -- we already know this knowledge, we are simply remembering it. From this single insight alone, you can tell that Plato was by no means an ordinary person. The place where he was located was called Academia, and that name remains to this day the English word for our colleges and universities, academia⁹. So Plato's understanding is the same as Seth's statement -- this knowledge has existed all along, and it is merely a process of recollection. Alright, we will return to this topic later, so I will not elaborate on it here.

Painting Advice for Rob

Then Seth turned to Rob and said -- because Rob had asked about the painting:

Your knowledge knows how to flow out through the techniques you have learned, to use those techniques, and to become part of them. Thus a painting emerges with a spontaneous intelligence. That is what you are learning, that is what the painting shows, that is where you are.

The skills you have learned flow through you in the process of painting, as you merge your knowledge into your technique, and this is expressed through the painting. The painting is a manifestation of your spontaneous intelligence, and it embodies your present state of consciousness. That is to say, your current artistic attainment or level in painting is embodied in the painting you create; the painting represents your present state.

To a certain degree, almost to a certain degree, every image -- every subject, if you allow it, will make subtle changes in technique on its own.

Those images, those subjects, if you allow them, will make subtle changes on their own.

Your impulses have layers of depth just as your colors do. They should be seamlessly one with your brushstrokes.

Your impulses -- the impulse behind each stroke of painting -- like your colors, have layers. You should condense your impulse for painting into your brushstrokes, letting your heart or your inner impulse merge with your brushstrokes, and it will automatically tell you where it should be deeper and where it should be lighter.

So within every dab of paint, the concept of your subject is almost magically contained.

Every point you paint, every stroke, contains the concept of your subject -- the concept of the subject is embodied point by point, stroke by stroke. And within each stroke is contained your overall thought, or your overall state of consciousness, all of it expressed through each and every point of your strokes.

And now, this is what you are learning as a painter. Or rather, you are learning to use your direct perception.

This passage echoes what Rob said at the beginning: in his painting he could sense what improvements he should make in his next painting, but he could not make those improvements in the current one, only in the next one -- that feeling of impatience. Seth gave him an insight, and this insight is far beyond the understanding of the average painter.

In other words, when you are doing artistic creation, much of the time you are also using direct perception, except that sometimes you add logical reasoning to make judgments. Seth's point is: do not use too much logic and reasoning in artistic creation; directly use your inner perception, use your direct perceptual system to paint, just as those mathematical geniuses directly use inner perception to arrive at answers. So a gifted painter also paints using direct inner perception. And Rob is clearly not that kind of gifted painter, so Seth is helping him open up these inner senses, to help him become a talented painter.

After saying this, Seth said to Jane that her attitude should be more playful -- let Jane be more relaxed, more game-like, not so tense, especially about her illness. He said:

I say, you must work hard at playing.

This last sentence is what we often say: play well at the things that are fun to play -- this is one of the main meanings of your life; nothing is more important than playing well at the things that are fun to play. Here Seth once again emphasizes the playful attitude, especially for Jane. For those who are wound very tight, this is excellent advice; but for those who are already in a state of play, you do not need to reinforce this point further; you need to find balance in other areas. And here he is addressing people like Jane, whose lives are overly serious and tense, with no leisure or entertainment, giving them this insight: go play well at the things that are fun to play, go play with effort, play diligently.

Rob's Notes

The following are all Rob's notes. His first note is about how the Seth material is transmitted:

Rob says, in slight retrospect this becomes quite clear -- but I want to explain that Jane's expression of the Seth material is clearly the result of her direct cognition, and this is very important. Because Jane must make a linear statement in words, and that takes time, so he certainly had to speak sentence by sentence within the framework of time. He could not be as clear and direct as those mathematical geniuses who calculate numbers, or music writers who write out notes. What Jane transmitted was Seth's verbal material, but the ability he used was the same as that of those mathematical geniuses, painters, or musicians -- except that painters, musicians, and geniuses use numbers, mathematics, painting, and music, which are forms of expression that transcend culture and language. Because numbers are the same all over the world, and painting and music do not need translation.

Then Rob says, from the time the Seth material began at the end of 1963, he began to notice the speed at which the Seth material was being transmitted, and began to record the time involved in each session. You see, Rob would always record what time it started, what time it ended, and what time there were pauses in between. He did this deliberately, and at the time he did not know why. Rob says:

I now believe that my spontaneous beginning to do that -- that is, adding the times to all the sessions -- reflected my own intuitive understanding of his direct cognition, and long before either of us knew how to describe it.

Before either of them knew there was such a thing as "direct cognition," Rob had an intuition that the Seth material Jane was receiving was obtained through her direct cognition ability, even though at the time he could not name it. And during those years when Jane spoke for Seth in the ESP class, her delivery was even faster, sometimes astonishingly fast, like a machine gun.

Rob then goes on to talk about the difference between words and numbers:

When I read that mathematical geniuses love their numbers, and rely on the reliability of numbers in a very uncertain world, there is also a deep love for words. But words can be a very elusive tool, and they also change from one language to another -- words themselves have many divergences in understanding and ambiguity, and when translated from one language into another, their inner meaning also changes.

So he says, although through the Seth material Jane originally conveyed profound meaning, that meaning continues to develop as it is translated into other languages. Seth spoke through Jane, and this content itself has deep meaning, and although this profound meaning undergoes some changes when it is transformed into other languages -- or is not entirely his original intent -- such changes are also a variation in the development of its profound meaning, and a meaningful extension of its meaning.

This psychological growth, and the many challenges involved, set Jane's work apart from the numbers of a mental computer or the notes of a musician -- because words themselves are not cross-linguistic the way numbers and music are; they depend heavily on strong understanding and interpretation. Because the latter two do not need translation; we all say music is the universal language of the world, and so is mathematics. For example, certain amiable number sequences have the same sum in any language. That is a characteristic of mathematics.

In Jane's own direct perception, she is dealing with perceptions and concepts that are quite far from these two usual possibilities and receptivities. Jane's work is more complex than that of mathematical geniuses and musicians, because what she comes into contact with is a feeling, a concept -- it is not a direct numerical expression or a musical-note expression. What Seth transmitted, and what Jane transmitted, were Seth's concepts, Seth's feelings, Seth's interpretation of the event -- and this is far more complex and far more difficult than numbers and music.

So now you can understand why Seth was able to have such a transmission with Jane. You can understand Jane as a mathematical genius, except that she was a verbal genius, a language genius, not a mathematical genius. And she shared one thing in common with those mathematical geniuses: she had activated the ability of direct cognition. That is why Seth was able, through her, to transmit some of his direct concepts to Jane, and have them expressed through Jane's language ability.

Then Rob goes on to say:

Whoever or whatever Seth is, with Jane's permission he added his material to the information possessed by Jane's reasoning mind, thereby making that information available to the reasoning minds of others.

Whatever or whoever Seth is, he placed his own information within the scope of Jane's reasoning mind, and then Jane spoke it out, and then through Rob's recording and publication, it entered the reasoning mind of every person who reads it. You understand how miraculous this process is.

Through Jane, Seth placed his content into Jane's reasoning mind -- what he placed in was a direct cognition, a direct cognition and understanding of concepts. Jane would often receive such a direct cognition, but she had to express it through language, and this was sometimes actually very difficult for Jane. It is like when you have a picture in your mind, and you find it very hard to express it.

For example, if Seth had given a person of the Tang dynasty a direct cognition of an electric generator, that person would not have been able to understand it. It is the same with Jane -- in the early sessions Seth several times gave her direct cognitions of certain core concepts, and Jane received them; whether in images or in cognition she obtained this knowledge, but she could not express it. You cannot blame her for this, because this knowledge itself is not something that our present era could understand, and moreover Jane was a liberal arts student who studied literature, without the basic concepts of the various sciences.

So you understand that the Seth material we have today has also undergone two transformations: Seth's concepts passed through Jane's direct cognition, and then through Jane's language and words, entered the conscious mind or reasoning mind of us readers. We then extract the inner concepts within it -- the concepts themselves that Seth wanted to convey -- from the language. So the reason it is hard to understand lies right here: it has already undergone two changes and two transformations.

Alright, regarding the content of this session, we will interpret it up to here today. Thank you all for listening, and I wish everyone a magical and beautiful day.

注释与核实

1. Source: Time and Date, "April 1980 Calendar" (https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/monthly.html?month=4&year=1980) ↩

2. Source: Barry Levinson's official website, "Rain Man" (https://www.levinson.com/rain-man) ↩

3. Source: CCTV.com, "A Beautiful Mind (film)" (https://tv.cctv.com/2013/08/21/VIDA1377077043422344.shtml) ↩

4. According to Mike's original words, "In the 1980s, our country was still relatively open-minded about these amazing special abilities and paranormal powers, and set up many gifted classes; the University of Science and Technology of China had its Special Class for the Gifted Young"; upon verification, it should be "The University of Science and Technology of China established the Special Class for the Gifted Young in March 1978; in 1985, the Ministry of Education decided to expand the pilot program of special classes for gifted youth at 12 key universities including Peking University and Tsinghua University." (Source: Xinhua Net, "Uncovering the Special Class for the Gifted Young at USTC," 2017, https://www.cas.cn/cm/201706/t20170620_4605696.shtml) ↩

5. This claim could not be verified. ↩

6. Source: Chen Shou, "Records of the Three Kingdoms, Book of Shu, Biography of Zhuge Liang" (https://ctext.org/text.pl?if=gb&node=603517&show=parallel) ↩

7. According to Mike's original words, "Plato established his own academy as early as 500 BC"; upon verification, it should be "Plato's Academy was founded around 387 BC, not 500 BC." (Source: Anton-Hermann Chroust, "Plato's Academy: The First Organized School of Political Science in Antiquity," 1967, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/platos-academy-the-first-organized-school-of-political-science-in-antiquity/6C358F61D89D7A3D0327CE73D230A69E) ↩

8. According to Mike's original words, "This academy lasted for 900 years"; upon verification, it should be "The Academy founded by Plato lasted as a philosophical school for about 300 years, not 900 years." (Source: Paul Kalligas, Chloe Balla, Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, Vassilis Karasmanis, "Plato's Academy," 2020, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/platos-academy/8F0444D1BC89EDC1525223722654188D) ↩

9. Source: Oxford University Press, "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: academia" (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/academia) ↩