Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 8

The "Introduction" 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 uses the metaphors of a wheel and a ball of lightning to explain that the psyche organizes subjective life in a circular, simultaneous manner, rather than through single-line cause and effect; birth, death, past, and future exist simultaneously, and events are versions of possibilities selected within time. Dreams are the laboratory where the psyche processes possibilities and rehearses events, and both events and language originate from a non-sensory source called "Codara." Creativity connects the waking state and the dream state, and is the key threshold for understanding how events are formed.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Subjective life is organized in a circular fashion; causality is only an appearance along the track of time, not fundamental reality.
• Birth and death are equally creative; a person's life is made up of many small deaths and small births.
• Dreams are the laboratory in which the psyche handles probable events and rehearses physical events; events are rehearsed and selected in dreams.
• Both events and language originate from the non-sensory "Codara"; language is a device that filters and translates information.
• Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is the threshold for perceiving the process by which dreams and events are formed.

Main Text

Session 783: The Circular Nature of Dreams

The title of Chapter Eight is "Dreams, Creativity, Language, and 'Cordella.'" The English word "Cordella" cannot really be translated, so it has to be rendered phonetically; it will be explained later.

This session was held on Monday, July 12, 1976, at 9:25 p.m. Seth said this chapter is about dreams, creativity, language, and Cordella, and Cordella can be put in quotation marks.

He began:

Although you may not realize it, you really do arrange your subjective life in a rather circular fashion.

That is to say, your own life is actually arranged in a circular way. He gave an analogy: pretend that this moment is like a wheel, and your attention is at the hub. If you want to maintain the momentum of what you think of as time—assuming time needs momentum to be maintained—then the axle, the outer rim structure, and the spokes must all be connected. Otherwise, even if there is a hub, it cannot take you anywhere. If there are no spokes connecting the hub to the outer rim of the wheel, the wheel simply cannot function; it cannot go anywhere. And this point of the moment, this so-called present moment of yours, could not even manage a bumpy journey.

I will draw a diagram for everyone in a little while to explain. Because later on, the understanding of the psyche becomes more and more abstract, more and more beyond the scope of our normal comprehension.

Yet your journey through time seems to proceed so smoothly.

In our daily lives we do not feel how the wheel is turning; the wheel always rolls forward, as if it were perfectly natural. Of course, the wheel can also roll backward, but in your intent—this "intent" means direction—you have a forward direction in your mind. Although the wheel can roll forward and backward, in your consciousness the wheel can only have one forward direction. Going backward would seem to lead you away from your goal. In your beliefs and all your thought systems and value systems, you have never considered going backward.

This is very interesting. Suppose you get on a bicycle right now. Once you mount it, you only think about pedaling forward; you do not think about riding backward. Of course, a circus bicycle or a unicycle can be ridden both forward and backward, but an ordinary person, without training, the moment they jump on a bicycle, their instinct is only to go forward. This is your most basic intent.

And this forward motion of yours carries you out of the past from which you seem to have emerged.

It is as if you emerged out of the past—because you were produced from the past—and because of your forward movement, the past behind you is revealed. Every step you take adds one more piece of past. And it carries you toward the future; this forward-rolling wheel carries you toward your future—a time you consider unknown.

So it appears as though you have planned a straight-line path through time.

It seems as if you are traveling along a straight line on the time axis, with a single direction always moving forward, yet you have never mistakenly—this "mistakenly" is the character for "not yet"—yet you have never mistakenly what? In our analogy, the circular motion of the wheel may be transverse to the forward path. I will explain in a moment what "transverse to the forward path" means. This "transverse" in the original English is another word; that word mainly means to cut across, to intersect, and it also has a meaning of "through the axis"—the "through" of passing through, the "axis" of the hub. I will combine this with the diagram so everyone can understand, otherwise you really will not know what Seth is talking about.

The circular motion of the wheel is essentially a transverse, through-the-axis motion. This hub of yours right now is held together and connected by the spokes of the wheel. These have nothing whatsoever to do with your concepts of cause and effect. When you can use this wheel analogy to think about things, there is no cause and effect at all in it.

Instead, they are concerned with a circular motion of your own psyche as it travels through time.

What is your cause and effect related to, then? Your cause and effect is only related to the circular motion of traveling through time. And your psyche, from your human perspective, appears to be circular motion, but from the psyche's perspective, it is a through-the-axis motion.

What is meant by through-the-axis motion? It means that every present moment you experience depends on the future just as much as it depends on the past. This present moment you are experiencing now depends on both the past and the future. When this moment depends on the past and the future existing simultaneously, how can you even speak of cause and effect? Cause and effect must involve something that happened in the past influencing the present or the future, but he tells you that your present actually depends on the simultaneous existence of past and future. This is the reasoning behind why cause and effect does not exist.

You depend upon your death as much as you depend upon your birth.

You might say, my present existence certainly depends on birth, because birth is what led to my present existence. But you forget that your death is also like one part of the spokes; without that part, the hub would not exist. You depend on the world of the moment of your birth, and you also depend on the world of your death. Birth and death, from the perspective of your three-dimensional world in this life, seem to be one at the beginning and one at the end, but from the psyche's perspective, they are simply two parts of one circle, equally important.

You could say that your birth and your death are inherently together; one implies the other. Birth implies death, and death implies birth. Unless you are the kind of creature that can be born, you cannot die. You cannot have a present moment such as you imagine if you could neither be born nor die; then you would not have a present. In other words, where there is birth there is death; birth and death together determine the existence of your present moment. Without birth and without death, there would be no present moment for you.

Your body, at the time of its birth, is aware of the fact of its death; at the time of its death, it is also aware that a new birth has begun. Therefore, in your terms, death is just as creative as birth.

As we humans often say, it seems as though only birth is creative, beginning a new life. But he says you do not realize that death is just as important as birth; it is equally creative, and equally necessary for action and consciousness.

Let us continue. Actually, it is not as simple as just birth and death as he described, because at every moment you are undergoing many small deaths and small births. In your life you are constantly experiencing small deaths and small births; you dwell within these small deaths and small births, and records are kept of them both physically and psychically. Every small death and every small birth of yours leaves a record, and consciously you are usually unaware of them.

And logical thinking—that is, when you reason through rationality—in the ordinary sense deals with cause and effect, and requires a linear sequence of time as its framework. It cannot go backward; it builds upward step by step—this "step" is the character for one, two, three, four—that is, it rolls forward; time rolls forward. Then he moves into your language. According to logical thinking and language, you might say: I will go to the banquet today because last week I received an invitation and agreed to attend. That makes sense. But you cannot say: I will go to the banquet today because I will meet a person who will be very important in my life five years from now. You cannot speak that way.

Why? Because in logical thinking and language it does not make sense. Because in the latter case, cause and effect exist simultaneously, or worse, the effect will exist before the cause. There is a place in the original text here that says the effect exists after the cause—that is a translation error. Normally, of course, the cause should come first and the effect after. The correct meaning is: how could you know that this person will be so important to you five years from now? Because you are only going to the banquet today; you cannot know what will happen five years from now. The reason you are going to the banquet today must be because you received someone's invitation, or some other reason; you cannot go to today's appointment because of a future event. This makes no sense logically.

That is to say, you cannot decide something today because of a future event; you cannot put the effect before the cause. This thing has not happened yet; how could you possibly know what will happen five years from now? That is the meaning.

On all levels of consciousness other than the normal one, you also deal very effectively with the existence of probabilities.

Beyond the normal level of consciousness in daily life, there are also various probabilities in our daily lives. Seth says that cells maintain their integrity by choosing one probability and discarding others. When a cell chooses one, it discards another. For example, if a cell wants to develop into a bone cell, it can no longer develop into a cell in the eye; it gives up the probability of becoming a retinal cell and can only become a cell in the bone. So when a cell chooses one probability, it must give up all other probabilities.

Therefore, the present hub of the wheel is only one main present, and there are other alternative presents.

In the chapter on probabilities—Chapter 16 of Seth Speaks, and in The Nature of Personal Reality, I cannot remember which chapter—he said that these probable presents also exist. So this hub of yours is only one present, only one main present, main for you. Operationally, this present is effective.

What you call cause and effect appears only because of such a circular motion, a relative motion.

What you call cause and effect exists only because of a relative motion of this wheel—relative to our space-time—only then does cause and effect arise. If you leave our space-time, and this wheel moves on its own, there is neither cause nor effect.

All right, at this point I need to make a diagram for everyone to introduce this, and then we will look at his later explanation.

I have drawn a diagram for everyone to help understand the preceding passage—the relationship between the existence of the psyche and real life. Because this entire book is about the nature of the psyche, so what kind of state of existence is the psyche, really?

Let us suppose that we now think of this present subjective life, this subjective feeling, as a wheel, and you are at the hub of this present wheel—the point I just wrote as "the present point of power" at the hub. All around the wheel are various events; on the right there is the event of your birth, the event of your death, and also Event A, Event B, Event C, Event XYZ... all kinds of infinite events.

What is this gray line below, this gray line with a certain thickness? This road is our three-dimensional world; it is our space-time continuum. It contains both space and time. This gray line is labeled "future, present, past," and it represents our three-dimensional world.

Then what is this wheel? The wheel is not our three-dimensional world. You can understand the entire wheel as your psychic world, or imagine it as the part that is your soul. Rising up from this road, the wheel itself is the part that is your psyche. The point where the wheel touches the ground—the point I have now labeled "present"—is the point where the wheel presses against the road; this is the point where your soul intersects with the three-dimensional world. And who is this point? It is your ego. The present perception of your physical existence right now, in this wheel analogy, is the surface where the wheel contacts the three-dimensional world—that one point. That point is your present moment; for you, it is your present.

The track of the wheel that has already rolled past on the right is your past. The places the wheel has not yet rolled over, the tracks it may roll over in the future, are your future. In the three-dimensional world, this is a straight time axis, and you move forward along this time axis. In this present moment, you can see the past, but you cannot see the future, because the wheel has not yet rolled over the future. Although the wheel has inertia, you can roughly predict what will happen tomorrow in the short term, but beyond that you cannot predict, because you do not know where this wheel is heading. The track it has not yet pressed out cannot be determined; you can only roughly know the direction, because the wheel can change direction at any time. But the track the wheel has already pressed, from the three-dimensional perspective, consists of things that have already happened—like the imprint the wheel has pressed into the road, that is your past. Understanding it this way makes it easy.

Now Seth tells you, what is our whole person, or the psychic world, really like? You are seated at the center point of this wheel. This center point can be said to be the focus of your consciousness, or the focus of the conscious mind, or the focus of all your present psychic perception. For this focus, there is no concept of time. The world around this wheel, for the hub of this psychic world, has no time scale, no time coding, no time calibration; for it, these events have no before and no after. When a wheel rolls—of course it can also roll backward, but let us not talk about forward and backward rolling for now—what Seth means is this: this present point of power of yours, this present moment point, this point of perception of your existence that you presently recognize, depends on the connection between all the events around the wheel and your hub; it needs the spokes to fasten the events to you. If there were no events, if there were only a hub, you could not go anywhere.

But for this hub, these events do indeed exist simultaneously. Because it is removed from the lower half of the wheel—the three-dimensional space-time on the road—it is outside space-time, with no calibration of time, so it perceives and knows these events simultaneously.

Why is the present called the point of power? Because you can change all of these events. Remember, the events I have written here are all probable events. I have only drawn a few; there may be as many events as hairs on an ox. In your life there are countless events, and every one of them is a probable event. Moreover, every event, freed from the constraints of time, in that instant is eternal. If you still remember the concept of "time clusters" that I talked about when discussing The Magical Approach, if you understand time clusters, then you will know that for every event, the present moment turns the instant into eternity—because at the level of this wheel, time does not exist. So every one of these events is alive and developing; it has not ended; it is all in the present progressive tense. Just as Seth said in an earlier session: from the psyche's perspective there is no past tense and no future tense; there is only a present tense. These events are all happening simultaneously; they have not ended. So from the psyche's perspective, you can change what you call your past.

These events on the wheel—you can change every one of them; you can also change their future; there is nothing that cannot be touched. How are you connected to these events? How do you change them? Your connection with them is through emotions and feelings. Just like the spokes of a bicycle—thin steel spokes, yet they bear unimaginable strength. This present point of power of your psyche can maintain direct contact with all these events simultaneously, and can influence and change every event. When this present point of power changes, it affects the change of all events. When Event A produces a change in this point of power, this point of power simultaneously affects all other probable events; it is a linked chain reaction. And because everything happens simultaneously, you cannot say who came first and who came later.

If you can understand that the psyche is like this wheel analogy, then you will know: this life of yours is composed of countless events, and these events are all probable events. If they have not made contact with the road of the three-dimensional world, then they are all probable events, with no relationship of cause and effect. Only when they have been pressed onto the road of the three-dimensional world and formed a track can we say that this event was pressed first and that event was pressed later; only then does the concept of cause and effect arise.

If we take away this road, and send this wheel spinning in the air, then can you tell me which is front and which is back? When it makes circular motion, you cannot tell. So as I said earlier, cause and effect can only be discussed on the ground—this road represents our three-dimensional world—only at this level can we talk about cause and effect. Once you leave the three-dimensional world, there is no cause and effect. And essentially speaking, there is no cause and effect at all. It is only because of the three-dimensional world, because of the imprint pressed out by this bicycle, that cause and effect exists. So cause and effect is only an appearance, a camouflage, an illusion. What is real is that there is no cause and effect.

Then you might say, what if I ride the bicycle backward? That is the second point. Second, from the psyche's perspective, these things happen simultaneously, so how could there be any talk of cause and effect? Cause and effect is something you see on this line of time; your little person standing at the point where the bicycle tire meets the ground—from that point, looking out, there does indeed appear to be cause and effect; that is a fact and cannot be denied. But from the perspective of this little person—the little person standing at the point where the tire meets the ground—there is cause and effect. But that is not the real you; that is only a feeling and sensation of you in the three-dimensional world; it is the feeling of your ego. Who is the real you? You are this great wheel. The real you should be seated at the center of the hub, which is this present point of power.

Let us extend Seth's wheel analogy a little further: our ordinary daily life is like living on the rut pressed into the road by this bicycle. When you meditate, when you sit cross-legged and enter a meditative state, returning to the essence of the psyche, what are you doing? You are rising from the point where the bicycle tire meets the ground, up to the hub of the wheel. You no longer focus only on the point where the wheel meets the ground—daily life is that point; all your attention is on the point where the wheel and the ground meet. But when you meditate, when you have an out-of-body experience, when you dream, you leave the point where the wheel meets the ground and return to the center of the wheel, to the hub. Entering a meditative state or a dream state are similar states, though not exactly the same; this is not the time to distinguish between them.

In other words, when you enter a nonphysical world, enter other dimensions, higher dimensions, then there is no longer any limitation of time and space, and you return to the hub of the bicycle. How do you move at this time? As Seth said earlier, what you do is transverse motion, through-the-axis motion. What is through-the-axis motion? It is a motion that radiates outward from the hub in all directions. You maintain contact with the surrounding events simultaneously. You are not in circular motion. Only when viewed from the three-dimensional world are you a bicycle wheel on the road, continuously using circular motion to trace out a straight line. But at the level of the psyche, you are not in circular motion; you are in transverse motion from the hub to the surroundings, to each event—or call it through-the-axis motion—motion from the center to the circumference. So that earlier sentence means exactly this: when we are truly in our psyche, we do not move according to circular motion.

So what problem do you notice when you dream? Those events have no regularity at all; they are not organized according to the time sequence of your three-dimensional world; they are organized and changed at will, at any time. These events have happened in the dream, and although they have not happened in the three-dimensional world, have not pressed out a rut on the road, from the perspective of your hub, have they all happened? These probable events—did they also happen in the dream? Yes, they happened. Do they have an effect on you at the hub? Of course they do, because you experienced them and felt them. Why must only the experience at the place where the wheel pressed over in the three-dimensional world count as experience, while the interactions with other worlds at the hub, the experiences you have in dreams or meditation, are not important? From the wheel's perspective, they are equally important. The wheel pressing on the road is only one event among many for the hub, but most of the wheel's events are not pressed onto the road, have no contact with the ground. Your psychic core feels the entirety of the whole wheel, rather than focusing only on that narrow angle of the single point intersecting with the ground. Only our human ego focuses only on that one point.

Through this diagram, I have already explained the preceding passage fairly clearly. Remember, this is an analogy, just a vivid analogy; the actual fact is even more complex than this. But first understand this; it is very crucial. Your connection with these events is emotions and feelings, nothing else. Why are emotions so important? Right here. If there were no emotions and feelings, you would have no connection with these events. If an event leaves you with no feeling, it is as if it never existed in your life. For example, what you ate for breakfast on some morning four years ago—that breakfast left you with no feeling, no emotion and no sensation; for you it is as if it never happened. So the important things in your life are all held together by emotions and feelings; be sure to remember this.

Let us continue with what he says next:

Therefore, when your eyes are fixed upon the road of time, you forget the circular motion of your existence.

When your eyes only see where the bicycle wheel is pressing, you forget that you are a wheel, and focus only on the imprint the wheel has pressed. Actually, for this wheel, the rut is not important; the wheel itself is what matters most.

When you are dreaming, or sleeping, the world of cause and effect either disappears or appears chaotic.

I already explained this just now. If you return to the wheel's perspective, the world of cause and effect is meaningless; these events all happen simultaneously, and you can feel these events happening simultaneously. Moreover, when dreaming, through the hub of the wheel you interact and engage with all the events. What you dream tonight is entirely determined by the psyche, entirely free from the limitations of space and time. Normal daytime images will mix and be reconfigured—the events of the day, the events of the rut, are also among them, and will also mix in, mixing together with those other probable events that did not happen. So the combination is very different from what is seen in daylight. In daylight you can only see the events on the road; you do not pay much attention to the events of the wheel.

The laws that govern the behavior of creatures and objects seem not to apply very well in dreams.

Past, present, and future appear in seemingly bizarre alliances. If you were awake, you would lose all mental footing in them. If, while dreaming, your consciousness is clear, you will find that you have lost all logic. You can feel this in many movies as well; films depict this sense of having no logic at all in dreams.

And this circular nature of the psyche, to a certain degree, reveals itself.

This is the wheel matter we just discussed. Remember, you are at the hub, surrounded by these events; the intersection of these events with the three-dimensional world forms our life in the human world, but there are still many parts that do not intersect.

When you think of dreams, you usually think only of their surface aspects.

You only see the surface; you may comment on the strange activities, saying, "Oh, I had such a strange dream, such bizarre locations, I do not know where I went," marveling at the rules of dream life itself—there are so many strange rules in dreams, different from when we are awake.

Within such a limited physical framework, the events that are allowed to occur, sometimes so spectacular, leave an impression of ultimate depth.

What he means is that in our physical world, many things have very rigid limitations; for example, pigs cannot fly in the sky—these are rigid limitations. But in dreams, these limitations are removed, so in dreams there are strange, or sometimes very spectacular, events.

He gives an example: in a twenty-minute dream, you can experience things that would normally take years. The most famous example is the dream of the yellow millet. Your body ages twenty minutes in time—only twenty minutes pass in the time of the three-dimensional world. But what do you experience in the dream? In their time, it is like a drop of water leaving a ripple. But in the dream, several years have already passed.

But the events in the dream themselves, for the most part, exist outside of time.

Dream experiences are summoned in a circular fashion—summoned in the manner of simultaneous radiant perception from the hub outward in all directions. Sometimes, as far as your memory is concerned, they do not even touch the hub that you consider to be your present moment. Yet the dream exists, and it leaves memories on all other levels of your existence, including the cellular level.

Let me go back and explain what he means by this. When you are dreaming, the central axis organizes these events in a circular fashion -- it organizes all the events it needs. There is no causality in any of this, no logical relations at all; it combines things entirely at will from the psychic angle, according to its needs, according to what it wants to experience or undergo. While experiencing and undergoing, it may even bypass that central axis point of yours. What does bypassing this point mean? It means that sometimes your central axis point does not even know. In a "yellow millet dream" type of dream, you do know -- from the angle of the axis point you rearrange the surrounding events into another life and experience it. But some dreams are too deep, so deep that your axis point has no awareness at all. The dreams you know are all transferred over. So in those very deep dreams, you do not even know what happened, but your cells will know instead, and that underlying you will still know. Because this point of power -- the point of conscious attention -- consciousness can go to different levels, so it has already escaped the point of your conscious attention in the dream. So sometimes your axis does not know what happened either.

You always translate experience into terms that you can understand.

You always turn dream experience and ordinary experience into something we can understand. This translation is real. The dream you remember is already a translation, but it is one you have experienced -- the dream that you cannot understand without translating it is already something you have experienced.

As you know it, a language is dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences.

So the dream you experience and remember is already a psychological, psychic statement that has entered into prominence. But it is also dependent upon other conditions that you do not remember. Your consciousness, functioning as it does now, will automatically translate it into its own terms.

There are many dreams you cannot remember, or that have no consciousness at all. Many of the dreams you do remember have also been translated. Just like language, the sounds that can be spoken depend upon the language that is not spoken, or upon the pauses between words and the parts without sound. The dream you can remember is also dependent upon those parts of the psyche that you do not remember. Although they are not remembered, they are equally important.

What is Seth trying to tell you? You cannot say that because the things in dreams are translated, and you do not even know what the real dream is, they are therefore unimportant. Seth says no, they are as important as the pauses and intervals in language. Without those, your language would have no meaning. In other words, without those dreams you cannot remember, the dreams you do remember could not happen, and would have no meaning.

At this point let us pause for a moment and expand further on the wheel question from earlier. The wheel is an example Seth gives here when discussing dreams, or when he wants to discuss the relationship between language and dreams later on. Through the wheel diagram just now, we already have a rough idea of what the psyche looks like: the wheel is the psyche, and the road is the three-dimensional world.

But this is only an extremely simplified version. Let us now go a step further and see what a more advanced version of the psyche should look like. Without discussing its final version yet, let us first look at this evolved version. Let us look at the next diagram.

This diagram shows a device called a plasma globe -- I do not know whether you have done this kind of experiment in physics class -- in the middle there is a charged sphere, one that is constantly charged.

The Ball Analogy: From Wheel to Lightning Ball

The wheel analogy earlier was only a simplified version. Now let us go a step further and look at the next diagram -- it is more like a lightning ball.

You may have seen this kind of thing in physics lab classes; it is called a plasma ball, also known as a lightning ball or Tesla ball¹. In the middle there is a sphere that is constantly charged, with some special gases inside, and through ionization the electric current shoots out onto the surface of the sphere, forming streaks of light one after another. In the past this was a piece of equipment in physics laboratories, used to demonstrate the process of lightning; now it has become a toy you can buy on Taobao.

Suppose that the discharging ball in the middle is the essence of your psyche, the core of your soul. Of course, this is only an analogy for the sake of visualization; you must not take it as literally real -- it is only meant to help you understand. Under this premise, what is the outside of the ball? The surface of the ball is all kinds of events -- the practice of all possibilities is on this surface. Your psychic essence stays connected with these events through lightning-like connections. In other words, the occurrence of that event happens precisely because of the existence of your psychic essence. The middle sphere strikes the surface of the outer sphere, and every bolt of lightning produces a small spot of light; you can regard that spot of light as an event. After this event occurs, there is still interaction between it and your soul's essence through the lightning; they influence each other.

All these events are existences of possibility, and they are all happening at the same time; every point is an instant that is also eternal. Because in this diagram there is no existence of time; it is a kind of existence without the concept of time. Your soul's essence is the small ball in the middle, and on the outer large ball are spread the events of this world -- this is very similar to the wheel example we just discussed, only taken one step further. A wheel is a ring shape, but on a sphere you can draw countless rings. Roll this ball once on the ground of the three-dimensional world, and a ring is drawn on the surface of the sphere.

The ring formed by this track on the sphere corresponds to a track left on the ground as well. The events that have already occurred on this track, from the perspective of the three-dimensional world, are the past; the part of the track that has not yet pressed onto the ground, from the perspective of the three-dimensional world, is the future. So this ball can roll out many tracks in the three-dimensional world -- it does not have to go in a straight line; it can twist left and right at any time, drawing all kinds of lines. Such a sphere of the soul exists beyond the limitations of time and space, but once it intersects with time and space, it produces tracks. On one ball you can draw countless tracks; these are all existences of possibility.

What does this mean? It means that all your possibilities, all your cycles of reincarnation, from the perspective of the psyche, are one thing; they are all matters on this ball. All your reincarnations life after life, all the possibilities within this one life of yours, all exist simultaneously. There are many existences of the three-dimensional world, many reality spaces; this sphere of your soul rolls here and rolls there, and it is everywhere.

So from this angle, is there any meaning in talking about cause and effect? There is no meaning. But on each individual track, cause and effect do have meaning. On each yellow track, cause and effect exist; but from the standpoint of the essence of the psyche, cause and effect have no meaning at all. Here there are two different levels at which this matter is being discussed.

In the future, when you encounter similar content again, it will be enough if you can recall this diagram. If you are talking about the affairs of one lifetime, the wheel analogy is simpler; if you are talking about reincarnation, then use this ball, because on one ball there can be countless wheel tracks emerging.

The Body's Perception of the Environment

Let's go back to the original text of the lesson. Seth says that, on a physical level, your body also responds to environments you are not conscious of. Continuing from what was said above, when you are dreaming, those very deep dreams are ones your consciousness cannot perceive, but your body will respond to them, and even your cells will record them. That information is indeed very important for the body's integration. Although you are not conscious of it, it is very useful for the overall integration of your body, and therefore it is also very important for your mental state.

At the cellular level, the body not only has impressions of its own present condition, but it is also affected by all aspects of its own physical environment that can influence it. For example, in its own coded way -- "coded" meaning in a way humans do not understand -- the body can perceive not only local conditions, but also all the weather patterns of the world upon which that local region depends. That is, your body's cells not only know the climatic conditions of the area where you are right now, but also know the overall meteorological patterns on a worldwide scale that may affect that local climate.

He therefore prepares himself in advance to meet any challenges necessary for adaptation.

The body can have this degree of foresight. It evaluates probabilities and responds to various pressures. You say, how is that possible? How is it not possible? Even ants know when it is going to rain and move their nests; swallows, birds, and animals all know. When animals encounter major natural disasters, when something is about to happen in nature, they can all sense it in advance. Humans also have this ability; it is just that you do not know it, but that does not mean your body does not know it.

Seth gives an example. He says the sense of touch can perceive pressure -- ordinarily our hands and bodies, when someone touches you, or when you stroke something, have a very keen perception of the texture of an object's surface. But there is another version of that sense that we humans do not know about: cells can respond to air pressure, and with the most precise attitude, the body knows the measurements involving all kinds of radiation. That is to say, in addition to sensing the pressure of touch, the cells of the human skin can even sense air pressure, and from changes in air pressure they can know the intensity of various kinds of radiation. Some rays, such as nuclear radiation, are very dangerous; some radiation has less effect on the human body, but any ray whose dosage exceeds a certain level is fatal to the human body. The human body has this ability, so it will feel uncomfortable. This is a very subtle feeling, but humans do not yet know it -- we think the sense of touch is just the sense of touch, but Seth says the sense of touch has another version that can sense the intensity of radiation in the air.

Thus, on one level, the body itself has its own picture of reality -- a picture of the world seen through the body's own way of perceiving, rather than the picture humans see with their eyes. Your conscious reality, that is, the world you are conscious of, must be built upon this body's cognition of the world. Yet the way the body cognizes the world is so different from the way you cognize the world with your brain consciousness that you cannot understand how the body perceives it. The orderliness of your consciousness is built upon this larger, circular, non-logical knowledge -- this knowledge comes from a kind of circular knowledge that we humans do not know.

Generally speaking, the psyche has an immediate, overall comprehension of psychological events and the environment.

Your psyche has an immediate, instantaneous, overall comprehension of your psychological events, the material external environment, and the non-material environment. This is the ability of your psyche, just like the body's response to the physical environment -- where it is cold, where it is hot, an instantaneous response, an instantaneous cognition. Your psyche knows the overall psychological climate of your locality, including the parts related to you personally as well as the worldwide parts that affect your psychology.

Your actions appear so smooth that you never notice these things, as if they do not exist for you, because your ordinary life goes too smoothly. Seth gives an example: in one corner of the world, a volcano erupts -- for instance, the volcanic eruption in Iceland a couple of years ago, which ultimately affected the entire earth to varying degrees; just like this year's wildfires in the western United States, where the entire West Coast from Seattle all the way to Los Angeles was burning, and it affected the climate of the whole earth; and the Australian bushfires last year were the same.

An emotional outburst is the same, just like a volcano; on another level, it has the same effect emotionally. An emotional outburst affects the entire psychological environment of a person -- primarily it changes the local generation, but it also spreads its ripples into the psychological environment of the masses. A person's psychological and emotional outburst not only affects yourself, but also affects the psychological environment around you. This is something you ordinarily do not notice.

This picture of reality held by the psyche is equally indecipherable at the level of your consciousness, because your usual requirement of consciousness is to concentrate on the important matters at hand. Your consciousness can only focus on one thing at a time, just as the small ball in the center can only focus on one lightning bolt. How could it possibly deal with all these concurrent events at the same time? Yet your soul is indeed handling these things simultaneously -- it transcends our human conscious ability, transcends our thinking ability. For the soul, it simultaneously handles all the events of all these lifetimes and all reincarnations. We humans cannot do this through the physical body, but at the soul level you can. Be sure to remember, it is not that you cannot do it; I am only saying that at the level of your physical body and brain you cannot do it. Once you detach from the physical brain and return to your spiritual essence, this is something you do every moment of every day, and it is effortless.

However, at the level of dreams, you are no longer limited by three-dimensional space and time. At this point, the soul essence in your center can occasionally catch a glimpse of what the world of your spiritual nature looks like -- it cannot be called an overall comprehension, only a peek through a crack in the door.

Those probabilities you become aware of, those actions that sometimes seem unrelated to yourself, are still connected to your own behavior within the larger schemes of interaction that you ordinarily do not understand.

If you can have awareness at the level of dreams, you can perceive the existence of such probabilities. Within the patterns of those probabilities, you will discover that those things that seem utterly unrelated to you are actually, within the larger schemes of interaction that you do not understand, closely connected -- just like the axle of a wheel and the events around the wheel's rim. The events on the left side of the wheel and the events on the right side of the wheel seem unrelated to you; you think one is a past event and the other is a future event, as if neither will affect your present very much. But do not forget, from the perspective of the wheel's axle, these two events are happening simultaneously. Their occurrence affects the experience and feeling of the axle in your present moment, and that experience and feeling directly affects the small ego in the three-dimensional world that the wheel is pressing upon right now. This small ego may be muddled, not knowing what is going on, not understanding how the events are connected, but these changes do indeed exert an influence on his life and environment, sometimes beyond his own cognition. But in dreams, you can faintly sense that between these seemingly unrelated events, there seems to be a connection that cannot be clearly explained.

Events Also Grow

When you grow from an infant into an adult, you do not just get taller; your whole body expands outward -- you become thicker, heavier, and both thickness and weight increase. Events grow in the same way. You think of events as unchanging, but that is not so; every event is in the process of developing and changing. A small matter develops and grows larger and larger. For example, you treat a new colleague to a working lunch, or you help him buy a fast-food meal. It is just that simple an event, but if this event develops a certain possibility, perhaps the two of you will develop into very good working partners. Maybe one day the two of you will leave the company together to start a business, founding a new company, and become like the relationship between Steve and Jobs²; you might also develop into a romantic relationship with this colleague. The event itself is not dead; it also grows. And in the process of growing, an event will in turn influence other events.

So looking from the inside outward, in dreams you are closer to the stages in which events are born. In your terms:

Events emerge from the future and the past, and the creative tension that exists between what you regard as birth and death gives these events their vitality.

You see, all around the edge of this wheel's tire are events. Every event is in the process of developing, and through the axle it influences other events, so all these events are strung together, linked together, mutually influencing one another. Some events that you consider insignificant may have an influence on other events.

How should we understand the tension between birth and death? If at the very beginning this wheel had only the two spokes of birth and death, then you would have to place them on the left and right sides of the wheel in order to suspend the axle at the center of the wheel. With birth and death as the starting point and the ending point, like the two ends of a rope, once you stretch it taut there is tension, and only with tension is it possible for other events to have the possibility of existing. Only with birth and death is there such space and leeway for other events to be woven in. This is relative to your three-dimensional world.

So looking from the perspective of dreams, you are closer to the core and the initial stages of where events happen. In dreams you can know what an event is about, how it came to be, and how they influence one another. But after you wake up, standing at the point where the wheel meets the ground, standing at this point of the present, you cannot understand the relationships among these events, because you can only see the one point where the wheel presses against the ground.

Language and the Source: Codela

Seth says, you use the letters of your language to make sentences, speak them or write them, and use language to communicate with others. Events are thought of in the same way:

It is as if the letters of the senses form sentences of the psyche, sentences of experience that are lived rather than written, forming history that is perceived rather than written.

What this passage says is that events are all living, not written down. On a certain date I had a meal with someone—is that matter finished? No, it is not finished just because a period has been put down. After you have a meal with someone, there are follow-ups; this event will give rise to a whole series of later events, and history is always being written. Using the letters of the senses to form sentences of the psyche, this event is living, not a thing that can be recorded in words. History is alive, not what is in textbooks.

Seth says, to a certain degree your language programs your experience; it is a limitation. But there is a sensory language—what the eyes see, what the tongue tastes, what the ears hear—these are all the language of the senses. They give you a biological kind of perception, experience, and communication. This sensory language is actually your feelings, your experience, your perception, your communication. Through it, you can perceive the essence of events. You combine these experiences, making them capable of being actually and physically felt, letting your body truly feel them.

All of your written or spoken language must be based on this biological alphabet. The words you speak and write depend on your biological nature—you depend on your lungs, your organs, on the composition of your molecules and atoms. Molecules and atoms do not say a single word, and they do not understand what you mean, but without molecules and atoms could you speak? Without these cells could you speak? Without vocal cords could you speak? But do the vocal cords know what your words mean? They do not know. Then how do they produce it? Who makes them vibrate in this way? Who directs them? What is that inner thing? What Seth wants to say is exactly this—that inner thing behind language. The biological substratum has far more room than you understand. Language is born from places you do not know at all, places you cannot see, places you cannot trace back to their source.

He spoke of the word "Codela." I searched all the materials; Codela does not have much meaning. The only thing I could find is that in Barcelona, Spain, sometime in the 1530s in the sixteenth century, there was once a Codela academy³, which was a seminary. I could find nothing else. I suspect that Seth may have heard this word in Europe during that era and simply picked it as a name, using it to represent the source from which language emerges.

Codela has two levels. The biological Codela is the source of the body's language, which you can trace down to the level of molecules and atoms. But Codela itself arises from the greater knowledge of the psyche—because this greater knowledge originally formed the mechanism of your physical body. Your physical body is produced from the greater knowledge of the psyche, and the language you speak necessarily has the body's mechanism within it. Where does your physical body come from? It is produced from the psyche. This is mentioned in The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 4, "The Flesh Made Word," and in many other chapters as well.

Dreams: The Language of the Soul

Dreams are a language of the psyche, not a language of our three-dimensional world.

In it, the essence of the human being is surrendered into time.

Note the word "surrendered" here — it is not used casually. It has a double meaning: sinking, which means being within time, one with time; and floating, which means being above time, separate from time. You need twenty minutes to dream, and those twenty minutes are three-dimensional world time — without that time you cannot dream. That is the human being within time. But the time you experience inside the dream is completely unaffected by the three-dimensional world — that is being beyond time. In this process, you are both within time and outside of time.

In this process, the person has his sensory experience. He runs — although he is lying in bed, in the dream does he run? Of course he runs. Some people in dreams even fall straight out of bed, step into empty space, get scared half to death, break out in a cold sweat all over, and wake up. Many people fight wars in dreams, battling all kinds of enemies, seeing monsters chasing them. He even shouts in the dream, but not a single word comes out, and the people next to him cannot hear a word. Running, speaking — these are all the language of the body.

But that language is opaquely connected with the body's mechanisms.

What is being spoken of here is the language of the body — do not confuse this — it refers to your running, your bodily movements, the words you speak with your mouth. That is the language of the body. The language of the body is connected with the body's mechanisms in an opaque way, not so directly. Although your body did not move, and your mouth did not shout, in the dream you feel that you are running, and it is real running — you run until you are out of breath.

He processes events in the dream, yet they do not take place in his bedroom, nor necessarily in any place he can find when he wakes up. They take place within the dream, not in our space-time. Going back to that diagram: it takes place on the wheel, not at the point where the wheel intersects with reality, but it needs a point of intersection with reality — the point where you are sleeping. It needs that point in order to enter that realm. But apart from lying in bed as the sole point of connection, you are living in a psychic world. The world in dreams combines experience arbitrarily, with no necessary relation to your real life.

So why do some people have precognitive dreams? For example, take the first world at the lower left of my diagram. If in your dream you are able to perceive that world, then naturally, as the wheel rolls on, it will happen tomorrow or next year — and to you that is a precognitive dream. But to the wheel, it is simply an event. Do you say that this event will definitely happen next year? Not necessarily. Perhaps other events intervene in between, your thoughts change, your view of the event changes, and the event changes accordingly — it may turn into something else. So the past and future of this event can both be changed — this is what Seth repeatedly emphasized in The Nature of Personal Reality, I believe in Chapter 14, in the chapter called "The Point of Power Is in the Present."

The session ends, and Seth says: "I heartily wish you both a good evening." Finally, I also wish everyone a magical day.

From "Codela" to the Formation of Events

Session 784, July 19, 1976, Monday, 9:23 p.m.

As before, he had sometimes done this kind of thing earlier -- the first part of this session he used to write Jane's preface for the book about Seth. Jane was busy typing, finishing the final draft. He said that I was still struggling with the notes for The "Unknown" Reality. The notes for this book, well, they were the most Rob ever wrote, and also the most painstaking. After this book, he basically stopped writing notes. Because the scope of knowledge involved in the Seth material was simply too broad, covering everything under the sun, and if you wanted to write a note for it, you would have to -- and back then there were no computers either, it was all paper, flipping back and forth.

In the second part of this session, he began to talk about the content of The Nature of the Psyche.

Session 784

He said:

Information flows through the universe at such speed and in such quantity that you can at best handle only a small portion of it.

This is a fact. The amount of information is so enormous that we can only process a very small part of it, and the same is true of the information in our brains. I mentioned once before that the amount of data our brains process every second is massive -- think about it, 100 billion brain cells⁴, how much data do they process every second? An astronomical figure. But the information that we humans can consciously process is only 200 bytes per second⁵. Between 200 bytes per second and the activity information of 100 billion brain cells⁴ per second, there is still a huge gap. And the brain is only a very small part of the information we can process. If you think the brain is already amazing, then compared with the processing ability of the multidimensional inner self, the brain's computing power is extremely weak. The total computing power and the sheer volume of information far exceed anything humans are capable of attaining.

Again he said:

Your physical senses are almost like a biological alphabet that allows you to organize certain information of the senses, and from it you form the contours of your world.

Our physical senses -- ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and so on -- are like the words in a language. We only have five kinds of "words"; a language may have hundreds or thousands of words, but the nature is the same. We use our physical senses to obtain information, use it to organize sensations and experience the world we go through, and then from this information we form the events and contours of our world.

He continued:

Your conscious knowledge is based upon an invisible, unspoken psychological and physical language that provides inner support for the communications and recognizable events of conscious life.

The knowledge we have is built upon an invisible, unspeakable psychological and physical language. This language provides inner support for the communication of our conscious life and for our cognition of our world.

These inner languages constitute the codela. The codela is the unit of our psychic organization, a core unit within the psyche. And all letters are born from it. Letters imply the existence of the codela, but cannot contain the codela. The codela is the source of language -- just as English cannot contain Russian, French, or any combination of Chinese. If you speak English, you cannot simultaneously speak Chinese; speaking one excludes the other. But one language implies the existence of another, because to that extent all languages share some common roots, and these common roots are the codela.

I already briefly explained this in the last session, so let me repeat what the codela is. All your languages are accomplished through biological existence -- the mouth speaking, the tongue, the oral cavity, the lungs, the vocal cords -- these biological existences trace back to organs, cells, molecules, atoms; that is one layer. And these material existences are themselves produced by those psychic existences in the spiritual world. If the source of language, biologically speaking, traces back to the layer of molecules and atoms, then psychically speaking, it can be traced back to the psychic source. So when the source of language is traced back to its very end, it is actually also the psychic source. The codela is just such a designation; it refers both to the source of language and to the source of the psyche.

Events as Language, Senses as Letters

In a certain way, events are like the spoken parts of language, but spoken in a living form, not just as a sound.

Events are the things we encounter in everyday life -- who you had dinner with, going to college, your romantic experiences, your life experiences, these are all events. They are like the spoken, pronounced part of language, because the world can be perceived by us, can be seen, can be recognized in real life. But he says, just as the sounds and written words spoken in language are all built upon the letters of the senses -- the outer world depends on the senses, and the senses are like the most basic letters. Without the senses, these events would not be recognized by you. Suppose you were blind, and could not hear, had no touch, no taste, no smell, no senses at all -- then these events could not be perceived by you as existing. So if events are the words we speak, then the senses are the letters of these words, their core elements. He keeps using language and the psyche as an analogy.

And the letters of the senses themselves come from the non-sensory "codela." The core of your senses -- just as the core of events is the senses -- the senses are like letters in language, so where does the core of these letters come from? It comes from the non-sensory codela.

A sentence is made up of words or characters, which is why we have verbs, adjectives, subject and predicate, scales, and all these things that build up language. But beneath this surface language, there is an entire structure that allows you to speak or read -- beneath syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and all these things, there is also an overall structure of language.

To a certain degree, events are built up in the same way. You form and organize sentences, yet you rely on confidence in speaking, without actually knowing the methods involved in your speaking.

You normally organize language, organize words, organize sentences -- speaking certainly has sentence patterns, but when you speak, you do not actually know how you speak; you never think about what method you are using. You only recognize the surface of the activity, recognize the surface of the act of speaking, without knowing what is going on underneath. In the same way, you form all the things around you, yet often you do not intuitively know how you do it. The things that happen around you are just like your language -- you do not know how they happen; it seems that things just happen, just as words just come out. We open our mouths and speak, never thinking about how to move our muscles, how the tongue moves, how the breath is produced. Events are the same -- they just happen naturally.

In school they teach you sentences, and you learn to speak from your elders. But before you were born, you were already involved in the formation of events.

From childhood you learn to speak by following your parents. But before you were even born, events were already being formed.

The psyche forms events in the same way that the ocean forms waves.

Your psyche transcends your life. Before your life began, your psyche had always existed. The psyche forms events, not the physical body forming events. The psyche forms events just as the ocean forms waves, except that while the ocean's waves are limited by its surface and its bottom, the psyche's events are instantly transferred and built up into the reality of the group psyche.

Buddhism often uses the ocean and waves as an example, because it could not think of a better one. Buddhism takes a person's self-nature, dharma-nature, or suchness -- the part that is a person's essence -- whatever it is called, from Seth's perspective it is the nature of the psyche or the soul. Whether you call it Buddha-nature, dharma-nature, self-nature, or the mind in Neo-Confucianism, it does not matter. Buddhism compares it to the great ocean, a vast and boundless ocean. Then your outer circumstances, the external environment, real life, are the waves in the ocean. Waves rise and fall one after another, endless and in myriad forms -- they are the outer expression of your self-nature. This explanation is almost exactly the same as Seth's.

Although waves are limited by the great ocean and the ocean's bottom, the ocean is also finite -- no matter how large it is, for one world it is still finite. But the world of your psyche is instantly transferred out, forming a group world of the psyche -- this world of your psyche takes effect immediately, instantly influencing the people around you.

Events in the Waking State and in Dreams

In your waking life, you encounter events that are already completed.

When we are awake, what we run into are events that have already been completed one by one -- today you had an argument, tomorrow you got angry, the day after you got a promotion and a raise, and the day after that you threw another tantrum. But in the dream state, and on other levels of consciousness, such as out-of-body experiences or meditation, you deal with events more directly.

You say, that's not right -- I deal with events when I'm awake, how do I deal with events when I'm asleep? When you are awake, the events have basically already been completed, or nearly completed. In the dream they have already been realized and prepared, ready to be realized in your physical life. So in the dream you deal more directly with the formation of events, and in physical reality you encounter the events. These are two different levels.

Yet you know nothing about this. You have no idea that you formed these events in the dream, or on other levels of consciousness, just as under normal circumstances you have no idea how you form sentences. The sentences seem to flow out of your mouth automatically, just as you form those events in the dream, completely escaping the management and control of your conscious mind.

The psyche, when it turns toward physical reality, is the creator of events. Through these events, it experiences its own reality.

While it creates these events, it also has to go through them, and in the process of going through them it experiences its own reality. Just as through your speaking, you hear your own voice -- you have to speak it out before you can hear it, right.

In the dream, you are involved in the process of forming physical events, and you sort out the psychological portion of action.

What does that mean? Your outer events are certainly action -- all kinds of things, whether your own actions or the actions of others. This action has a psychological portion, prepared in advance. In the dream you prepare these psychological portions, and then when you wake up, you use them to form the physical language that follows. You really do prepare the psychological portion in the dream, and after waking you use physical language to express it in physical life. What is physical language? It is your speech, your actions. Simply put, physical language is action. After waking, you use action to put it into practice, turning it into action in your life.

All the events you recognize as truly happening have a kind of singleness in time, because they exclude the probable versions from which they sprang, the versions that more or less appeared in the dream.

In your physical life, the things around you carry a strong sense of exclusivity and uniqueness. If you choose to go to college, you cannot also choose to join the army; if you choose to marry Zhang San, you cannot also be with Li Si. And those other probabilities, the place where all those probabilities reside -- that is, the versions in the dream -- you exclude them.

Another analogy: if at this moment you say a sentence in English, "I'm here," you cannot simultaneously say "wo zai zhe li" in Chinese -- you cannot say these two sentences at the same time; you can only say one, excluding the other. In our physical actions, you choose to say one thing rather than another. He says this "saying" is itself a kind of action, and he keeps using this analogy: when you say "I'm here," you cannot also say "wo zai zhe" in Chinese; you can only choose one. In physical life, when one thing happens, another thing necessarily cannot happen.

However, the events you form naturally do not depend only on your unique psychological or psychic attributes; they also depend on the attributes of your own physical body to be possible. You cannot transcend the limits of the body. The event must follow the possibilities of your body -- just as you do not have wings, so you cannot fly. Although on the psychic level you can fly here and there, in the three-dimensional world, when you want to generate events, you cannot have the possibility of a physical body levitating.

But since any person may speak more than one language, he may also combine the body's information in ways different from the usual. Just as a person does not speak only one language -- he may also know Chinese, or Spanish, it doesn't matter -- within his body there are the structures of three languages. In physical life it is the same: when a person organizes the body's data, there may also be other ways of combining them.

Your body is capable of putting together the languages of different realities.

Your body can handle different languages in different realities, and respond differently to different sensations, not only in one reality. For example, generally speaking, your body can only be in one place at the same time. In the three-dimensional world, the body can only be in one place at a given time, and your experience of an event is largely determined by the position of your body. This is quite normal; you are necessarily limited by space.

However, there are certain biological mechanisms that allow you to send a version or pattern of the body to places beyond its primary location. The primary location is the three-dimensional world, and it can send a version of the body beyond the three-dimensional world, to perceive from that position. For example, during sleep, in the dream state, you often do this -- connecting new perceptual information with ordinary information, and organizing them without any doubt. They can be information from different times. Apart from the physical world of daily life, in the dream and in other states of consciousness -- meditation, out-of-body experiences, and so on -- your body can also enter other reality spaces. But the "body" here is in quotation marks; it is not the actual physical body, yet the sensation of your body is there. In the dream you run and jump, you shout and call out, you eat; you bring a body in with you, and that body is not the same as your physical body, but the sensations are the same. Out-of-body experience is the same: clearly it is the soul or consciousness going out, yet after you leave the body you can still see your own body. You may call it the spirit body or whatever -- the name doesn't matter.

The accuracy of your ordinary sense perception rests firmly upon this larger inner flexibility. It gives you a broad base from which you form your steady focus.

When we are awake, our senses are very accurate; our sense of position, time, and space is all very precise. This accuracy depends on those inner, larger, nonphysical-world sensations. That is a broad base, and upon that base we can form this clear and steady focus in the physical world. It is not as you think, that you could do without those -- you cannot do without them.

Words, Molecules, and Codela

He paused again for a long time.

Events appear in your perception just as spoken words do.

The events in your life are like the words you speak. When you speak, who is speaking? You say it is you who is speaking? Is it your tongue that is speaking, or is it your throat that is speaking?

What happens within your shortest phrase?

Even when you speak the shortest few words, the atoms and molecules in your vocal cords, lungs, and lips do not understand a single word of that sentence. That is very strange — your cells do not understand either, the molecules and atoms do not understand, nothing understands, so why do they speak this word? How do they know they should speak this word? How do they know how to mobilize and organize these cells and muscles, how to coordinate them to speak this word? Since none of them understand the meaning of this word, who is directing them? Who is arranging them? And yet you are allowed to speak so fluently — not only can you speak one word, you can also speak string after string, paragraph after paragraph, at great length, just as Seth does night after night.

Yet without their cooperation and awareness, not a single word could be spoken. Nevertheless, each of those nameless atoms and molecules cooperates in a vast adventure, making your speech possible.

These atoms and molecules understand nothing, but can you do without them? No, without atoms and molecules you would not even exist. But they do not understand the words we speak, so how can they collectively coordinate and cooperate under someone's arrangement, speaking paragraph after paragraph so fluently, simply, and effortlessly? This is something you cannot understand. That you cannot understand it does not mean they are not cooperating.

And the reality of your events is built up by a living codela, in which every spoken word has a history, and this history can be traced all the way back to antiquity, beyond the oldest fossils and the earliest remembered monuments.

The events of our three-dimensional world, just like the language we speak, all have an inner linguistic structure — or call it codela — and our events are also born from within it. Our events, just like language, are also born from an inner, invisible structure.

Every word we speak is extremely ancient, ancient beyond all the oldest fossils. Why is it so ancient? It is the core from which all things in the universe are generated. Think carefully: where does the source of language come from? It is not what modern archaeologists and biologists tell you — that it was gradually built up after humans began walking upright — according to some account, built up through labor, some tens of thousands of years ago. It is not merely that. If language is traced back to its roots, it is as old as this universe itself; it already existed at the very instant when spirituality was born.

You must always remember the concept of the bicycle wheel from the last session. That concept is not only the concept of this one life of yours; if extended broadly, the entire universe is also this concept — all events have already happened simultaneously. Your language also already existed at that time. Although when it manifested in the three-dimensional world, it was like a wheel pressing on the ground and forming a rut, and only then did we humans recognize that language had manifested in the three-dimensional world. But before that manifestation, the matter of language, that event was already at a certain position on the wheel; it was already there.

So it tells you that any word, any single word that comes out of your mouth, is ancient to a degree you cannot imagine. He says he is using your experience to speak — when speaking of antiquity, because time is simultaneous, for him there is no concept of time, but from the human perspective, it is more ancient than anything ancient discovered by archaeology.

In every word you speak, you awaken that past, or rather you stimulate it into existence.

Every word is stimulating the ancient past, and then letting it exist. Therefore it makes reality and you simultaneously coexistent — it is so ancient, yet it coexists with this present moment of yours.

In dreams, even the past is in the present tense.

In dreams you will have some dreams that take place in the past, but in dreams it is also present.

Events form everywhere.

What it means is that events have no concept of space. Just like around the bicycle wheel, events are generated simultaneously. Only when it makes contact with the ground is it said to happen in a certain place. When it is not in contact, it can happen anywhere.

Simultaneous Creation: Past, Present, and Future

You create the past again and again, just as you create the future. From those experiences you select certain ones as the events of normal waking reality.

You are constantly creating your past, and you are also constantly creating your future. What does this mean? If an event happened in the past, you think it is over—but actually it is not over; it is still happening. By using this present point of power, through your emotions and feelings, through changing your belief system, you can change that event. The future goes without saying. When you change these probable events, you are in effect changing the past, and also changing the future. So you are simultaneously creating the past, and also creating the future.

Although you can only speak one sentence at a time, and can only speak one language. Although that sentence does not need to sound like a cause or an effect each time, they are still the result of a circular kind of knowledge and experience.

You can only speak one language at a time. But when you speak this language, you are so fluent and relaxed, opening your mouth and speaking, as if you knew its ending. Indeed you do know its ending—if you did not know the ending, you could not begin so fluently. This is a most basic principle.

Why is that? Because these languages, they are also like a circular knowledge and experience. Let us go back to that diagram from earlier—the surrounding events are all knowledge on the circular knowledge disk, all available for your use. You, the central axis, this present point of power, whatever you want to express, you can freely draw from the surrounding language materials. Based on your present combination, a language has already been formed. And from the moment this language begins to form, it already has a beginning and an end. From your perspective there is a temporal sequence, but from its perspective, it happens simultaneously. These words, before you have spoken them, have already been spoken. Only you have this sense of time. When spoken, it is like a wheel pressing on the ground leaving a rut; before it is spoken, this language already exists.

If we use the sphere to understand this, it is the same. Suppose this middle curve—this curving line in the middle—suppose it is a sentence, and it sweeps across 20 words on the surface of the sphere. In our ordinary speech, these 20 words must be spoken one by one to form a sentence. But actually this sentence was already arranged before you spoke it; it exists on the surface of the sphere as a probable existence. In other words, you have merely spoken one of the millions of possibilities of this language. To you it seems original, independent, organized on the spot in this present moment. But from the sphere's perspective, suppose this sphere is all of your language, and outside the sphere are all kinds of vocabulary and phrases, then drawing any trajectory on this sphere represents a sentence—is that not the concept? So why does Seth always discuss language and the psyche together? Because they share many commonalities right here.

This yellow curving line in the middle of the sphere, suppose it is a sentence, and it sweeps across 20 words. The sentence formed by these 20 words already existed there before you spoke it. For the sphere, it has no temporality. Only when your physical body speaks it—through the mouth, tongue, and vocal cords—does it come into temporal existence. But before it is spoken, that sentence is already within this magical sphere of language.

If this sentence had no ending, if the ending were not known, he could not begin it skillfully—he has been wanting to make this point.

In the same way, events that occur in time are also dependent upon a circular kind of event, in which beginning and ending are entwined, not one occurring before the other, but existing simultaneously.

Just like the example given earlier, the events that occur in time are actually all happening simultaneously. These events are all occurring simultaneously on the outer rim of the bicycle wheel. So which one can manifest? That depends on what kind of rut you press into the ground. You might say this rut still has a sequence, arranged according to this probability of yours—yes, from the wheel's perspective, there is still a sequence, only that it has not yet happened or is about to happen. But if we return to the concept of the sphere, with the sphere rolling on the ground, that is another concept entirely; it no longer has a fixed direction. If the surface of the sphere is covered with all kinds of events, then what event happens next, what shape the sphere's trajectory takes, is not necessarily a straight circular line; it can be a twisting, turning curve. What happens next depends entirely on you.

So this passage has actually been saying all along: beginning and ending are entwined together; there is no beginning, no ending; it is a sphere; everything is happening simultaneously and existing simultaneously. There is no one thing happening first and another happening later. Then why in real life does one thing happen first and another later? Because in real life, the direction in which your sphere rolls determines whether it presses onto the ground first or later. Suppose the event that presses onto the ground manifests as a real physical event, and the part that does not press down does not manifest. So which part should press down, which presses first and which later, depends entirely on how you choose at this present point of power. These events are all probable existences. Whichever place you want to press first, it presses there first—that is the concept of the sphere. Because with the concept of the wheel there is still a sense of before and after, but when you rise to the level of the sphere, you can truly realize that there is no before and after.

This session is not long, because in the first half he discussed Jane's preface, so the dictation ended there. Aside from a few private remarks, nothing more was said. This session ends here.

Language as a Filtering Device

In today's session, Seth continued dictating Chapter Eight. At the start, Rob mentioned that the weather had not been so hot lately, so when they held the session they opened the front and back doors to let the air flow through the middle, allowing the cool breeze coming down from the hills to pass through the house. So far no one had ever come to disturb them at such a time. Although more and more readers had found their home, and although they enjoyed meeting people, they were beginning to worry somewhat, because these visits really did cut into a lot of their working time. Interestingly, even when troubled by the summer heat, Seth was never affected. Jane, in her trance state, actually could not feel the heat at all; it was only during breaks that she became like the rest of us and had to struggle with the temperature.

Session 785

After Seth came through, he said that today we will continue dictating this book. He said:

Once again, on a conscious level, it is impossible for you to process all the information that exists on all other levels.

On the conscious level of our brain, we cannot process all the information on other levels. That kind of information that transcends our physical world we cannot process, and even information about the physical world itself, such as information about our own bodies, we cannot process either. The intelligence upon which your basic physical survival rests, you also cannot process -- the information that the fifty trillion cells⁶ and one hundred billion brain cells⁷ in your body process every day, you could not process for even one second.

So to some degree, language serves as a filtering device, enabling you to convey certain information while at the same time effectively blocking out other information. Only the useful information gets through -- that is, what language can understand, or what your consciousness can understand, is passed on to you, while those other things are blocked out. Because you cannot process them, passing them on to you would be of no use.

For example, your consciousness will never contain things like: how much oxygen you need, how wide you need to open your mouth, how many milliliters or liters of oxygen you need to breathe in order to maintain the normal functioning of your heart, or the blood oxygen supply level in your body. This kind of thing cannot be transmitted to you, and even if it were transmitted to you, you would not know how to control it. But when you are in a room with very murky air, or when you enter a high-altitude area where the oxygen content is very low, then it will tell you that you "cannot catch your breath" -- at that point the information can be passed on to you: you had better move to a place with higher oxygen content, or take in oxygen right away.

He said, when you speak a sentence, you do not stop to consider all the rules of grammar. You do not make a diagram of the sentence in your mind beforehand, but simply speak more or less automatically. This also involves the highest accuracy on both the mental and physical levels -- your body cooperates in accurately expressing what you want to say, while at the same time your mental level also knows the way you want to express it. Both aspects are of the highest accuracy.

When you experience an event, you usually do not stop to look up the laws of perception, or wonder what these things really are. You do not think about what deeper meaning lies beneath this event, or why it happens -- generally you do not think about it, you just directly experience the event. Just as when speaking, you do not stop to ponder syntax and grammar, or how you choose your words and form your sentences. He uses this example to draw a comparison between speaking and experiencing events.

But those events that are experienced also go through a filtering process. They gain focus, and gain brilliance and physical effectiveness -- the effectiveness of manifestation in physical life -- all because they have risen to a position of importance above other seemingly invisible events. There are many probable events that did not happen, but this event did happen precisely because it rose to an important position among those invisible events, allowing you to focus your consciousness upon it, and only then could it achieve manifestation in our physical reality.

Dreams and Probabilities

But in the dream state, you operate intimately with the inner grammar of events. In dreams you come to form this event, to construct this event—in other words, you come to create this event, to plan this event. In dreams, you deal with those unspoken words and unexperienced things, that is, those probabilities—words that might have been spoken, things that might have been done, none of them done, none of them spoken, but in the dream state you still process them.

In the dream state, the skeleton of the inner workings of events is more apparent; the action has not yet fully grown flesh.

Because in dreams, the framework of the inner workings of the event is more obvious. You know why the event happens, why the event happens in this way, why this event connects to that event—what the inner structure of these events' occurrence is. Because at this point the action is still only a framework, not yet fleshed out; precisely because it has not yet grown flesh, you can process it. Once this event occurs in three-dimensional reality, it has flesh and blood, extremely detailed and complex, and by then it is very hard for you to process it among so many events. So in the three-dimensional world, why can't we see the inner structure of this event? Because it is already too rich, so rich that we must use all our energy and attention to deal with this matter, and we will not carefully savor the inner meaning of this matter.

This is the difference between our ordinary dreaming and waking states.

When you are awake, the mechanisms of your psychological behavior are clearly outlined.

In other words, it is controlled by your inner belief system; you have an automatic response mechanism inside. In the waking state, this condition is quite correct—you have a very clear processing mechanism in your mind, and you can very naturally and simply use an outlined approach to handle the events of daily life, and you can explore and utilize them more completely. If, while awake, you insisted on observing the inner aspect of the event itself, including all those possible events that did not happen, that would also exceed your processing capacity.

Between waking and sleeping consciousness, there is always a veil. When you have a physical body, the waking mind can only process so much information, and whatever it cannot contain it simply forgets. In dreams you can process many things; all kinds of probable events are processed in dreams, and you carry out unified planning or construct their inner mechanisms. But when awake you can only handle the things right in front of you. What if you cannot process them? You throw them away. It is like when a computer's memory capacity is limited and its CPU computing power is limited—it simply abandons the information it cannot process. If you have studied information theory, you know that when the amount of information is too large, you can only select the very core or brief part to process; the complete information cannot be processed, so you just discard it.

Cells, Consciousness, and Dreams

Your dreams affect the reality of your cells, so that in your terms that reality is largely the reason why you can dream.

Your dreams affect the reality of your cells, and the reality of your cells is the fundamental reason why you are able to dream.

Dreams are a natural product of cellularly attuned consciousness, just as fire gives off light, and consciousness attuned at the cellular level gives off dreams.

At the cellular level, if we attune consciousness to a certain frequency or a certain range, you can give off dreams. This is what we humans can understand—in your terms, from our purely material human perspective, the production of dreams is the function of brain cells; the activity of certain parts of the brain cells produces dreams. So it tells you that when the cells attune to certain frequencies of consciousness, your dreams naturally arise.

Such a consciousness is in a state of being in which it recognizes energy and power far greater than its physical manifestation at the time of its brilliant intersection with matter.

That is to say, in dreams, it is better able to recognize what the core of a matter is—to understand an event from the perspective of energy and power, rather than the event itself as it manifests after this consciousness intersects with the physical world. It does not focus on the physical manifestation itself; it is above that. What it observes is energy and power.

Sparks generated by every moment of its existence, and the sparks give rise to more experience and more perception.

But by the time we can perceive this spark—when we can dream in our dreams and perceive the existence of the dream—the dream is already in the past. Relative to the consciousness that the cells have attuned to, the dream scenes you perceive are already the products or traces of this spark of consciousness.

Yet these events and reactions continue to act: events bring sparks, sparks bring reactions, reactions bring new events. Especially in the dream state, they do not need to intersect with material experience as directly and completely as in the waking state, but only partially and indirectly. So the reactions to these events in dreams are different from those in real life.

All of these parallel or alternative experiences, then, are used to construct the physical events that you recognize.

Those probable existences in dreams—they are used to construct the events that actually happen in your reality. So dreams are very important.

Again, you did indeed speak a sentence so that this ending could arrive smoothly, although when you began to speak, perhaps you did not realize what you would say, yet a certain part of you knew simultaneously the beginning and the end of the sentence.

He says this to explain the passage above—when you speak a sentence, you actually do not know what the ending will be, but another part of you, a certain part, knows the beginning and the end of the sentence, which is why it can be spoken smoothly. The events in your dreams are the same: the dream consciousness is processing the results of all probabilities, arranging and combining all events, evaluating them, and picking the one most favorable to you to happen. But when this event happens in real life, you do not know how it begins or how it ends, yet the consciousness in your dream knows all of it—because this event is happening precisely according to the way the probabilities were constructed in the dream.

In dreams, in the same way, you know the beginning and the end of events. Any action in your life is taken in the context of all other events from birth to death.

Now you think that because at any given moment you speak only one sentence and not ten other possible versions, the sentence you spoke is therefore the correct one. You do not know the sentences you did not speak; you have not considered the possibilities of their grammar, tense, or inflectional endings. In fact, the sentence you spoke implies that you picked the best one out of ten other possible versions—yet you cannot simultaneously know the existence of those ten versions.

But at a level of consciousness you are unaware of, you have already simultaneously evaluated the expressive ways of those ten versions—which one is more reasonable, which one is better—and you are completely unaware of it. You may have already tried out all those discarded sentences, only you have no experiential memory of it, because it is unconscious.

Therefore, even in the making of the sentence, you deal with the question of probabilities. And your body more or less imitates the muscular responses involved in every unspoken sentence.

For those unspoken sentences, your body also has to preset and simulate the muscular responses for them. A sentence has ten versions; you pick one to speak, and for the nine unspoken ones, your muscles still have to imitate the possible pronunciations, vocal cords, and bodily expressions of those sentences—including the coordination of certain expressions, gestures, and facial movements. It has to be prepared, because it does not know which sentence you will ultimately speak. Your muscular responses will be a bit slower, but at that level beyond the speed your consciousness can comprehend—at your deeper level of consciousness, the part you cannot perceive—the operation is extremely fast. It simultaneously sends to the body all the preparations needed for these ten sentences: all of you must be ready; listen for my command as to which sentence to speak.

So sometimes you encounter a particularly interesting thing: you say some words that are not what you meant—suddenly a sentence pops out that was not what you originally intended to say, but you do not know how, in that situation, you suddenly came out with such a magical sentence, and you yourself do not know either.

Even as you speak your sentence with such a wonderful, deliberately indifferent air, you are still making inner choices.

He is joking here, about that human air of "deliberate indifference." On the surface you seem indifferent, but inwardly you are making intense choices and calculations—you are unconsciously preparing for the other person's reaction after you finish speaking, and then deciding what to say next. You are still making inner choices, only you do not know it.

Therefore, every action in your life is taken in the context of all other actions. Because there is a previous event and a following event, your words also exist because there is a previous sentence and a next sentence. We often say "one word leads to another" and that is how you get there—you handle things in life the same way, one thing after another, seemingly natural and flowing like clouds and water.

Yet until you die, all the actions in your life happen naturally. But this does not mean that your death is predetermined to occur at any specific time. Death is also one of many probabilities, not fixed—just like the things you do in ordinary life, just like the sentences you speak, it is one picked out of many probable sentences. He uses the analogy that when you are speaking, you may actually have switched through many versions in the middle—based on the other person's reaction, your feeling at the moment, and your judgment of the external environment, you automatically switch from one set of words to another. So sometimes as you speak, your words change—many people say, "I originally went to reason with him, I originally had the better argument, but why is it that as I talked with him I seemed to lose my ground"—many changes happened in between; you gradually switched from the version where you had the better argument to a state where you did not.

Therefore, as you live, you also live probabilities.

What you call living is only one of many probable states of living. You are the person who speaks that sentence, and you are also the person who lives. But you are larger than the sentence you speak, and you are larger than the life you live. Because you also process countless probable events, and those are things the conscious you—the one who has lived this life—cannot perceive. You only perceive one single event happening after another, but in fact you are processing the happening of all these probabilities. The real you is far larger than this one life. And the sentence you speak is also larger than your true meaning, because what you speak is only one of many sentences; all the possible sentences have already been constructed beneath the level of your consciousness.

Waking and Dreaming Cognition

You cannot remember all the sentences you spoke today. It is impossible to remember every sentence you said. If you repeated them again, unless it was something very simple, you could not reproduce a natural conversation word for word -- you could only give the general gist. But you may have a rough concept of what you said: although you do not know everything you said today, you know roughly whom you met and what you talked about.

At any particular moment, you do seem to say one thing rather than another. Witnesses would also seem to support you in saying that waking events do indeed seem more stable and reliable than dream events.

Because you have witnesses -- for daytime events, you find someone to confirm, "When we met, did I say such and such?" and he says yes. Although you cannot repeat that sentence word for word, you both know roughly what was said. But in dreams, or during the day when the underlying consciousness processes those unspoken words, because there are no witnesses, you cannot sense it. So you feel that daytime experience is more real and reliable.

When you are awake, events happen and disappear quickly, and you participate with all your senses -- eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body -- you experience them directly. But because of that instantaneous intake, the moment you experience that event, you give up the larger dimensions of the same action. When you are experiencing this one event with all your senses, you cannot simultaneously experience the parallel or similar possible events -- just as you can only say one sentence with one mouth.

In dreams, the preparation for unexperienced actions is taking place, and it is not only given the most minute details, but also within the larger scope of such a scene as the world.

When you prepare events in dreams, you must not only prepare the event in great detail -- considering the internal structure of the event and the connections between events -- you must also give sufficient consideration to the minute details of the event. And not only that: any single event that happens around you must be considered from the scope of the whole world.

Events are fitted together, events are linked together.

"Fitted together" is actually a very good term -- events coordinate with one another, fit one another, and then form a consistent whole. The world you perceive is a whole, a consistent world, yet this world is constituted by countless events taking place. From major political events to the small emotional and trivial matters of daily life around an individual, all these events constitute the whole of our world. There are connections between events -- if you know the butterfly effect, you understand what he means by this sentence: any small event may influence a very large historical event.

For example, the future history of the world is being arranged right now.

How the entire historical scene of the world's future will play out has already been arranged in your dreams. When each person's dreams process the possible worlds of that person's individual life -- for example, what to do tomorrow, what to say -- yet when you process the possibilities of personal events, the entire history of the world is already being arranged.

The existence of personal private life, and the social, political, and economic aspects within the individual's range, are all unconsciously understood. So when a person constructs various probable realities in dreams, he also does so within a larger scope, in which the probable scenarios of the world are consistent.

That is to say, when you construct the possibility of an event in the dream state, it is based on a global perspective, comprehensively considering the influence of this event on all events and the interactive relationships among them, taking everything into account as a whole. But we humans, when doing things in ordinary life, often cannot consider things so thoroughly -- we generally handle matters based on direct feeling. You feel that events happen naturally and as they should, but in fact, in your dreams, all possible trade-offs and analyses of pros and cons have already been done. This weighing involves not only the fine details of events, but also the macroscopic mutual influence and coordination among events. This computational capacity exceeds all human cognition -- even if you brought out a supercomputer, it could not calculate the influence between every event and every other event, and moreover in terms of probable time. Countless possibilities, their mutual influences and possible outcomes, and the outcomes in turn bring further influences, endlessly. Such a capacity for calculation completely exceeds the range of what humans can know and understand.

The Web of Psyche and Coded Transmission

Here, events and your web of psyche are interconnected, and it is far more efficient than your physical communication systems.

In the psychic world, events and the web of psyche are tightly linked together, far more effective than this system we actually refer to.

Here, the codes of reality are used. Knowledge is received and transmitted in electromagnetic patterns. Therefore, technically speaking, one pattern can carry far more information than anything you have.

There exists a kind of pattern, and this pattern can transmit more information than all the information transmission methods you understand. This amount of information is too great, exceeding any internet or various networks we now know of -- even the next-generation quantum network the United States is currently building⁸ (I saw in the news that quantum networks have extremely strong privacy, almost impossible to eavesdrop on) -- surpassing any pattern that we humans can currently know. This kind of information transmission pattern cannot be communicated through language, nor can it be understood by people.

How do you communicate then? Every cell in your body participates in receiving signals and transmitting them. Every cell participates in receiving signals, and also participates in uploading such signals -- it simultaneously receives and uploads. Think about it, fifty trillion cells⁶, like fifty trillion information units, sending and receiving at the same time. Countless times calculated within one second, one piece of information means fifty trillion times -- even the world's strongest computer could not process that. And this is only talking about processing one byte of information at a time; if the information processed at one time is itself an event, or the impact of an event on a cell, then you are even less able to process it. Science at this level is completely helpless. So never imagine that with artificial intelligence or quantum computing, one day humans can grasp the entire world, the universe, and its mysteries -- impossible, not even on the same level.

It is precisely the codes and transfers that occur on those levels, so in terms of the body, the appropriate information is transmitted to where it should belong.

Because of these coded transfers, the appropriate information is given to the appropriate cell, and it does not transmit randomly -- it would not ask every piece of information "is this for you?" That is impossible. It has a very efficient coded transmission mechanism, delivering information to whomever it belongs to, without random transmission or broadcasting everywhere. Although our current internet technology is very ingeniously designed, if you understand communication protocols -- from the bottom physical layer all the way to the top application layer, each of the seven layers has its own specifications and standards -- their purpose of transmission is also the same purpose: to give the right information to the right person. You cannot send an email and have everyone everywhere receive it; that would not work. Only the designated mailbox can receive it. A lot of coded transfer work is used here.

Much of this information does not even reach the brain. The mind is aware of this information.

Note, here the mind is not equal to the brain. In the Seth books, the mind is the conscious mind, and the brain generally uses the word brain; these are two different concepts. Simply put, the mind can process the conscious and the unconscious, can process the physical and the non-physical, can process the external and the internal -- it is a bridge connecting consciousness and the subconscious, the brain and the psyche, or the inner self. And what the brain processes is basically all at the conscious level. So some information does not pass through the brain; it is processed directly at the bottom level, because it does not require the participation of the brain, but your mind knows about it.

The structure of your psychic body has a complete, up-to-date picture at every moment.

He has talked about this before, in Chapter 4 of The Nature of Personal Reality, "The Flesh and Blood Body": your psychic body is a kind of structure, and your psyche and your physical body are coordinated together. It forms an up-to-date picture at any time and any place of any information about the physical body of your organism -- our biological body. This picture is very fast, not one picture every few minutes; it may produce countless instantaneous pictures in one second, calculated in nanoseconds. It always has a picture and image of the body's latest state at the present moment. How this is formed exceeds human cognition; just know that there is such a picture. Here every cell contributes its own strength, and every cell participates in the evaluation and calculation.

All of these actions are taken with knowledge of this information.

Again, in the dream state, this intermediate information is transformed into a picture on a pseudo-reality screen.

In dreams, that image of yours is a picture on a pseudo-reality screen. The vivid experiences in your dreams, all those things, are a reaction to events that might happen. An adaptation of probable sequences -- that is, how these events should develop, how the events before and after should be arranged, he is constantly testing. Trying in dreams: this event happens first, then that one; if it does not fit, switch it around. Sometimes it can be perceived by you, forming a kind of picture, so you feel that the things in dreams are all jumbled up.

These messages are temporarily focused in the theater of inner reality.

In your inner world there is a theater, constantly staging plays of various practical arrangements and combinations, flashing before consciousness. Because it performs too fast -- there are too many possibilities -- the speed of the performance is faster than your consciousness, so your consciousness can only capture some fragments or pictures. The dreams you remember are all messy and irregular, and you do not know the reasons behind them. Your consciousness is standing by and can watch, but it performs too fast, so you cannot see the logic in between; you can only see a rough outline.

These adaptive rehearsals are not only for the mind, but also for the body.

Because these rehearsals need to evaluate whether the occurrence of an event is more beneficial to your body, and what effects it has on the body.

Again, in sleep, each cell calculates the effect of various probable events upon its own reality.

This is the remarkable part: in your dreams, every cell participates in computation -- what substantive effects the occurrence of an event would have on that cell. Every cell makes a calculation, and the reactions of fifty trillion cells⁶ added together are the reaction of the entire body, and this reaction of the body is known before the event happens. So before an event occurs, your body already knows what kind of reaction it will have; that is not strange at all.

It rehearses all possible events, and rehearses all the reactions of the entire body. And this reaction of the body is not some vague, approximate kind -- not the vague concept of "if this event happens my body might be fatigued" -- every cell participates in the computation, all the computational results are put together to make a unified picture, and then you are given an overall cognition, and the pros and cons are assessed.

At the most minute levels, the body also participates in dreams.

At the cellular level, cells are also participating in your dreams. Because events in dreams affect them, and they need to assess this effect. So they constantly rehearse various possible events, see what the reactions of the cells are, and then they can calculate. So you know the importance of dreams -- the exquisite internal structure of the human body far exceeds all of our current human scientific understanding of the body, and not just by a little bit.

The molecules and atoms themselves possess that kind of consciousness.

Not only cells have it; molecules and atoms all have this kind of consciousness.

You cannot analyze them.

You cannot analyze them; that will never be possible. The molecules and atoms in one cell are also counted in the tens of trillions, so this thing simply cannot be analyzed or assessed.

Because the scale of your activities is so different.

We only deal with things within the scale of our human range -- the normal human size of a few meters, tens of meters, hundreds of meters. At the cellular level, the atomic level, and the molecular level, we cannot process it; we do not have this processing capability.

Their process of gathering information includes the coded electromagnetic properties that flow through all of your devices.

The process by which molecules and atoms gather information includes all those things that cannot be measured at the same time when all our scientific instruments and experimental equipment are testing -- because it has already reached the molecular and atomic level, and you cannot measure it. Even your current instruments are not sufficient to measure the information capability of a single atom itself; they cannot reach that precision. Moreover, all your instruments themselves are also composed of atoms -- if the instruments are plastic or organic, they are composed of molecules; if metal, they are composed of atoms. Those instruments themselves are composed of molecules and atoms, so how can they measure the things of other molecules and atoms? So this information flows through these devices.

And it is itself encrypted and coded. You say if I intercept it, can I analyze it? You cannot analyze it. It is end-to-end encrypted -- those who have studied cryptography know that this kind of encryption is extremely difficult to crack. Between cells and cells, between molecules and molecules, information is transmitted with codes. Why use codes? Because this mechanism completely exceeds the upper limit of human understanding and wisdom. If it were not transmitted in coded form, such a huge amount of data transmitted among so many atoms, molecules, and cells would become chaotic without codes -- the information would all be noise, with no valuable information at all.

This one pattern is a pattern that can carry more information than anything you have.

This pattern cannot be clearly described to us; it surpasses all the communication mechanisms and communication patterns that we humans can currently conceive of -- not what we can achieve, but what we can conceive of -- exceeding the limits of human cognition.

Again, the atoms and molecules, and all the seemingly smaller particles within them.

Note that he used "seemingly" in quotation marks -- why? He wants to imply that the bottom level is not particles. Molecules are composed of atoms, and below atoms there are even smaller things -- the nucleus and electrons, and the nucleus has neutrons and protons, and neutrons and protons have quarks, and further down we humans currently recognize superstrings. Below that it cannot be exhausted. His use of quotation marks means that below atoms and molecules are not particles.

Your interpretation of the nature of events depends entirely upon them.

Our interpretation and understanding of the nature of an event depend entirely on these underlying things. Without them, we cannot judge an event, and we would not know the nature of the event at all.

The consciousness that is tuned to the cells initiates dreams. Consciousness, built upon a molecular basis, initiates a physical reality, and events suited to it.

This sentence is very profound: the core of consciousness itself can be traced down to the molecular level -- molecule is just an analogy; more deeply, consciousness is built upon the smallest particles of the material world that we can cognize. And consciousness, upon this smallest, quoted "particle" level, initiates a reality in our material world -- consciousness forms the reality of our material world, and within it also initiates a world suited to it.

This is: when the consciousness of cells is tuned to a particular frequency, it produces dreams, and in dreams our probable events are produced; from among the probable events some are selected, and these form the events that actually occur in our three-dimensional world. So from this angle, consciousness forms our physical reality, and from it selects some appropriate events to let happen -- this is what is accomplished in dreams.

Do not forget the title of this chapter -- Dreams, Creativity, Language, and "Cordella" -- the focus of this chapter is on dreams.

Thought and the Focus of Consciousness

Thought is also firmly based on the fact of consciousness adjusted to thought.

What you call thought—your present ideas and notions—only arises when consciousness is aligned with a certain focus. The reason you have your present thoughts is that consciousness has adjusted its focus. Just as certain cells adjust their frequencies, this consciousness initiates dreams. Consciousness is the core.

Thought requires time, but it exists by means of cellular organization.

Your thoughts require time to arise, and they exist by means of cellular organization—our ideas are based on the existence of certain brain cells in our brains.

The unfocused focus and the constructive consciousness of the cells themselves involve a direct cognition, an understanding that arrives in a more circular fashion.

This kind of consciousness is itself based on a circular kind of knowledge. It is based entirely on direct cognition and direct knowledge, and it is knowledge that considers all worlds unified together, not singular and linear knowledge.

Creative acts are your most direct experience of direct cognition.

Any creative act—something you have never done before—is your most direct experience of direct cognition. If you want to cognize and experience certain things, you must perform those creative acts, whether you are alive or dead.

When your consciousness thinks of itself in physical terms, then you will still largely make use of the thought patterns you are familiar with.

When your consciousness considers problems in a material way—that is, when you are not dreaming, not meditating, but handling matters in daily life and real life—it will necessarily involve a fixed automatic pattern of thought, which is your belief system.

Your consciousness is cellularly attuned, and it perceives its own reality through the functions of the cells that form the body's organs.

Consciousness perceives this world through the cells, not through your thought patterns—these are two different levels of perception. Your consciousness perceives through the level of cellular attunement, while in your ordinary daily life you perceive through your thought patterns and belief systems.

Your psyche is greater than the consciousness attuned to the physical body.

The psyche is greater than this consciousness attuned to the physical body's cells. The reality cognized at the level of the body's cells is only one part of the psyche's level. There is a much larger part of the psyche that is not based on the body's cells, that belongs to a greater level.

Your psyche and your physical reality are interwoven with each other. Consciousness perceives the material world through your cells, while thought perceives this world through thinking patterns—it is a simplified, generalized version; whereas the picture of the body and of reality perceived at the level of consciousness is extremely rich, belonging to another level.

On those occasions when you can temporarily alter your focus, the greater experience of your psyche also begins to come into play.

When you can shift your focus away from physical reality—for example, when dreaming or meditating—you have already temporarily altered your focus. When you are no longer operating through thought patterns, the broad cognition of the whole world based on the cellular level of your consciousness can come into play.

To put it bluntly: when you are awake, and you make judgments and handle what happens around you, what do you use? You use your thinking, your thoughts, your thought patterns, your fixed ways of thinking. This process depends on your knowledge, your vision, your experience, your thinking ability, your IQ, your wisdom—every aspect is related to your thoughts. From this angle you infer whether a matter is beneficial or harmful to you, and what you should do next—all of this happens on that level. This mode of handling things is rather crude, rather simple, rather shortsighted—it can only see the few steps right in front of you. Some people can see one step ahead, some can see two or three steps ahead, but after all it is limited, because your information is limited.

But if you shift your focus away from the three-dimensional world—do not keep your attention fixed on your three-dimensional world, but return to the dream state or the meditative state—then the level of your consciousness comes into play, that is, the inner level of your psyche comes into play. That level sees a more comprehensive view, one based on overall considerations, a globalized vision. We often joke that an entrepreneur needs a globalized vision, but on this level, sorry, your cells have already achieved a globalized vision—your brain may not have done so yet. This is not a joke; it is real. Your cells take into account what other events will be triggered by the occurrence of this matter, and what effects these chain reactions will have on your own cells—whether they are beneficial or harmful—so they have been continuously deducing this on the level of your psyche, like a super, super, super quantum computer algorithm endlessly calculating these things. After the calculation is complete, it forms events, and in your dreams it even practices and rehearses them—not only deducing them in theory, but also practicing them on the stage of your dreams.

The feelings in dreams are real; the joys, angers, sorrows, and pleasures, and the body's reactions, are all the same as when you are awake. And during the actual rehearsal, your cells' reactions give it the most direct feelings—this event will bring such feelings, that event will bring such feelings. This intuitive deduction in dreams leaps beyond and surpasses your thought patterns, deducing on the level of the essence of consciousness. It is far more effective than when you are awake.

If your focus does not shift away from the three-dimensional world, the greater experience of your psyche will not come into play. Why do we muddle through daily life in confusion, with all kinds of pain and affliction? Why should we study spirituality? Studying spiritual things is to teach you to learn to temporarily shift your focus away from the three-dimensional world, so that a larger picture will emerge, so that you will have a truly global vision, so that you will know what is truly useful to you. Its realm far surpasses your level of understanding—both its ability and its realm are far higher than yours, because you judge only on the basis of your thought patterns, which is the only thing human beings can use, and it is higher than that.

You can at least sense an existence that is different from the standard of the cells.

You can sense that it is not based on the cells as the standard, but is a broader consideration on the level of the psyche that transcends the cellular level.

This experience is circular.

What does circular mean? It means simultaneous feeling, simultaneous occurrence. Once this experience departs from the focus of the material world, it is very difficult to put into language—that instantaneous understanding, instantaneous dharma joy, instantaneous enlightenment you have in meditation cannot be spoken, because language is linear and has a sequence of before and after. Events come one after another, and when I tell you a story I also have to start from the beginning. But your understanding and experience on this level is circular: in an instant, all events are experienced simultaneously. It is like the bicycle wheel diagram I drew last time—you are in the center, all events surround you, they occur simultaneously and react with you simultaneously. You perceive these events and the mutual influences among them simultaneously, all gathering and adjusting in your center. Those events are also changing, you are also changing, and the influences among events also promote the change of your whole—this is an eternally dynamic, circular knowledge system, and you sit upright within it.

How can this experience be described in language? It cannot be described. At this point you will discover that the single-threaded nature of language is so fragile and inadequate. The amount of information is too great—if you try to organize it into your normal information patterns, it will not work; nor can it be organized into the information patterns and data patterns we can normally understand. So this is the part we cannot understand; it can only be grasped intuitively. Therefore, on the level of learning spirituality, on the level of practice, after reaching a certain realm, the teacher can no longer lead you further down—there is no way to tell you anymore, so it is up to you alone.

This session's dictation ends here, and afterward some private session information was given. As for the third part of the interpretation of Chapter Eight, we will stop here for today.

This is the last part of Chapter Eight of The Nature of the Psyche, that is, the fourth part. This session is Session 786 of the book, begun on Monday, August 16, 1976, at 9:19 p.m.⁹

Before it began, Rob said it was a beautiful evening, very pleasant, though he and Jane were somewhat tired. They had not held a session the previous week, because throughout the summer they had been making appointments with experts from various fields who were interested in the work—throughout the summer, he had met with different people, scientific experts from various fields. This took time and energy, because the Seth material covers an extremely broad range, and some of the knowledge exceeded the understanding of the two of them, so they needed to supplement their knowledge. Therefore, they always hoped these visitors could bring them some new connections that might take root and develop into lasting relationships; or they might meet only once, with no further contact. In any case, that night they were both somewhat weary, feeling they had already had too much personal contact. But paradoxically, Seth was as energetic as ever.

Let us look at the formal content Seth began to deliver in this session.

First of all, the earth that you know has an atmosphere.

Within our limited space travel—our space travel is still very limited, so far we have only landed on the moon and sent some probes to Mars and other planets¹⁰—at the same time, you expect to encounter planets different from yours, or situations of alien invasion. Within our limited exploration, we always think we might encounter aliens or alien invasions, and when doing scientific analysis we always feel it is possible. Yet in such a plan, we have already calculated these possible changes—changes different from the state of our atmosphere—we have calculated all of them in as well.

So astronauts expect to encounter weightlessness, including some phenomena in space that are different from those on earth. For example, cosmic rays are relatively strong, because without the protection of the atmosphere, their intensity is very strong.

Session 786

But your concepts of space and matter are determined by your own sense organs.

How we judge space and how we judge matter all depends on our sense organs. We can see space because we have eyes, and our eyes can see space. Matter is perceived through touch -- we can touch it, and we can also see it. Our cognition of space-time and matter is determined by our sense organs.

Yet what may be matter to you may be as empty as space to beings with entirely different equipment.

We humans consider outer space to be basically close to a vacuum. So what we consider solid -- as solid as a spaceship -- may be empty to them.

Consciousness, then, must be a psychological structure.

Consciousness must be a structure of the psyche, not something material. It operates on a physical basis to handle situations -- this psychological structure depends on a physical foundation, that is, it depends on your body. If there were no body, where would this psychological structure exist? This psychological structure depends on the body to act, so you need a body to handle situations. It is an interdependent relationship.

On the spiritual level, you actually do not need a physical existence; but when you want to handle things in the three-dimensional world, you definitely need a body to help you. Without a body, you cannot handle anything in this three-dimensional world.

You could say that sense data -- the information obtained by the senses -- arrives more or less in packaged form. What does "packaged" mean? It means it is no longer raw information; the information has already been packed and processed.

However, the greater inner reality of the psyche is as deep and vast as space appears to be. He emphasizes once again that the greater inner reality within the psyche is just like the space we humans see -- so vast, so expansive, so deep and immense.

Now when information falls into your conscious mind from those greater areas...

Note that he uses "Conscious Mind," not "consciousness." Because that information comes in from the inner reality of the psyche, and it already involves the part of the inner self, so it is not something that consciousness alone can recognize -- it must be recognized through the conscious mind.

He gives a vivid analogy: the inner reality of our psyche is as deep and vast as the universe, and the information coming from the inner reality of the psyche is like objects coming from the deep space of the universe.

When this information passes through the various layers of our psychological atmosphere, it is also changed, until finally it lands on the conscious mind -- or it explodes, forming strings of images or fragments of thought.

The atmosphere is layered, with the stratosphere, the troposphere, and many other layers. For information from the inner reality of the psyche to enter the conscious mind, it must pass through the various layers of the psychological atmosphere. It is changed -- the information is changed.

Where does it land? It lands on the conscious mind. For this information to finally be understood and captured by you, it must enter your conscious mind. Or it does not land -- it explodes, forming strings of images or fragments of thought.

He uses the analogy of scale -- just like a comet entering the earth, just like any meteorite entering the earth. Passing through the atmosphere, it may land on the ground, or it may explode in midair. Everyone knows this. The information coming from the inner reality of our psyche is like meteorites and comets from outer space. When they enter the earth's atmosphere, they may disintegrate and explode in midair, or they may land directly. From the spiritual perspective, if it is captured by our conscious mind, then it has landed. After landing, it is like strings of exploding fragments -- think of a meteor shower. Those are all small meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, streaking across the night sky like shooting stars. The vast majority burn up completely in midair. The information that enters our conscious mind is like strings of images or fragments of thought -- that is, like our thoughts, and even more like our intuitions and certain psychic images. He makes this analogy in the hope that we can understand.

He says you humans are often bombarded by such alien intrusions -- the original text uses the word "alien" or "stranger"; the translation does not matter much. What is meant by "bombarded" is like the feeling of meteors falling in large numbers onto the ground. In other words, we are often bombarded by information coming from the depths of the soul or the depths of the psyche.

When you are in your normal waking state, the focus of your consciousness blocks these out. When we are awake, the focus of consciousness is on the three-dimensional world, and that incoming information entering the conscious mind is like a series of explosions -- but these inspirations and intuitions are all blocked out by us, because our consciousness focuses more on the three-dimensional world.

Just as meteorites tumble everywhere in the universe, although we can only see some of them in the night sky -- when a meteorite enters the earth's atmosphere, you see a streak of light, like the tail of a shooting star. But during the day we cannot see them, because during the day we use a way of focusing on the physical world. Why? Because during the day the light of a meteor is too weak for you, too faint to see. But meteors come during the day just the same; they do not distinguish between day and night, yet we can only see them at night. It is as if during the day we somehow filter them out, deliberately not seeing them. The focus of our consciousness stays only on the sunlit places, so we cannot see those faint meteors.

But this filtering process during the day is necessary, and very important. Because with such a filtering process, you can maintain the accuracy of your actions. In daily life, we automatically block out that information from the depths of the soul. There is a reason for this; it is not that blocking it out is wrong -- it is because we need to block it out in life. If you could not block it out, if waves of inner inspiration and intuition kept surging through you as intensely as reality itself, you would enter a state where you could not tell what was real and what was illusion. You would have problems surviving in the three-dimensional world. So there is a time and place for everything. During the day, work when you need to work, drive when you need to drive; you cannot keep fantasizing about those things coming in directly. If images kept flooding into your mind one after another, how could you drive? How could you see the traffic conditions clearly? Driving on the highway with images coming in one after another would easily cause problems.

Many strange traffic accidents happen when some drivers say they saw something while driving and suddenly swerved, losing control of the car. Sometimes it is actually because their consciousness was not focused on the three-dimensional world, and other information or images entered their mind. What they saw was real -- real in their impression -- but the other passengers in the car did not see the thing they described. So it is normal for us to filter it out during the day.

But that fine precision -- the precision of our daytime actions, unaffected by the inner senses -- what does it depend on? Endless amounts of information. The accuracy of our daytime actions, even though we block those things out, depends on that information. That information, although it cannot appear within the range of the conscious focus, is still needed. It constantly bombards you -- intuitions and inspirations from the depths of the soul -- bombarding the other layers of your psychological reality. Although it does not reach the layer of conscious focus, the other layers of psychological reality are constantly receiving the impact. That material and information becomes the raw material, and our definite physical events are formed from this blocked-out information coming from the depths of the soul. The formation of our three-dimensional world is accomplished by these things that seem to come from outer space, or by analogy from the depths of the soul. This is normal. Our earth is the same way; without these external meteorites and cosmic materials, the earth would not have developed to where it is today.

In the dream state, when your body is more or less safe and at rest, when there is no need for precise action, these psychological intrusions become more apparent.

When you are sleeping, you do not need to drive, you do not need to act; you are just lying in bed, with nothing to do in the physical world -- at this time you are relatively safe. When you are safe, the conscious mind relaxes and no longer focuses on the point of action; it is not as tense as when driving or flying a plane, and it enters a relaxed state. In that relaxed state, those psychological intrusions can be felt and become apparent. It is like how at night you can see the meteors.

Many of your dreams are like the tail of a comet.

Our dreams are like the tail of a comet. What does that mean? Their actual life has already ended. When you see a comet streaking across the sky, it has already burned and exploded in the atmosphere, burned itself out, leaving only a trail of light. What you see is its tail. So by the time you perceive it, it has already ended.

When they strike your psychological atmosphere and burst into the sparks of dream imagery, you see the flash of their disappearance -- this is your dream.

Dreams are these bits of information entering your conscious mind, and in the process they have already begun to burn and explode in the psychological atmosphere. In other words, they are no longer in their original form. What you see and feel is only a flash and a trail in the atmosphere.

Therefore, in passing through your psychological atmosphere, they have already been transformed. Within the focus of our three-dimensional consciousness, within the focus of the physical world, we cannot perceive their existence. Only when they plunge into the earth can we perceive them -- just like a comet or meteorite; only when it plunges into the earth can we see its flashing tail, and if it lands on the earth, we can also see its physical substance. But they cannot maintain their original state either.

Many meteorites are made of various materials -- some are ice, some are various metals, ores, and stones. They fall into a pattern -- what kind of pattern? A psychic pattern. They fall into our psychological pattern and naturally form themselves into the dream most suited to their own mind. Each person has their own unique psychological pattern. In this process, a dream naturally forms that is suited to you -- related to yourself, understandable to you, and fitting your current state of mind. This is how the structure of dreams is created; this is where dreams come from. And this dream is suited to your own reality and your own world.

When this intruding material falls, or moves through the layers of your psychological atmosphere, it is changed by the conditions it encounters.

He repeatedly uses the example of a meteor entering the atmosphere, because it has already changed; it is no longer the original meteorite.

He says the pattern of raindrops in a small puddle follows certain laws. When we see rain falling and there is a small puddle on the ground, observe that puddle. The raindrops fall and eventually form a small puddle. This process follows certain physical laws, closely related to the terrain of the land, the weather at the time, the nature of the rain and clouds, the height from which the rain falls, and the conditions of movement, approach, and outflow -- including air temperature, humidity, wind, and so on.

If you could have a proper understanding of all of this, then through this one small puddle, if you observed it closely from nearby and collected all the information and data, you could know the past and present weather conditions of the entire planet, and predict the possibility of storms and volcanic eruptions.

Of course you cannot do this, because it is impossible to analyze all this information, but the possibility exists. He uses this example to lay the groundwork for what follows -- if we carefully observe a tiny event, such as the formation of a small puddle, we can deduce the formation of the earth, and even the entire past and future climate of the earth. If you had a super-supercomputer that could input all the data and information, it could be done. Humans cannot do it, but it is theoretically possible.

He uses a very romantic analogy:

Dreams, then, fall sparsely into the small puddles of your mind.

Dreams are like raindrops from the sky, falling sparsely into the small puddles of your mind. Dreams follow the terrain of your psychological reality -- just as mountains, rivers, and land have their own shapes, your psychological reality also has your patterns or psychological structures.

Dreams create ever-changing psychological patterns in your mind, and send ripples outward.

It is the same principle as observing the pattern of raindrops falling into a small puddle. Raindrops falling on your psyche also create ripples.

The rain that hits your backyard is warm and gentle raindrops, clear and definite. But far above your rooftop, it may originally have been hail, yet as it fell, because of temperature changes, by the time it reached your backyard it had already become a warm raindrop.

It was originally a piece of hail, and it changed form as it fell. Once again, according to the conditions it encountered -- what climate it met; if the temperature was low enough it stayed as hail, and if the temperature was high it became a raindrop.

Therefore, this "alien intrusion" -- his description of information from the depths of the soul -- is the same. Dreams are like rainwater, because at higher levels -- "higher" in quotation marks -- the source of dreams is higher than us, so they may indeed have a very different form. Just as the raindrops that fall to the ground may have been hail, the dreams we perceive were not originally in the shape or form we now perceive.

The earth has streams, rivers, peaks, valleys, continents, and small islands. The falling rain adapts itself to these terrains; whatever terrain it falls on determines the pattern of rainfall, and it plays out nature's music. The sound of rain differs, and the results and effects differ too. Falling into a deep gully, it becomes a small stream; falling into a desert, it is instantly absorbed.

Your thoughts, your dreams, your consciousness, emotions, beliefs -- these are the natural features of your mind.

Therefore, when this external information intrudes into your spiritual world, it also follows that terrain. When information from the depths of the soul enters your dreams, it is influenced by your thoughts, your past dreams, your current dreams, your imagery -- that is, what you want to do and what your purpose is -- as well as your emotions, your current emotional state, and your beliefs. These form your psychological terrain, and when external information falls onto this terrain, it must follow that terrain.

If your backyard has a ditch, it will always collect the falling rainwater; if your backyard is a gully, whenever it rains the rainwater will gather together and then flow away.

Your beliefs are like the receiving areas.

Your beliefs are like your backyard, able to catch the rain. What do you use to collect information? Your beliefs. Beliefs are like a sieve, and also like a terrain. Depending on the terrain, the same rainwater falling on it creates different scenes. Different terrains, the same rainwater -- the scenes presented are different. So your beliefs are very important.

The intruding information will often follow the terrain and naturally fall into such basins.

Information coming from outside, or from within, will follow your terrain and enter your basin -- your basin is your beliefs. Ultimately it ends up in the information that your conscious mind can capture.

Beliefs are a method of constructing reality.

Beliefs are a method of constructing reality. We often say beliefs create reality; beliefs are a method of constructing reality, just a method. But we have over-structured our reality. This is a characteristic of us humans -- we especially like to structure our reality; whatever we do, we want to structure it, organize it, with all kinds of structures. This is what we most like to do.

You will end up with a formal mental garden, precisely laid out in what may be a rigid construction.

What is meant by "formal" is structured. We have our own set of structures, and we must follow structures that conform to our beliefs. Your psychological structure is determined by your beliefs. Whatever belief system you have, that is the psychological structure you have. It is precisely laid out, and may be such a rigid structural composition that the natural appearance of plants and flowers is completely obscured. The natural flowers and plants of nature, the natural appearance of vegetation, are all covered up by this deliberately artificial structure of yours.

Even your dream information will flow into structured patterns.

Because your beliefs are a kind of structure. The information in dreams enters this structural system, just like terrain, like the structure of mountains and rivers. Dream information is like raindrops. Whatever kind of ground the rain falls on determines what kind of scene is formed. How it flows, where it flows, whether it gathers or disperses -- the course of the rain on the ground does not depend at all on the rain itself, but on the terrain it falls on. The terrain determines the rain. Where dream information goes and how it is applied -- your terrain is an already structured pattern. Your belief system is this structured pattern; whatever information comes in must be filtered through its pattern.

You know that the natural world constantly changes form, but when you experience an object, it follows certain physical laws.

Although nature constantly changes, there are certain laws; it cannot change arbitrarily. The violets on the ground cannot suddenly turn into something like a rock, because they must follow physical laws. These conditions exist only on the conscious level that you perceive. On our level of consciousness, it is the same; we are restricted by these physical laws, so a flower cannot become a stone. The entire physical world is perceived by our perceptual system, and ultimately it is still a matter of the perceptual system.

But in the larger dimensions in which the psyche handles events, the dream itself is like a laboratory.

When the psyche is handling the very vast dimensions of an event -- an event that comes from multiple dimensions -- when handling the multidimensional nature of this event, our dreams are like a laboratory. When you are awake, reality is constructed within it. When we are awake, our physical world is completed within this laboratory.

Our physical earth is attacked by the universe and by other phenomena you do not know about -- cosmic rays, solar rays, and the influence of other cosmic rays -- all attacking without your perception.

You cannot feel it, but it is very important to your survival. Although you cannot feel the existence of these cosmic rays and external intrusions, they are very important to your survival, yet you do not realize it.

Your psyche is attacked in the same way by phenomena that are important to your survival.

Your psyche is the same; it is attacked by phenomena important to survival, but you are not aware of their importance. You must remember that these things you cannot perceive are very important, because they determine your survival.

In the dream laboratory, this information is processed, collected, and finally formed into dreams that you remember or do not remember.

In the dream laboratory, information from outside and from the depths of the soul is collected, processed, rehearsed, and then formed into dreams that you remember or do not remember.

It is already a dream translated from other events, turned into a form you can recognize.

Whether remembered or not, it is already something translated from other events, turned into a form we can understand and recognize. The original information has already changed.

Every dream you remember is quite legitimate in other forms of your memory.

What does "legitimate" mean? It means logical, having a certain existence. The dream itself seems to have a certain reasonableness.

Because the information has been broken down and conforms to the contours of your own intent and purpose.

Why are the dreams you can remember all quite legitimate, as if very close to real life? It is because the original information has already been broken down by you, conforming to the contours of your current will, current intent, and current purpose -- it is related to what you are thinking right now. You use such a mindset to interpret the most original information.

But such a dream is also a symbol of another unrecorded event.

The essence of this dream is another event that cannot be recorded -- because it happens in another space-time -- and this dream is the symbol of that event. A dream is a symbol.

What does this mean? Let me give an example to help you understand. When rain falls from the sky and reaches the ground, what you see is water. In the air, you see raindrops. But what was it at the very beginning? You do not know. Above the clouds, in the cumulus clouds, temperature differences are generated, and there is lightning and so on inside, causing those small particles to condense. Because the higher the altitude, the lower the temperature, water vapor condenses into water droplets, or even into ice crystals. We will not go into how rain forms in the atmosphere; I am just telling you that the raindrops you see were not originally raindrops. Before it fell, it was not a raindrop; what it originally was, you no longer know. But the raindrop you now see is a symbol of its original form -- or rather, a symbol of the meeting of two air currents. A high-pressure cold air current and a low-pressure warm, moist air current meet, and clouds and rain are formed. Rainwater is the symbol of these two air currents meeting. When we see rain falling somewhere, we know that above that region there must be two air currents, one cold and one warm and moist.

This is an event, and the symbol of this event is the raindrop. The analogy he uses is: the dream you see is like a raindrop. The thing this dream originally symbolized, we have not remembered; we can only sense its existence through the symbol.

It is one not recorded in consciousness, like a meteorite.

Just like a shooting star, we only see a streak of light, but can you record it? It has already dissipated in the atmosphere; you cannot find any real evidence of its existence. It is as if it never existed -- but it did emit a streak of light. When you watch a meteor shower, many meteors streak across the whole sky, very spectacular, but where are those meteors? Gone, already vanished into the atmosphere. The streak of light you see is only a symbol of the meteor's existence, proof that the meteor once existed.

Continuing:

In a certain way, the reality of dreams is closer to the true nature of events than your experience of physical events leads you to suppose.

When we have a dream and remember it after waking, we assume what the dream represents. For example, if in a dream you break up with your boyfriend, you assume you might break up in the future; if you win the lottery in a dream, you wonder if you will win the lottery in the future. These are all your assumptions about the dream. His point is that the event the dream truly represents is closer to the essence of the event than what you assume. What you assume is all your own imagining, your own speculation, because you do not know what the dream truly means.

Just as when rainwater falls to the ground, the shape of the ground determines how the rainwater flows, and this has nothing to do with the original nature of the rainwater.

So your dreams often seem chaotic, because your reference points are too small.

Our reference points are limited to the very small visual range of the physical world. Our level of awareness is not high enough, and our perspective is not broad enough. We cannot accommodate the dimensions that add certainty; we do not allow those dimensions that truly exist to be added. We can only see our three-dimensional world, and those higher-dimensional worlds that exist, we do not acknowledge and do not accept. You only observe things from a three-dimensional perspective. It is like observing rainwater when you can only stand on the ground, with no way to fly into the air, and even less ability to stand on a satellite and observe from a global perspective the meaning of this rainwater, its formation, and its impact on the world's climate. When you look at rain from a satellite cloud image versus looking at rain from the ground, they are two completely different concepts.

Once again, in a certain way, the world is far more circular in nature.

He talked a lot about the circular nature earlier; when you hear "circular nature," you immediately think of the bicycle -- that is the example from the first section of Chapter 8. That section is very important, because it will be used repeatedly later.

Real events are like the circumference of a bicycle wheel; these events interact with each other through you at the center, happening simultaneously. This is their true nature.

In dreams, you can experience the past and the future -- you can dream of dead people, and they will reappear in the dream. And in your terms, physical events are now indeed formed.

Our three-dimensional world's events indeed happen because a timeline exists, with the interplay of past, present, and future. So we think that the occurrence of these events is definite and inevitable. Past and future are in fact not separated, although in our perception they are separated and completely unable to touch each other -- but in reality they are not. If you do not understand this part, go back to Chapter 8, Section 1, and think about that bicycle. Among the events around that axle, there is no past, no present, no future. Only when the bicycle wheel presses against the ground and leaves a track on a dirt road, which event is pressed down first and which event is pressed down later, can that form the one-way flow of time in our three-dimensional world.

A dream is like a rubber band, but it is not a rubber band.

Your dream is somewhat like a rubber band, but it is not a rubber band. We will explain this part later.

Continue with the following introduction:

You begin to read newspapers and maintain regular physical communication with your own kind.

We obtain this information by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching television, and then going online and looking at our phones.

News influences future time.

A piece of news will certainly influence a future event. For example, recently there is some policy, or the country has announced some information, or a vicious incident occurred somewhere that led to a change in the law -- all of these will influence future events. When individuals and governments make decisions, we all take this kind of information into consideration. For example, if you want to study in the United States, then you have to reconsider whether a U.S. visa is as easy to obtain as in previous years. Basically, the difficulty of studying in the United States now has increased by who knows how many times compared to before; compared with last year it is simply one world above and one world below. All of this is obtained from the news. This information changes your timeline -- originally you might already have been studying in the United States this year, but because of this matter, you might go to study in Britain, Europe, or Japan instead.

Newspapers are not the events they discuss, although newspapers claim to be a kind of event.

The events reported in newspapers are not the events themselves; they are only reports of the events.

Dreams, Symbols, and the Nature of Events

So newspapers cannot be called events; a newspaper is only a report of an event. Although from a certain angle, the newspaper itself can also be called a type of event—things that happen in the media can all be called events. But what is the media itself? It is a report of events, and after reporting, it itself becomes one of the events. For example, if a certain TV station broadcasts some news, does that count as an event? It does. But in essence, it is a report of an event.

A newspaper is composed of a set of symbols. Its report of an event is composed of a set of symbols, and through reading, we learn how to interpret these symbols. When we read a newspaper, we can use our own understanding to interpret these symbols and restore them to the event, but it is not the event.

If you watch TV news, you have a broader perspective on a news event. Why is television so popular? Its perspective is broader than that of a newspaper. Television is a continuous picture, and each person can pick out from it the point of interest that they care about. Although the cameraman will focus on the center of the screen, the center of the image, you can pay attention to the edges and corners, or to some information the cameraman did not notice. A newspaper is different: you can only see the feelings of the editor or reporter who wrote the article. Whatever he wants to write, that is what you can see; what he does not write, you will not know. So the perspective of television is broader.

But TV news is also not the event. Suppose the news is showing a war, for example the recent war between the two countries Armenia and Azerbaijan¹¹. From the TV images we see a tank being directly blown up by a drone, and so on. These images are only the images we see in the TV news; you are not truly witnessing people's deaths, and you are not truly standing at the scene watching a person being blown up. So what you see is an image formed through translation; it is a symbol. What you see is a picture, not the scene. The image represents people—the image of these people who were blown up in the war—it represents these people, but the image is not these people. No matter how many times you watch images of soldiers and battles in the TV news, you are never a soldier, and you can never experience what a soldier feels. Symbols carry information, but symbols are not the events they record.

At the same time, some of your dreams are like stories on paper, telling you about events that happen in other parts of the psyche. And others are like broadcast pictures, perhaps carrying more information about the event, but still unable to contain those events. Some dreams are like watching a news report; they are only a record of events happening in certain places deep within your spirituality, but they are never the event itself, only a record of the event, and they may also carry the reporter's own unique personal perspective and personal inclination within them. Sometimes your dreams are strings of events, like watching a movie. The pictures carry more information than words, but no matter how much information there is, it is still not the event itself; it is only a symbol of the event.

Dreams and Group Reality

But psychologically and physically, you have been issuing announcements in a constant inner communication:

Psychologically and physically, you have been issuing announcements in a constant inner communication.

Not an outer communication system—not that you have a television station, not that you have a newspaper, no. It is that inwardly, in your body and your psyche, you are constantly issuing announcements. What announcements? Issuing dream announcements—the original text does have the word "dream" in it. On this level, each person's dreams, individual dreams, help to form group reality. One person's dreams are helpful and useful to the formation of group reality. Yet to some degree, individual dreams are also generated by group reality.

It is like how local weather conditions have an influence on the world's climate, yet at the same time, is local weather also formed by the world's climate? Yes. Between them there is just this kind of subtle relationship. The weather of one place is inevitably influenced by the climate of the whole world. Of course, we often talk about the El Nino phenomenon and so on; this kind of climatic phenomenon affects the entire globe. But if the climate affecting the entire globe affects the climate of a certain place, would you say that the climate of that place is completely passive and can only be influenced by others? Not at all. Because the climate of every place in turn affects the climate of the whole world. So local weather affects the climate of the whole world, and the world's climate also forms local weather; between them there is just this kind of relationship.

Just as your individual dreams form a group world, and the group world in turn influences your individual dreams; between them there is just this kind of relationship. Complicated, isn't it? It really is complicated. This is not as simple a matter as you might think.

Your earth exists within the scope of this physical universe. You, on the other hand, exist within the scope of your psyche; you exist within your soul. The world you consider real—the world you believe actually happens—depends on all the other worlds that occur within your psyche, just as the existence of the earth depends on all the other aspects of the physical universe.

He gives another example: the earth exists within this universe, just as you exist within your soul; these two are the same. The existence of the earth depends on the existence of the entire physical world, the entire universe, while your existence depends on the overall existence of your psychic world. I don't know whether you can understand what he means by this example; he draws an analogy between the two.

The Multidimensional Nature of Events

As you understand these events, it is a multidimensional activity, an intrusion into your space and time. These things that you perceive—one thing after another happening around you—what is the occurrence of all events? Multidimensional activity, that is, an activity that is itself high-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional—these high-dimensional activities—an intrusion into our three-dimensional world, intruding into where we are. Like a meteor from outer space entering our earth, something similar to that.

Events are a reflection of your dreams. The things in your dreams reflect something, and in real life similar events will occur. Just as your dreams project many anticipated events that you know and experience. In a manner of speaking, the events you know are only fragments of those events in which you are also intimately involved.

What he means by this is that the things you experience in real life are only one selected from countless possible events in your dreams. One that you have intimately experienced—only experienced in dreams, not in reality—one of those events you have experienced in dreams. So you are not unfamiliar with events.

In saying this, he does not deny your great validity. What I mean by saying this is not that your real life has no meaning, that everything is decided in dreams. He says, be sure to remember, I have not denied your great validity, that is, your validity in the three-dimensional world. This is not in conflict.

What he wants to tell you is that every event, its inner nature is a multidimensional state. Any event, it is something that happens in high-dimensional or multidimensional space-time, intruding into our three-dimensional world, a tail that we see, or a sign, or an image, or a representative, a symbol—that is what it means. So the inner nature of the world is multidimensional, it is always multidimensional. It occurs within a framework that you cannot structure—in that kind of multidimensional world, you cannot apply it in the way that we use so skillfully in the three-dimensional world. It cannot be structured, it has no logic, it cannot be structured. Why? Because it is circular, how can you structure it? It cannot be structured.

Because you usually do not focus your attention in that direction, therefore you do not know how to structure that multidimensional world. What you prefer to deal with are activities that can be practically manipulated—because we cannot handle those high-dimensional things, so we can only handle low-dimensional things. That thing we cannot handle, it completely escapes our understanding, it has no logic and structure at all, so we are not very good at dealing with it, and not very willing to deal with it either.

The Manipulation of Events: A Valuable Psychological Technique

As for the actual manipulation of events, coming back to our three-dimensional world, manipulating an event -- imagining something happening, imagining its course and the direction of its unfolding as the outcome we hope for -- this is indeed a technique of considerable psychological value. This part was mistranslated; it should be said to be a psychological technique of considerable value.

Of course, we have learned so much -- starting from Seth Speaks, all the way through The Magical Approach, and now including The Nature of the Psyche -- what are we doing? Are we not learning this very technique? How, on our psychic level, to actually manipulate the occurrence of our events? Is the manipulation of events not an ability we have always wanted to acquire? Right, this is our true thought. We do want to control it, we do want to manipulate it. Although we know that physical reality is a reflection of inner reality, we still want to manipulate it a bit. This is our true thought. Perhaps after we have finished manipulating it, we will no longer want to manipulate it, feeling that it is quite boring -- just like a child playing a video game: wherever you point, it hits there; what fun is that? But at the very beginning you still want to manipulate it, because previously you felt it could not be manipulated.

What kind of psychological technique is this manipulation? And it is of considerable value:

In it, your consciousness and attention are full and completely focused.

If you want to obtain actual manipulation of events, you must make your consciousness and your attention -- full, meaning the energy is very strong, the two of them very full -- the focus of consciousness must be placed upon this. The attention of consciousness is the focus of consciousness; it must be full, and it must be completely focused, and only then can you bring effectiveness and meaning within a fairly small scope of activity.

So Seth speaks very objectively; he does not say that you can change the world, change the globe, change this or that thing. Because that is still influenced by other mass events, and still influenced by the psychological structure of the whole group and the belief system of the group. You, for your part, concentrate on the matters you yourself are concerned with, focus the focal point of your consciousness, be completely attentive, and you can change it within a relatively small scope, bringing effectiveness.

The word Seth uses is very interesting; again he says it brings effectiveness and meaning. Why does he not use the word "change"? This is also a misunderstanding many people have. In actual practice, it is not a kind of change; it really is effectiveness and meaning -- ultimately it will bring about this result. It does not make things happen in the way you imagined, but the final result, when you look back after some time, the things it arranged for you are more effective and more meaningful. From your perspective looking onward, compared to the result you wanted, the result it gives you is, from a higher vantage point, more effective and more meaningful, and not necessarily according to your narrow three-dimensional-world angle -- "I want this, I want that" -- not that.

The Specialization of Experience

Once again, he said he does not mean to deny the validity of that experience. I am not saying that dreams determine everything, or that the affairs of the three-dimensional world are no longer important. That is not what I mean.

I am merely pointing out one nature of the specialization of that experience.

What is meant by specialization? The experience itself may have many possible outcomes; it is a totality. For example, when you are involved with a girl, this one experience has many possible outcomes. Which one do you actualize in reality? How does your relationship with this girl develop in reality? That is a specialized nature. But the experience itself includes all the possibilities within it -- all the possibilities of your involvement with this girl are fully present within that experience. Yet at the conscious level, you can only be aware of one possibility occurring. The possibility you are aware of is a specialization, a singularization, of this rich experience; you cannot simultaneously experience the other experiences.

However, because its nature is extremely rich:

In time and space, the specialization and adjustment of that conscious psyche largely precludes other, less specialized contact with reality.

This sentence is again hard to understand. Actually, to put it simply, the nature of experience is diversity, the existence of multiple possibilities. Your involvement with this girl has many possibilities: it could continue to develop into a romantic relationship, into being boyfriend and girlfriend, and eventually perhaps marriage; or after a few days of contact you might not get along and part ways; or you might be in love for a while and then break up. All of these are existing possibilities, and all of these possibilities are its nature.

But within a single time and space, in our physical world, it is constrained by time and space. Although the experience itself, or the event itself, is a multidimensional existence, a multi-dimensional existence, in which there is no time and space, our physical world does have time. Therefore, in your present time and space, you can only choose one event to occur; you can only choose one path to walk. You cannot walk several paths in parallel at the same time; you can only choose one. If you choose this one, you cannot choose that one -- with a girl, if the two of you choose to be close platonic friends, you cannot be boyfriend and girlfriend. You can treat him as your male best friend, that is fine, but at that point the two of you can no longer develop into a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. This is the limitation of time and space; there is no way around it; this is one reality.

You have precluded all those possible contacts that are not specialized, that are not on the path you chose. You have little contact with those possibilities. Perhaps occasionally there is still contact in dreams, perhaps in the space of your imagination there is still such contact. Therefore he did not use "completely"; he used "largely" -- it has not been completely precluded. Why has it not been completely precluded? Because in parallel worlds, sometimes you may still cross over; you may still frequently jump between two spacetimes. So he did not speak in absolutes. In this spacetime you chose one mode of development with this girl; in another spacetime you may have chosen a different mode of development. But in your present moment, for you, you can only choose one; the other one does not exist for you, it is only a possibility. Yet when you possess the ability to travel through spacetime to that parallel world, you can go to that spacetime and feel it. That has already been explained very clearly in the world of probabilities.

And even within this world of yours, you can also feel, in the dream state, different experiences with this girl -- is that not also a kind of experience? So it is not absolute either. That is why he used "largely" -- largely precluding all the other paths that are not the one you chose. For you, those events are mostly no longer in contact; occasionally there is contact in dreams, occasionally in parallel spacetimes there may still be possible contact, but for the most part there is no contact. If you marry her, then the possibility of marrying another girl no longer exists for you.

The Nature of Dreams and the Limits of Their Function

Dreams, you see, often present you with a kind of ambiguity, a kind of hazy, unclear feeling, not so clear and precise, but vague and indistinct. So dreams lack the immediate impact of psychological activity on time and space—because dreams do not occur within the time and space of our three-dimensional world; they occur within a multidimensional, multi-dimensional time and space, so they lack the immediate impact on psychological activity in our three-dimensional world. That is, the impact dreams have on us, on our experience of life, is not as strong as events in waking life; it is many times weaker.

From your viewpoint, it seems that dreams are not events. From our perspective, a dream is just a dream, not an event that truly happened, so it does not have that great an impact on us. Or it happened and yet did not happen, or we think it happened but in waking life it never happened at all. So it lacks the normal intersection of time and space.

You cannot share your dreams with others. You can tell others about them, but you cannot share them. What does sharing mean? It means you cannot do it the way you do with events in the waking state—for example, if you invite a friend to dinner, then the two of you share the event of eating together; you have your experience of the meal, and he has his experience of the meal. But in a dream, you cannot say, let us agree to have a dream together tonight, to go on a trip together—that does not work. In a dream, you cannot share it with others.

You also seem unable to remember time in dreams—as if we cannot remember the events in dreams either. You say, that is not right, I can remember dreams. Well, you can only remember a very small number of them; most of your dreams you cannot remember. But in fact, you only consciously remember certain emphasized times in your life; those important times you remember, while the ordinary, mundane details of your days all seem to vanish like dreams. Just as the trivial matters of your daily life, like eating and sleeping, you cannot remember at all; they vanish like dreams. You cannot remember your dreams, just as in waking life you cannot remember the unimportant things. Of course you certainly do have memories of dreams, although generally speaking you are not aware of them.

The Formation of Events: From Before Birth to After Death

There is a certain skill involved in the formation of events. What kind of skill? When you are dreaming, you perform this skill very well. For events to happen, a certain skill is required, and when we dream we make use of this skill with great proficiency. The events in dreams happen with particular ease.

Before you were born, before you had even come into the world, you had already begun the formation of events. You already had this ability. For example, an unborn infant, a baby, its dreams in the placenta, in the womb, are often mixed together with its mother's dreams. The child dreams too, but it cannot distinguish its own dreams from its mother's.

The dreams of those who are about to die also often involve dream structures that are already preparing for future existence. When a person is about to die, besides facing the problems of his present body, he also has to prepare for the world he is going to enter in the future. So you will find that people who are about to die often sleep a great deal, and in the last few days they are basically in a comatose state. Before that, they also sleep more than they are awake, and they dream constantly. Their dreams are especially numerous, and the dreams are all vivid and lifelike, all of them from when their bodies were healthy, when they had no illness, all kinds of things. This is also preparation for the new time and space -- the time and space into which they are going to be born. Events are all prepared in advance in dreams, rehearsed in advance, given a preliminary rehearsal, so to speak.

In fact, when death is near, a great acceleration of dreams is involved. When death is near, dreams are especially numerous, and the person often cannot distinguish between reality and the dream state. He can see many strange and peculiar things. Because new possibilities are being considered. He has to consider -- within his level of consciousness, beneath it, or in places outside his conscious level -- the spiritual part of him is preparing for the place he is going to. But at this time his consciousness does not know this. Would you say he is consciously preparing? You cannot tell. His consciousness would not prepare for this; his consciousness still wants to live. He would not prepare these things. But his spiritual part has long known, has long known what he will encounter and what might happen, so it begins to prepare for the new world he is going to enter, preparing psychologically, spiritually, and psychically. Therefore at this time, the acceleration of dreams provides a kind of impetus on the spiritual level, so that a new birth can be achieved. It is necessary.

No Beginning, No End

He said some of these are extremely difficult to interpret. When I try to tell you about these things, it is indeed very hard to interpret them for you. But there is one thing that can be certain, and it is true:

Nothing has a beginning or an end.

I cannot explain the rest clearly, but this can be affirmed. For life this is true. You think life has a beginning and an end, but he said there is no beginning and no end. For dreams this is also true. In your terms, this information is not practical -- from our human perspective, this information is not correct. How could there be no beginning and no end? And it is all things that have no beginning and no end. Because it negates your direct experience, this is a subversion, a complete negation, of the experience we have accumulated from childhood to adulthood in the three-dimensional world.

However, through inquiry and some practice:

You can, in the middle of a dream, expand it to larger proportions. You will then experience one dream enclosed within another, or several dreams occurring at once, all involving a particular theme.

Or several dreams occurring simultaneously, occasionally at the same time, all involving a particular theme -- these dreams are all about one thing, all related to one theme. And these simultaneously occurring dreams, the various aspects of possibility, each one is interrelated with every other aspect. Although to you, the connections may not be obvious -- that is, the connection between one aspect of this possibility and another aspect may not be obvious to you. But to them there is an inner connection. In other words, these dreams may all involve one theme, but you cannot perceive any necessary connection between them, and you cannot see what that theme actually is, yet they do have an inner connection.

One dream may be contained within another dream, and it is also possible for several dreams to occur simultaneously -- this is entirely possible, unlike our understanding. Everything in life is contained within every other thing -- just as your dreams are contained within other dreams. So one thing is necessarily contained within other things, and one thing contains other things within it. Each life is contained within every other life -- the life you think of as your reincarnated life, it is contained within another life. Think about it: whose life is your life contained within? It is contained within one of your other reincarnated lives.

So within the dream state, what is the feeling of reality like? In our dreams, our perception of the world is more genuine. Why? Because it is one nested within another, and that is the true nature of things. But in our waking life we think it is not so -- in waking life we think events happen one after another, with a beginning and an end. If he says that every event in the world has no beginning and no end, that you are within me and I am within you, mutually nested, endlessly infinite, then if this is true, then the things in dreams are more real. Can you understand his logic here? Just like what he said earlier, he said that nothing has a beginning or an end, and he said this is certain.

If this is true, then what you feel in dreams is real. Because in dreams, one dream is nested within another dream, one dream contains another dream, one event influences another event, and another event is nested within this event -- all of this has no beginning and no end. Therefore the feeling in dreams is the true reality. The premise is that nothing has a beginning or an end, and this conclusion is true. This must be noted carefully.

Creativity: The Threshold Connecting Waking and Dreaming

Within a certain range, you can become more conscious and more aware of dreams. That is, you consciously become aware of the process of dreaming. You may consciously dream — that is, you can bring consciousness into the dream and be aware of the dream. You consciously observe your own dreaming process, watching yourself dream like a bystander. That also allows your dreaming self to express itself more in the waking state.

If you can have this kind of lucid dream — in the dreaming state, you are first of all a dreaming self, participating in the events of the dream, while at the same time another consciousness steps out to observe how this dreaming self is performing in the dream — if you possess such an ability, then in your waking state you will have a more excellent performance and stronger abilities. What does this mean? In your waking state you can also step out and observe yourself in the same way: What am I doing? What am I up to? I do these things every day — where is the meaning in them? Every event is a symbol — what is the real meaning behind the symbol? If you have this kind of awareness and realization, then in your waking state, in your real life, you will have greater accomplishments and greater development.

He says that by means of techniques mostly connected with creativity, you can achieve this point. Someone says, great, I want this ability, I want to train myself to enter dreams with consciousness. Then Seth tells you a method: when you practice techniques connected with creativity, generally you can achieve this.

Creativity can connect the reality of waking and dreaming. It is itself a threshold, with waking on one side and dreaming on the other. Within it, your waking self and your dreaming self are mixed together, forming a construction that belongs equally to the reality of waking and dreaming.

He says:

Unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking life, you cannot understand how you form the physical events of your life.

Using creativity as a link or connection, you can achieve this point. Simply put, when we do any creative work — painting a picture, composing a piece of music, writing a novel, creating a poem, including making films, taking photographs, and so on — as long as it is creative work, anything you have never done before is called creative work — what are you doing?

In The Magical Approach, it was explained that when you do any creative work, you are actually already traveling outside our three-dimensional reality. All your creative work is completed outside three-dimensional time, not within present time. Because when you are creating, you have actually already entered a state very close to the dreaming state, to what is now popularly called the "flow" state, or what we often call a "trance" state. When you are creating, it is generally only in this state that you can create.

So at this time, the boundary between waking and dreaming is no longer so distinct. You are riding on this threshold, with waking on one side and dreaming on the other, and you can see both sides. Because creation itself is a state similar to flow, similar to trance, a state of total concentration, you are essentially standing on the threshold between waking and dreaming. When you are creating, you are certainly doing it with consciousness — with purpose, I want to paint something, I want to create a song, I want to complete something, this is conscious — yet the entire creative process itself extends beyond three-dimensional time. At this time it is similar to lucid dreaming.

So when you want to obtain this ability to dream while awake, you need to do some creative work. This is one of the thresholds, and you can cross it to reach that state. Unless you can understand what the nature of your creativity is, unless you can understand what the nature of dreams is, unless you can understand these games — the so-called games are rehearsals, your dreams are rehearsing the time of all possibilities — when you know the essence of these things, then you can truly understand how the events of this three-dimensional world come about when you are awake. They are all created by you in this state, all selected from among numerous possibilities through rehearsal and practice, one chosen to become a real event in your three-dimensional world. So only when you understand this can you truly understand how you form the events of your life — the temporal, physical, real events.

Dreams: The Highest Art

In a certain sense:

Dreams are a structured unconscious game.

What is called the unconscious is what your conscious mind cannot perceive. Your mind, joyfully dreams that — it is using itself — this is quite convoluted here. Your mind very joyfully dreams that the mind is using itself, free from the concerns and limitations of practical life. It is playing a game: to experiment, to test, to rehearse all kinds of probable realities. Trying things out in dreams, you can regard it as a kind of unconscious game. Because it is not controlled by your conscious mind, nor can your conscious mind perceive it, but in dreams it is happening all the same.

Your dreams are a free game of your mind, a playground for games. But this spontaneous activity is at the same time an artistic training for forming our actual events. You are improving your ability to form events, repeatedly rehearsing and polishing events.

Probabilities in dreams can be tossed around by you, played with back and forth in dreams, tried out without substantial consequences — without physical consequences. You can do whatever you want in dreams.

The mind follows its own natural inclination. The mind uses far more energy than you allow it to use. You might say, is the mind not tired? It is busy every day, why does it have to rehearse every outcome? Would it not be enough to choose a comfortable one? He says the mind has far more energy than you think, it is extremely vigorous, not tired at all. It releases its great imagination, experiencing the infinite. All of your imaginings are released, and from these imaginings you choose the substance you will experience. After they are released in dreams and rehearsed one by one, then you choose which one you will experience in actuality. And the thing you experience and go through in actuality has in fact already been experienced and rehearsed in your dreams, only you do not know it.

At the same time, dreaming is the highest art. And all people are skilled at it, everyone is an advanced player. Do not say you cannot do it — you can too.

There are structured dreams — dreams with logic, with cause and effect, with storylines, just as waking life has structured games. There are group dreams in which many people participate — these group dreams are not just one person, many people take part in the dream. These shared dreams have a common theme, and the theme serves as a foundational framework. This theme may be a group theme, or it may be your personal theme, and you will have a series of dreams all connected to this theme.

Yet on the whole, the spontaneous activity of your mind will continue. This process of dream-making will continue, because your mind enjoys its own activity — it enjoys it, and that is why it keeps playing.

At this point he finished the dictation. As Seth, Jane transmitted a few more pages of data for herself, and then this section came to an end. This section is the last part of the interpretation of Chapter Eight, that is, the fourth interpretation of Chapter Eight, and it ends here.

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注释与核实

1. This claim could not be verified. ↩

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩

3. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), "Col·legi de Cordelles. Barcelone, Espagne (1538 - 1767)" (https://data.bnf.fr/14520568/col_legi_de_cordelles_barcelone__espagne/) ↩

4. According to Mike's original words, it was "100 billion brain cells"; upon verification, it should be "the adult human brain has about 86 billion neurons (and about 85 billion non-neuronal cells), not 100 billion." (Source: Azevedo et al., "Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain," Journal of Comparative Neurology, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.21974) ↩ ↩²

5. According to Mike's original words, it was "only 200 bytes per second"; upon verification, it should be "the rate of conscious human information processing (behavioral output) is about 10 bits per second, not 200 bytes per second; meanwhile, the amount of information taken in by the senses is as high as about 1 billion bits per second." (Source: Jieyu Zheng, Markus Meister, "The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?," Neuron, https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00808-0) ↩

6. According to Mike's original words, it was "fifty trillion cells"; upon verification, it should be "the total number of cells in the human body is about 37 trillion (3.72×10^13), with current academic estimates concentrated between 30 and 37 trillion, not 50 trillion." (Source: Bianconi et al., "An estimation of the number of cells in the human body," Annals of Human Biology, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23829164/) ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. According to Mike's original words, it was "one hundred billion brain cells"; upon verification, it should be "the human brain has about 86 billion neurons (and about 85 billion non-neuronal cells), not one hundred billion." (Source: Azevedo et al., "Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain," https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.21974) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Personal Sessions: Book 3 of The Deleted Seth Material," Session 786 (https://nowdictation.com/q/book:tps3+session:786+easier/) ↩

10. Source: NASA, "Moon Facts" (https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/) ↩

11. Source: International Crisis Group, "The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: A Visual Explainer" (https://www.crisisgroup.org/visual-explainers/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-visual-explainer) ↩