Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 9

The "Reading Guide" and "Chapter Highlights" in this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter centers on pure energy, the psyche, and the birth of events. Pure energy is indivisible and indestructible, simultaneously created at every point and always conscious; the psyche is its particular manifestation. Events are not produced by linear cause and effect, but are organized by "significant meaning," rehearsed and translated in dreams and pre-dream states, and then materialized into physical experience according to emotional intensity and conditions. Dreams therefore become the source of physical events, and creative play allows consciousness to participate directly in the birth of events.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Pure energy is indivisible and indestructible, simultaneously created at every point while always retaining consciousness.
• The psyche is a particular manifestation or gestalt of pure energy; even the smallest unit of energy contains the impetus of all possible forms.
• Events are fundamentally unrelated to linear cause and effect; causality is only a significant meaning made concrete.
• Dreams are the source of physical events; probable events must meet the conditions of space-time, emotional intensity, and fields of psychic sympathy before they can manifest.
• Consciousness mixes across species while retaining individuality; creative play and dreams allow people to participate in the birth of events.

Main Text

Session 787

Chapter 9 Title and Introduction

The title of Chapter 9 is "Characteristics of Pure Energy, the Energetic Psyche, and the Birth of Events," and it mainly explores these three themes. This chapter is relatively long, and it is divided into six parts for commentary. Today I will begin with the first part, which is Session 787 of the book, held on Monday, August 23, 1976, at 9:45 p.m.

This session begins without much extra preamble. Seth directly starts introducing the new chapter: the characteristics of pure energy. What exactly are the characteristics of pure energy? What is its relationship to our energetic psyche? And how are the events in our three-dimensional world produced?

Questions People Care About and the Deeper Truth

When people claim to be interested in the nature of dreams, they usually have certain specific questions in mind. For example, how real are the events in dreams? This is a question many people ask. What do dreams actually mean? How do dreams affect our daily lives? Everyone knows that dreams have some kind of intimate relationship with themselves, yet they also feel that dreams are very mysterious.

Even so, in your experience, certain symbols seem to have considerable universality. For example, if you dream that someone has died, or dream about something else, these similar symbolic things get summarized and become things like The Interpretation of Dreams by Duke of Zhou¹. Including some famous psychologists, Jung among them, they also did a great deal of dream interpretation work, collecting and organizing their own and others' dreams, seeking out certain universalities from them.

However, although these questions are clearly matters that people care about, they do not touch upon the larger events behind dream activity. Because you only see the dream event itself that you remember, and you do not see that this event itself is caused by the larger event behind it. The dreams you remember and the dreams you analyze are all transferred events, and what these events originally looked like, you no longer know. We have also never begun to touch upon the mysterious psychological activity behind the perception of any event—because this psychological activity lies beyond the range of our perception. Although it is functioning, you cannot perceive it.

Just as was discussed in the previous session: when a message from the depths of the psyche passes layer by layer through the atmosphere of our mind, by the time it is finally captured by our intellect, much has already changed in between. And in this process of passing through layer after layer, the changes within each layer, the brilliant sparks finally revealed and the traces of a meteor's fall—these are all the feeling of our dream states. We never know what that meteor itself is, nor do we know what its state was before it entered the atmosphere—the mystery behind that perception, we do not understand at all.

Dreams are an important event. Dreams are important to you precisely because they have characteristics similar to or interdependent with waking events. Behind all these questions lies a far more profound consideration, because it involves the nature of creativity and the characteristics of energy. Without these, no action would be possible. Dreams are not the bizarre and dazzling scenes that we can feel, nor do they represent symbols or prophecies about the future—the nature of dreams is far deeper than this. It involves the nature of creativity—how do we create in dreams? How do we continually rehearse and practice these probable events? This process itself is creation. At the same time, it also involves the characteristics of energy—in the process of manifestation from the nonphysical world into the physical world, questions of energy are involved. Without these, we would not produce any action in physical life. That is why dreams are so important to us.

The psyche is a particular manifestation of pure energy

Basically, the psyche is pure energy manifested in a particular form. "Appearance" is not quite the right translation here -- what is the psyche? The psyche is pure energy manifested in a particular form, something that lets you feel it, lets you perceive it.

Regarding the psyche, this book gives many definitions, and he defines it for you in different ways. Don't get hung up on which of these many definitions is the most accurate -- none of them is the most accurate, because the psyche itself is in constant change. In the final analysis, the psyche is pure energy, and that is correct. It is just that it is a particular way of expressing or manifesting, existing outside the framework you are familiar with.

It is quite difficult to consider the experience of the psyche. Within the space and time familiar to us humans, or within the scope of our thought, logic, and intellectual understanding, trying to understand what the psyche is is very difficult. Because whenever we discuss a problem within our framework, we must determine the accuracy of that problem. But the psyche is something that cannot be defined by accuracy. The very terms and definitions of what we call accuracy -- the vocabulary itself structures information, while the psyche itself is a kind of unstructured information that cannot be structured.

He says the psyche is a gestalt of energy. The word "gestalt" has been explained many times before, so there is no need to expand on it here. What is a gestalt -- it is when parts gathered together form a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts; that kind of thing is called a gestalt. The psyche is a gestalt of energy. To understand this psyche, you must realize that pure energy has such an alteration -- a tendency to constantly form patterns.

"Pattern forming" is not an easy translation to understand; it is hard to know what he means. This "pattern forming" -- "form" means to form something, and "pattern" means a model, a mold. Translating it as "pattern" is also fine, but here it refers less to a pattern and more to something like a mold, much like the mold you use to make mooncakes. This pure energy is different from other energies; it has a tendency to alter, always wanting to form some patterns, always wanting to become some form. These energies always want to take on some shape.

Because it is always forming these molds in this way, it always appears in a manifested way. Here it is not "appearance" but manifestation. This psyche always lets you perceive it in an outward way; it always has to manifest something. What is manifested then becomes the camouflage of the psyche. What you see is basically all camouflage of the psyche; it is very difficult to see the psyche itself directly.

The translator, Teacher Wang Jiqing, had good reason not to use the word "manifestation" here, because as soon as you say "manifestation," you think of the physical world. But what the psyche lets you perceive is not all physical -- including your thoughts, inspirations, intuitions, feelings, and emotions, these are all expressions of the psyche, a kind of nonphysical manifestation. But we have attached too many physical connotations to the word "manifestation," so she used "appearance." Still, let us return to the original meaning of the word: a pure energy that in itself has no shape and no qualities, like what we often speak of in Buddhism as Buddha-nature, self-nature, dharma-nature, suchness². But this energy has a characteristic -- it tends to compose itself into all kinds of forms and molds, and these forms and molds may manifest as things or events in the physical world, or they may be some thoughts, some ideas, some consciousness -- all of these are manifestations of the psyche.

The psyche can form particles, that is, matter. But whether or not these particles exist, it is still itself. The psyche can produce matter, but whether or not it produces matter, it is still itself. You cannot say that only when it produces matter is it itself, and when it does not produce matter it is not itself -- no. The psyche has no relation to matter; it has the ability to produce matter, but whether it produces matter or not has nothing to do with whether it is itself.

The Indivisibility of Energy

In the most basic terms, energy cannot be divided. In essence, energy itself cannot be divided; you cannot divide an energy. But here, our human vocabulary is almost incapable of grasping this, and we humans have a hard time understanding this indivisibility of energy.

He tells you why it is hard to understand. Energy cannot exist as a part—energy has no parts. You say, I will take a certain energy and cut it into three portions, each portion being one share of energy, and only when these three are put together do they form a complete energy? He says no. Because energy itself is not an entity, not a substance. Here the word "entity" is used, and in this book or in Seth's other books, Teacher Wang Jiqing translated it as "cunyou." But translating it as "cunyou" here is not appropriate, because the entity referred to here is not the same meaning as the entity in Seth Speaks; here it refers more to the meaning of a physical substance. Energy is not a substance; it is not like a pie that can be cut or divided.

But for the purpose of our discussion, because we need to discuss this energy, we must speak in our own way: every smallest unit of pure energy, the smallest unit, contains within it the impetus to form all possible variations of itself. Energy is indivisible, and it cannot be divided into piece after piece like a pie, with this piece being different from that piece. But for the convenience of discussion, let us provisionally use human language and say that if the smallest unit of this pure energy is one portion, then this one portion of energy also possesses the impetus of all possible variations of the entire energy.

This sentence is very important; you must remember it: every smallest unit of pure energy, even the very smallest unit of energy, possesses the impetus of all possible variations of the whole energy. What does "variation" mean? It means that this energy will form a pattern, a mold, and this pattern and mold are its variations. These variations are all camouflage of the psyche.

So what is the psyche? The psyche is pure energy. Yet even the smallest, smallest unit of this pure energy possesses the impetus to change into countless numbers of all possibilities. Of course, energy actually has no such thing as "one smallest portion," but in order for us to understand, he uses this example to explain.

Pure Energy Has No Weight but Contains Mass

The smallest unit of pure energy, to put it in our human terms, is weightless as far as you are concerned, yet it contains mass within it. It is quite interesting: it has no weight, yet it has mass. According to the law of conservation of mass and energy³, mass is not the same as weight; they are two different things. Although what it says here is clearly not the mass and weight of our physics, any object has mass, and under the influence of gravity it produces weight. An object without weight certainly has mass. But the mass it speaks of here is not the mass spoken of in physics.

What kind of mass does it have? Within its essence it still retains the propensity for creating all varieties of material form, and the prime impetus for creating all possible universes. Put in that way, we cannot think about energy without bringing to the forefront questions having to do with the nature of God or All That Is, for these terms all carry the same meaning.

It has no weight, but it has mass -- what kind of mass? It has the capacity to create heaven and earth, to create all universes. We say every person has spirituality, or a soul; here spirituality and soul mean the same thing. This spiritual, soul part of every person possesses exactly the same thing as All That Is. Even the very smallest portion of it possesses the capacity to create universes; it has the prime impetus to create all possible universes. That is to say, this smallest unit of your pure energy possesses this capability. It appears to have no weight, yet within it is contained boundless energy and mass, and it can create all possible universes -- suppose there were a hundred billion possible universes, it could create them all.

This is what Seth says: each of us is God, or as the Buddha said, everyone has Buddha-nature, and we are one with all things -- these are not empty words, nor are they reckless claims, nor are they some kind of realization that comes after entering a meditative state. This is not a realization; this is a fact.

Pure Energy Is Conscious at Every Moment

He said I can say precisely -- that is, I can say with great accuracy -- that pure energy itself is conscious at every moment. This pure energy, which is the part of the human psyche, the part of the soul, is always conscious. But these words somewhat distort his meaning, because he is talking about a consciousness that is difficult to describe. I say this, and it is not the true face of the matter either, because it is very hard to understand.

The consciousness he speaks of here is not the consciousness we ordinarily understand. This energy is conscious at every moment -- this "consciousness" is not something we can understand. The consciousness we ordinarily speak of in human terms, or the consciousness spoken of on the earthly level, or on the psychological level of our spiritual cultivation and practice -- none of these are it. If this consciousness must be defined, it is more like a kind of cosmic consciousness, but he finds it very hard to describe. You must not confuse this consciousness with that other consciousness.

He adds this passage afterward precisely because he is afraid you will confuse this consciousness with ordinary consciousness. Because when we humans speak of consciousness, we always bring human attributes into it. We cannot even understand the consciousness of a flower, the consciousness of an animal, the consciousness of a nail, the consciousness of a stone -- so it is even harder for you to understand what kind of consciousness a cosmic consciousness is. Seth is afraid you will misunderstand this consciousness as being the same as our human consciousness -- the moment he says this spirituality, this energy, is conscious at every moment, you will think, is it the same as my consciousness? If you think that way, you are wrong. This is a consciousness utterly different from yours.

To put it simply, it can be called cosmic consciousness, or the consciousness of All That Is. But to call it cosmic consciousness is also not right, because it is itself the capacity that creates the universe, so how can it be called cosmic consciousness? The universe is born from it, so calling it cosmic consciousness makes it too small. To call it the consciousness of All That Is is also not quite right, so here he uses something indescribable.

Pure energy, or any part of it -- this "part" is put in quotation marks because energy originally cannot be divided into parts. Many people do not understand: how can energy not be divided into parts? There is big energy and small energy, there is total energy and divided energy, each person has their own energy, and two people together make two portions of energy -- they always understand it this way. But what Seth means by saying energy is indivisible is that, in terms of its nature, there is no essential difference between them; they are one, and any single point can represent the whole.

Just as the Buddhist scriptures say, within a single mote of dust there can be a world⁴, or there are great thousand worlds, three thousand great thousand worlds⁵, all of which can be seen within a single mote of dust -- the same principle. Just like the example given in the previous session: you can infer the entire developmental history and geological conditions of the whole earth from a small puddle, and even the climatic state of the entire earth, if you have the ability to trace it backward -- it is the same. From any single point of the psyche, you can infer or perceive the existence of the entire universe. It is the concept of one point being everything -- this one point represents all of it, and therefore it does not have the concept of parts.

Within every energy there is a creative tendency toward individualization. Individualization means the concept of becoming independent, of differentiation; it does not necessarily mean something with human nature or human form. Every energy has its own tendency toward unique development. Therefore within any given part, all individualized conscious life has already been implied, created, and sustained. Because energy possesses the primal impetus of all possibilities, within the energy of any part there is contained this capacity to develop toward all individualizations and toward all possibilities. One energy can become a universe, can become stars and planets, can become as small as an ant or an atom -- these are all manifestations of energy, all representing the different individualizations of this energy.

Pure Energy Cannot Be Destroyed, and Every Point Is Simultaneously Created

Pure energy cannot be destroyed. Be sure to remember: pure energy cannot be destroyed, and at every point it is simultaneously created. It cannot be destroyed, this is its characteristic — isn't this chapter about the characteristics of pure energy? It begins to talk about this. And at every point it is simultaneously created; it is simultaneous, not that this is created first and then that is created.

This is beyond our understanding. In our three-dimensional world, no matter how powerful the energy, its creation still requires time; no matter how powerful the energy, it still requires a process of formation. But at the level of pure energy, this is not needed. In all universes — not just our physical universe — this process of manifestation is completed instantly and simultaneously. So time is meaningless to it; only we have a sense and cognition of time. To it, everything is created simultaneously.

Your physical universe and its laws give you little evidence of this activity. In the world we live in, there is no evidence of this, because what we see is always a process with a before and an after, from beginning to development. On our physical level, evidence only shows you the appearance of time or decay. What we see is only the passage of time and things going from birth to death — I mean anything, not just life, including rocks and planets, all the same, the entire process from newness to decay. Because our world has the time aspect, what Buddhism calls the "mark of a lifespan" — the "mark of a lifespan" spoken of in the Diamond Sutra⁶. Evidence only lets us see this; we cannot see the fact that energy is simultaneously produced.

So what he is saying here is completely unprovable in our current three-dimensional and physical world, and one could say it is completely opposite to the laws of our three-dimensional world. If you want to prove this, it is impossible. Your own psychological activity is the closest evidence you have. If you want to prove this matter, you can only seek within your own heart. So this is why the prophets of ancient times, the eminent monks and great virtuous ones, the wise prophets all over the world, all tell us that we must seek within. Because inner psychological activity is the closest to this evidence.

Although you cannot use it that way — although on the psychological level you can approach this evidence, or perceive a part of it, just as we jokingly say, you often have this kind of ESP or that kind of ESP, able to see spiritual aspects different from our three-dimensional world. But you cannot use it that way. You cannot use it in the three-dimensional world — you have seen this evidence of the spiritual world, in meditation, sitting practice, out-of-body experiences, or various states, this evidence within your heart, you perceive it, but you cannot use it in the three-dimensional world, because it is not a thing of the three-dimensional world. You live in this three-dimensional world, and you must be subject to the laws and rules of this three-dimensional world.

Although this three-dimensional world is projected by yourself, since you have projected it, you are within this painting — just as if you were the figure under the painter's brush, although you are also the painter, yet on this canvas you must follow the rules of the canvas; you can only exist in a flat way, not in a three-dimensional way. I give such an example to help you understand.

The Psyche Is Freshly Created at Every Point

Pure energy has no beginning and no end. Do not ask when it began, when it will end, or where the universe came from. Your psyche, at every point of its existence, is freshly created. At every point of your psychic existence -- every life, every lifetime, every present moment of every reincarnation, every minute and every second -- in every moment of your life, it is freshly created. This must be understood. So all of this is still happening, including what you think of as the past; it too is being freshly created. Every point of your psychic existence -- and here there are quotation marks, "every point" is our human way of saying it -- includes your past, present, and future, includes this life of yours and the next life and the life after that.

The physical universe was not born from an explosion of energy. No matter what your human perception of the universe's outward appearance may be -- through the redshift of light⁷ we know the universe is continuously expanding outward. How fast is this expansion? Quite fast; scientists have made specific calculations. But this is only how it appears to us on the surface. Because when we observe the present phenomena of the universe, it looks like an explosive object that has been flying outward all along, getting farther and farther away. Through this surface observation, humans have concluded that the universe must have originated from the explosion of a single point -- this is how the Big Bang theory⁸ came about.

We believe the universe was produced from an explosion of energy. From that initial starting point, the so-called point of infinite mass, infinite energy, and infinitely small size. At the Planck length -- the Planck length is 10 to the negative 36th power meters⁹, a size countless trillions of times smaller than an atom -- there was an infinite energy. How great was this energy? Infinitely great. The mass of that point was also infinitely great. In such a tiny place, so many times smaller than an atom, there was an inexhaustible energy and an inexhaustible mass, and then that point exploded, forming our universe. This is the current scientific understanding of the entire universe, because the phenomena observed all approach such a conclusion.

Yet we humans, whether scientists or ordinary people, can all sense that this is highly improbable. No matter how you think about it, it is a strange thing. Unless you treat that point as a white hole, but it is not a white hole; a white hole is the reverse of a black hole in the universe. Since it is not a white hole, what exactly is that thing? No one can explain it clearly. So Seth here directly denies this point, directly denies modern physics' understanding of the origin of the entire universe. He says the origin of the universe was not produced by an explosion of energy, did not come about through the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang theory holds that energy was dispersed, but in fact it was not; rather, at every moment, at every point, it is in a state of being created. What actually happens is not that energy was separated, but that energy is created at every point. The matter it creates is not, as we imagine, exploding outward from a single point, scattering in all directions, falling apart. Regarding the Big Bang theory, you can find a great many explanations online. Seth here directly denies the Big Bang theory -- energy is created at every point, at every moment, and there is no concept of time at all.

The Psyche as a Medium

The basic experience of the psyche is dealing with an activity you cannot directly perceive. The psyche's basic function is dealing with activity we cannot perceive -- it says this quite plainly. We can perceive it indirectly, but not directly. Yet at that level of existence, it is the source from which you can perceive events. That activity which cannot be perceived is nevertheless the cause of the events we can ordinarily perceive -- the events we can perceive are all generated from that place, from that activity which cannot be perceived.

And therefore, as a medium in which your dream and waking events occur -- what else is the psyche? It is also the medium in which your dream events and waking events occur. It is an intermediary thing, between the nonphysical world and the physical world, the psyche is a medium. It plays a crucial role; it can manifest a nonphysical world into a physical world -- all of this is the function of the psyche.

In that respect, you cannot tear your events apart to find the reality behind them. You cannot keep dissecting and anatomizing an event to see what it is actually composed of behind it. Because the reality behind that event is not stuck to the event like glue. If you tear the event apart, crush it, no matter how you dissect it, you will not see the "glue" behind that event -- you cannot find it. Yet it is intangibly entangled within your own psychological existence. This reality behind the events that form your true three-dimensional world -- since it cannot be discovered by you, nor seen by you, then what kind of state is it actually in? It says it is an intangible entanglement within your psychological existence. Within your psyche there exists an intangible entanglement that forms the events of your three-dimensional world.

Between what you consider waking events and dream events, there are obvious differences. You can of course clearly separate the two, you can distinguish them, and you work very hard to make sure they are cleanly divided. In your world, the so-called conventional and practical sanity and physical manipulation depend on your ability to make this distinction -- the way we define what it means to be "sane" is far too narrow, so Seth put "sane" in quotation marks. What we call sanity, or the physical manipulation in our daily lives -- eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, sleeping, all these things, the things that maintain our own lives -- these operations require this ability. What ability? The ability to separate the waking world from the dream world.

To put it more plainly, your conscious mind needs to have an ability to distinguish which things are events happening in the three-dimensional world, and which things are information coming from inner inspiration, intuition, other dimensional spaces, including information from different levels of your inner self -- all of this needs to be blocked out by your conscious mind. If you cannot block out that information, then you cannot survive in the three-dimensional world. It would become mixed together with the scenes of the three-dimensional world, and you would not be able to tell whether this matter is something from last year, or something that will happen in the future, or something happening right now; nor could you tell whether it is something from this lifetime, or something that will happen in a future lifetime, or something that happened in a previous lifetime. All of this would be jumbled together in your mind, with no temporal order, no logic, and you would collapse.

So if you want to survive in the three-dimensional world, you need this ability -- to separate the waking state from the dream state, and to accept only those events that others more or less agree upon as real. In the three-dimensional world, you can only accept as real those events that the majority of people consider real. If everyone says this is a cup, then it is a cup. If everyone in the world believed that right now this is a plastic bag, then it would be a plastic bag. No matter how much you insist it is a cup, it would be useless -- everyone would think you are crazy.

Accepted Reality Keeps Changing

But these so-called real events have changed drastically not long ago. Magic once walked upon the land -- here "once" is used because there is no concept of time, so "once" or not "once" does not really apply, but he wants to make this point -- and stirred up wars between the seas and the skies. People who believed in such things were considered mentally normal, and that was normal. Because the accepted framework of practice at that time was vastly different from your own.

Historically speaking, accepted practices have been diverse. The ever-changing nature of accepted practices provides not just one history of civilization, but also reflects the ever-creative nature of the psyche. What this passage is trying to say is: in the development of our human history, there was once a period of time when gods arrived somewhere, and then between heaven and earth, between humans and gods, between factions of gods, in the cooperation or struggle between humans and gods, all kinds of wars took place. If you look through all those Chinese and Western myths, you will find such records -- great wars between humans and gods, great wars between heavenly gods, with humans participating in the middle, or some heavenly god leading certain humans to fight against another heavenly god leading another group of humans. At that time, people considered these things normal. People who believed in such things were considered mentally normal, and if you did not believe, you were the abnormal one.

That is to say, in the period when the Classic of Mountains and Seas¹⁰ existed, people believed that those half-human half-beast beings, Lei Zhenzi, Jiang Ziya, Erlang Shen, Nezha, and such things all truly existed. Ancient Greece also had many such stories. Why? Because in that era, the framework of what we accepted as real was vastly different from now. We now consider those things to be myths, and as for whether they actually happened, people today are doubtful. Mainstream science, mainstream history books, and archaeology do not acknowledge the existence of those things, considering them to be merely myths.

Yet all current scientists and anthropologists have already proven through experiments that so-called myths must be facts that actually happened, otherwise humanity could not have passed them down. It is impossible that after millions of years, something that never happened could still be passed down by word of mouth all the way to later generations and still be known to us today -- it must have actually happened at some point.

This has also been proven by an excellent real-world example. During World War II, there were many island nations and many islands in the Pacific. These islands were isolated from the world, and some indigenous peoples lived there for generations, cut off from the outside. During World War II, for the Pacific campaign, the U.S. military built airfields on many islands. On one of these islands, the U.S. military built an airfield as a supply and airdrop distribution center. If you know about the Pacific War, you know how extremely brutal it was -- Tom Hanks produced a TV series called The Pacific¹¹, about a dozen or so episodes, which from an individual's perspective portrayed the brutality of the entire Pacific War very realistically. The U.S. military fought island by island, taking them one by one, so they needed this kind of logistical support, and air supply was very important. A military airfield was built on this island, and military planes brought in all kinds of food, canned goods, weapons, equipment, and such.

After the Pacific War ended, this island no longer had any strategic significance, so the U.S. military withdrew, the airfield was abandoned, and no more planes ever flew in. Several decades later, a group of scientists studying indigenous cultures arrived on this small island and discovered something truly remarkable: the entire indigenous population of the island was worshipping something like a god -- they had used branches, grass, and leaves to build something shaped like a World War II U.S. military transport plane, remarkably lifelike, and placed it above the airfield. The indigenous people regularly held various sacrificial ceremonies, singing and dancing before this plane, always fantasizing that all kinds of goods they wanted would come out of it -- canned goods, biscuits, Coca-Cola, and such. For that primitive tribe, they had never known such things existed, nor did they know where they came from -- they came buzzing from the sky, and they had no idea what was inside the plane. All they could see was this thing flying over, endlessly spitting out these goods, and they regarded it as something like a heavenly god. Decades later, this plane became a god-like existence on this small island.

From this incident, anthropologists discovered a fundamental issue: the so-called myths we have today must have existed in history, otherwise they could not have been passed down. Humans cannot imagine something they have never seen or that never happened.

So those primitive murals and ancient artifacts all hint at and imply the existence of such a history. Yet the existence of such a history leaves not the slightest trace in our human society. By all logic, the people of that era, those half-human half-divine beings, could see the meridian pathways of the human body and could see through the human body. India also had a flying ship called the Vimana, which was also very impressive. Later, someone rebuilt the Vimana. It used mercury -- the rotation of mercury cutting through magnetic field lines generated electricity, which powered the thing and made it operate, and once operating it gained new energy, which in turn kept the mercury rotating. The Vimana's power relied on an ingenious mercury device, and it could achieve anti-gravity flight. In ancient Indian scriptures, this Vimana was recorded -- equivalent to what we would now call a spaceship. It could also launch a kind of bomb from the Vimana, and when that bomb was dropped, it shone like the sun, described exactly like an atomic bomb. There are many such examples, so I will not go through them one by one.

What Seth is trying to say here is: there has been more than one human civilization. Our human civilization is not just one, nor is there just one historical line -- there are many historical lines. These different civilizations, or the different directions of civilization, also reflect the ever-creative nature of the psyche. He uses such a thing to prove in turn that the creativity of the psyche is simply beyond human imagination. Our entire human civilization has many different versions. The historical line we are on now is what we currently recognize, and parallel to our historical line, there exist many other developments of human civilization and history -- this reflects the extremely strong creativity of the psyche.

So once you understand this, you will have a general idea about many ancient myths and legends and the history of ancient civilizations, including things like Atlantis and the Mayan culture.

Dreams as a Medium for Archetypes

All the components of physical experience are presented in dreams. At any particular time, all these elements and cores of three-dimensional world experience have been presented in dreams. What happens in your three-dimensional world has already happened in dreams. And fundamentally speaking, in any given period, humanity accepts certain portions of dream reality as its so-called real world -- in any given period, humanity accepts only certain portions of dream reality as the so-called real world, and then forms its present civilization around those specialized events. The civilization we are now experiencing is formed around certain events that we have identified as real.

And historically speaking, early humans dreamed of airplanes and rocket ships. In ancient times, people had already dreamed of these things. For that matter, their natural television sets, in some ways, worked better than your technological version of television. Because their mental images allowed them to perceive the world of nearby regions or other parts of the world.

Our consciousness is like a frequency spectrum. Those ancient people, their psyche was more open than that of modern humans, more open than our civilization. Because of the openness of their psyche, they turned their natural television sets -- the equivalent of the spectrum of consciousness -- wide open, so they could receive programs from many stations, that is, they could receive signals from many different civilizations of the same historical period, or from human civilizations of different historical periods. They could obtain these signals in dreams, transcending time and space.

He says that because those people's psyche was relatively open, they used these natural attributes, which were much better than the television sets we modern humans have developed with electronic technology, semiconductor technology, and modern science and technology. The frequency range our television sets receive is too narrow, while their television sets could travel through time and space to collect information from various civilizations. Their mental images allowed them to perceive nearby regions -- and this "nearby" is not just physically nearby, but psychologically nearby, nearby in frequency, nearby in the spiritual world -- and the world of other parts of the world, they could receive all of it.

However, they could not make it happen just by pressing a button. This nearby information could not be obtained in an instant either; it also required entering deeper levels of dreams to obtain it.

The psychic and biological mechanisms are there, allowing humans to know what events not normally perceived might endanger their survival, especially in times of tension and crisis. But this ability itself exists; it allows humans to perceive those events that cannot normally be perceived but might endanger survival. But in the dream state then, as now, all such problems are simultaneous, like a model, in which humanity then chooses to form its physical experience and physical events.

Because their psyche was more open, dreams were like a large model, in which all possibilities were presented simultaneously, and humanity chose from this model those possibilities that would form physical experience and physical events.

The Interweaving of Dreams and Possibilities

So why do humans have this ability? It is for those times when you normally would not perceive something -- when it feels that these things might threaten its survival -- you perceive its existence. Especially when you are tense or in danger this is even more so. At the moment of life and death, before the choice of whether the whole species can survive or perish, human perception at that time becomes stronger. They can already perceive the existence of these civilizations that are different from them, and whether they might threaten their existence.

But in that dream state, in dreams, there was no difference in time, just like now -- ancient humans in their dreams might also dream of our modern lives, which is very interesting. All these questions are simultaneous, just as today we also encounter the same questions ancient humans faced: whether that unknown world, unknown civilization, or unknown development might affect human survival, the continuation of the entire human race. We are the same as ancient humans -- we also feel crisis, feel tension, can all feel it.

So it is like that model -- just like the model where many different civilizations existed in ancient times -- within this, humanity chose from among many possibilities one that suited itself, one it wanted to actualize in practice. That is why we have today's civilization.

Simply put, this passage means: ancient humans, in their dreams, could already travel through time and space and obtain information about various civilizations. Because their inner senses were more open than ours, their spiritual world was stronger, and they were less influenced by our materialization. But all the information they obtained about these civilizations was obtained in dreams. And what is obtained in dreams is limited by the time, biology, and environment of that period. Even if they dreamed of it, they could not say, "I press a button and I get it" -- could not say, "I dreamed of an airplane, and with one press of a button the airplane appears." To actualize that airplane in real life, after all, requires certain conditions, limited by the material environment and conditions of that time.

So for example, if they could dream of a rocket in their dreams, in reality they simply could not realize it -- at that time gunpowder had not even been invented, so how could they make something like a rocket? They could only see it, perceive it, have an impression of it. Like in those records of the Vimana, which could record an anti-gravity flying ship¹², humans at that time could have such an impression. We do not know whether they saw an alien civilization in a dream or in some other reality -- we will not concern ourselves with that. But for people of that time, if you saw it and perceived it but could not put it into practice, it was meaningless. So humans at that time could only choose a version that they could operate and practice under the circumstances of that time, and that ultimately formed the trajectory of today's human civilization. Our human civilization developed in this way.

What he wants to say now is this, but what he wants to tell you is: in the process of human development, the importance of dreams is extremely great. It can even help you avoid some crises and dangers. In the millions of years of human development, that is why there has been this existence of escaping various dangers and natural disasters. But this is not the point. The point is that dreams give you a lot of information, but which things can be practiced in real life -- you still have to be closely connected to the world you live in. You cannot surpass the technological civilization of your era and develop by leaps and bounds; you can only develop gradually.

So Tesla was the same. Tesla made many inventions, technologies, and creations in his dreams, but he still had to be limited by the technological level of his time. He could not have developed a quantum computer at that time, because at that time there were not even transistors and semiconductors¹³ -- he used vacuum tube technology, and there was no semiconductor industry yet. On the basis of vacuum tubes, he could only do his best to make many things that could be realized on vacuum tube circuits; he could not leap forward or develop by leaps and bounds. But even so, he greatly advanced the progress of human civilization, because he brought alternating current into human society, and also invented radar, X-ray machines, and other things¹⁴. You can see that the relationship between dreams and real life is just like this.

Prepackaged You

To what extent did he get there? The study of dreams gives you some important indications about psychic reality. He said your study of dream reality gives you some important indications about the reality of the spiritual world. In a certain way, you are prepackaged.

What does prepackaged mean? It means that in dreams everything has already been selected for you, all these things have been packaged up for you. How you will walk and what you will do in the future has already been rehearsed in dreams. So that is why he calls it prepackaged, meaning things that have been packaged in advance.

He says you always perceive one kind of psychic reality as wrapped up as you — you always think that a certain package of psychic reality is yourself, because it has been wrapped up, right? But basically, you always enter that package in the manner of instant mail. What does "in an instant manner" mean? Because you are an existence that transcends time and space, unaffected by the material world. In other words, the you inside that package is changing at every moment and in every place, so there is a sense of entering this package in an instant manner.

This packaged you is wrapped up, but this packaged you is not dead — it is not that once you are wrapped inside, the you inside never changes. In other words, the you that you perceive is changing at all times, but the you that you perceive is influenced by a certain prepackaging from the spiritual world. Why you think you are the way you are is influenced by your psychic reality, your spiritual reality. In the spiritual world it has already been decided what you are and what the you that you can perceive looks like. Because your perception itself is also physical perception; you perceive your own existence through the three-dimensional world, so even your senses are packaged, not real senses, but outer senses.

But the point he wants to make here is not this. What he wants to say is: the you that you think you are has been packaged by your spiritual world, and what "packaged" means is that it has all been preprocessed by the spiritual world. But this process is also one that is completed in an instant — it is not that once you are packaged you never change, but rather that you are changing in every instant, in every present moment, and after the change you jump into your package, allowing yourself to perceive it. The moment you perceive yourself, you undergo new changes again, and again you crawl into your own package. That is the kind of perceptual process you have. So here it returns again to the state at the very beginning — it is a paradox: you are preprogrammed, and yet you enter a package that seems like a fixed pattern in a manner of instant change. Interesting, right? The outside of this package looks the same, but the heart inside is changing at every moment and in every place.

The Attributes of Pure Energy

He says that you are unknowingly immersed in this pure energy, that you are always immersed in pure energy, and that you are a part of it. In every moment, you are freshly created -- every moment you are freshly created. This is the attribute of pure energy: it creates a brand-new you in every moment. Therefore the energy of your atoms and molecules, and the energy of your physical universe system, is replenished in every conceivable instant.

How do we explain this? It means that the energy within every molecule and every atom, and the energy within your entire physical universe -- that is, your entire physical world, the entire universe of the physical system -- is not an old, decaying energy. It is not like a battery. It is not as people say: when a person is born, their energy is at one hundred percent, and then you keep consuming it, and all kinds of energy get used up until it is gone. Especially regarding certain life energies, including male sexual energy, they also tell you this: you should use it sparingly, because if you do not conserve it, by old age it will be gone. This is a basic human understanding. There are also many ancient sayings, such as that the amount of food a person can eat in a lifetime is fixed, and if you eat too much early on, you will have nothing to eat in old age. All of these are similar ideas, telling you that energy is limited.

Seth here fundamentally overturns this view. He says no: the energy contained within every molecule and every atom that makes up the cells of your body, including every bit of energy in your entire universe, in all the things you carry with you in this universe -- all of it is instantly filled to the brim in the smallest instant you can imagine. This is much faster than Tesla's supercharger -- the electricity is instantly fully charged, and you can use it freely, and after you use it, the energy is full again. And every time it is re-energized, it is a new you. Every time it is fully charged, every time it is filled with energy again, it is a new you, and also a new universe. This is what he wants to tell you.

This is completely different from what we imagine. We think, does pure energy not get used up? Energy always gets consumed eventually, right? This is human understanding -- energy gets consumed, and once consumed it is gone, the more you use the less there is. No, your energy is inexhaustible, instantly filled to the brim.

Psychic Pulse and Electronic Behavior

It says your psyche is drawn back into itself -- drawn back into its original state. What is the original state of the psyche? It is All That Is, that pure energy. And then it emerges out of itself again, out from there, out from All That Is, entering into your individualized portion, that part which makes you who you are.

In this psychic pulse of daily activity, it is related to the behavior of the electrons in your world. He left us a clue, something our scientists can pick up on: this psychic pulse of activity is related to the behavior of electrons in our physical world. As for the study of electron behavior, humanity now seems to have studied it fairly thoroughly, yet the more they study it, the less they understand -- this business of electron strings, left-spin, right-spin, up-spin, down-spin, humanity still has no idea why it is this way, why these two strings must be different, why in a pair of electrons one must be left-spin and the other must be right-spin¹⁵. Humanity's understanding of electrons is a matter of half understanding and half not, basically, at present.

The Reality of Dreams and Probabilities

In dreams and in sleep, when you do not encounter physical activity so directly, while sleeping we temporarily ease off from the physical world. At this time you have the opportunity, by studying dreams—those events so like and yet so unlike your waking experience—to learn more about the psyche. When you are asleep, or when you enter hypnosis or meditation, you no longer need to have so much contact with the physical world, and at this time you have the opportunity to study the dream world that is both like and unlike your waking world. By studying these dream worlds, you can understand more about the world of the psyche.

He goes on to say: On a certain level connected with dreams—I have explained the term "level" before, so I will not explain it again here; you can understand it as different parallel worlds or different dimensions, but it is not the concept of dimension, world, or space-time that you understand. In a certain reality connected with dreams, all the probable events of your life exist simultaneously. Remember, they exist simultaneously—it is not that they happen and then are finished; they are always happening there, always existing.

Since your activities must in practical terms fit into a space-time framework, only a very small portion of those probable events will physically happen. Because on that dream level, there is no concept of our space and time. Since you believe that all truly real events must be merged into a space-time reality, merged into our three-dimensional reality, only a very few of those probable events can truly happen in our world. Because our time and space are only so much, and all those probable things are too many; you cannot have them happen at the same time—you cannot drink water and eat food at the same time; when you are eating you cannot drink water, and when you are drinking water you cannot eat food. This is the simplest principle. If you go on a date, you cannot be at home studying; you cannot date and study at the same time.

But among probable events, all these things happen simultaneously, in parallel. Because you need to bring events into a three-dimensional world in order for them to occur, you can only select a very small portion from among them to let them happen in the world. Those that truly become realized in our three-dimensional world, in our space and time, are all selected with great discrimination; they are all chosen through our comparison and selection.

Dreams, then, are used to determine whether any particular probable action is desirable. What are your dreams for? They are for determining exactly which particular probable action can be manifested in reality, and whether it is what we need.

The Waking and Dreaming Worlds Are Not Fundamentally Different

On these nonphysical levels of existence, fundamentally there is no difference between the waking and dreaming worlds. In those worlds that are not three-dimensional space-time, events happening in that world and events happening in our three-dimensional world are, in essence, no different at all. It is only that we arrange those events in the three-dimensional world, and so we feel they are real; while the things that happen in that world without space and time, we consider unreal, merely a kind of possible existence. But he tells you, those are just as real as the things that happen in your three-dimensional world, no difference whatsoever, be sure to remember this.

So in this way you creatively organize your experience. Because there is no difference, the events you experience in those worlds, in dreams, give you the same experience as the events you experience in the three-dimensional world. Since the experience gained is the same, you have much greater room to maneuver in dreams—in dreams you must organize your experience, trying out all the possibilities.

And this conscious mind that you think of as yourself also takes up its own responsibility. The conscious mind must play a role in the middle; it is able to explore those nonphysical worlds. However, those worlds you do not accept as substantial also exist and join into their own organization—the things you think did not substantially happen in the three-dimensional world, that were only possibilities, they also join into their own organization, and they too are contributing their strength to your experience. They have not simply left your experience; on that level, in that world, they are still vividly happening.

They then serve as those focuses not directly related to your practice—that is, things outside the focus of practice. You went and did one thing, but at the same time there were several other possibilities. You did not choose those possibilities; your focus chose only this one thing that could happen to you. Indirectly speaking, those possibilities that did not happen—although you did not experience them in your real life, in dreams you experienced them all. Those experiences of having practiced the possibilities, although they cannot be clearly obtained and perceived by you, still exist like a psychological background. To a certain degree, they become the invisible medium of your experience.

The Invisible Background and Life's Choices

What do we mean by an invisible medium? Whenever you talk about any experience, you have to mention its premise and background. When you say, "Would it be good for me to take this job," "Would it be good for me to quit and start a business," "Would it be good for me to marry this person," doesn't this premise necessarily require a larger background? — What is my current situation, what is his or her situation, what is the situation in society, what is the situation with both families. Only after laying out this background does the concept of whether the matter is good or bad come into being. And those experiences you have never consciously remembered exist like a kind of invisible background. You cannot clearly perceive them, but they still exist, and they still exert an influence on your life.

Your own specialized activities emerge from these — these individualized activities in your life, these actions you actually take, are only one among the many possibilities within the invisible medium. Therefore their essence is implied within your own life — only things you do not know can be called implied. They are carried within your life, but you do not know they exist. You could also say that your life is likewise implied within these other frameworks that you have not perceived.

The meaning of this sentence is this: what you call your life is the series of events that happen in your life, one after another, and together these make up your entire lifetime. And all the events, great and small, that happen in this lifetime of yours emerge from these invisible backgrounds, from these possible events that you believe never happened. You choose one after another, and then another, and in this way you string them together to form your life. And behind every event in this life there are countless possible events, and from among them you chose the one version you wanted. And those versions that did not happen in the three-dimensional world are still happening, still playing out, in their own worlds and dimensional spaces, and these happenings and playings-out still exert an influence on your experience, like an invisible background.

The Theater of Dreams and Symbolic Versions

In that realm, dreams also serve as a drama for interweaving probabilities—a dream is like a play, acting out all the possibilities. When an event occurs, its direction has many possible outcomes. Your relationship with a person can develop into countless possible relationships, and all these possible relationships are performed in this theater of dreams. The theater of dreams is like a springboard—they leap off in all directions, evolving into various versions.

Every aspect of a dream has its personal significance. An event in a dream has many possibilities, and each one must be rehearsed. Each rehearsal of a possibility can be called an aspect of that dream, and at the same time it is a version of your symbol—if you develop in that direction, then it is a symbolic version of that direction. It also represents a certain corresponding event, but entirely on a different level of reality.

If you assign a number to every aspect of a dream, then that number will represent itself within a completely different numerical system. The surface number, or the familiar number, is still used to interpret the dream within the categories of your world.

Let me explain this briefly, otherwise you won't understand what he is saying. For example, suppose something happens in your dream—you confess your feelings to a girl. There are many possible follow-ups: she accepts you, she rejects you, or she is ambiguous and neither accepts nor rejects. Let's assume there are these three possibilities, and we assign them numbers: one represents acceptance, two represents rejection, and three represents ambiguity. You remember these three numbers. But each number has its own meaning in its own world—on the level of the dream, it may represent a certain life trajectory or a designation for a certain direction.

In different worlds, it has completely different numerical meanings. In the dream, that 1 may not represent 1, and 2 may not represent 2—it has its own numerical system. What 1 represents may be a string of code behind it, perhaps two-dimensional encoding, or perhaps multi-dimensional encoding, which we humans cannot read. That is to say, if a girl rejects you in a dream, in the dream realm it is not simply what you understand in real life as "one of the options of rejection." It represents a whole series of subsequent changes—your life trajectory will change, and the string of possible changes represented by the subsequent alterations in your life is not just as simple as "two."

I don't know whether you can understand what I mean. This "two" to you represents rejection; in our familiar numbering it is "two," and we use our understanding to interpret it. But in the dream, this "two" might mean that you could commit suicide—not immediately, but perhaps through a series of events. So behind this "two" is the series of branches of possibilities that unfold after the rejection in the present moment, and behind every node there are further different possibilities and different nodes. Its meaning is by no means just "two"—that "two" contains all the subsequent variables. And you only see this one event of being rejected right now; what you see is just a "two." I can only explain it to this point, and I hope you can understand that the meanings within different numerical systems are not the same.

Because you live in an apparently physical universe, we share its reality. This girl rejected you, and in her world she also rejected you—within your space-time, you were rejected, and she rejected you. This is the same event, so this reality can be shared. The two of you face the same reality, except that you are the one rejected and she is the one who rejected you, but the event of "rejection" truly happened in your space-time.

Therefore, each of you also exists within a far larger psychological or spiritual universe, surrounded and supported by it. Although the event that happened in the world is a shared reality, at the same time that the rejection occurred, there also exists the reality in which the girl accepted you, and the reality in which she did not show up for the date that day, and the realities of countless other possibilities. What you call the real world is surrounded and supported by these spiritual universes that you do not know. Without the existence of those worlds of possibility, the events of your three-dimensional world would not exist either.

Quantum-State Existence

What is that far larger spiritual universe? You can think of it as a kind of quantum-state existence — all possibilities are contained within it. In your three-dimensional world, whichever event manifests is only one of those possibilities. You can understand it as the collapse process of the wave function in quantum mechanics¹⁶ — the moment the wave function collapses, an event in the physical three-dimensional world is formed. Whether this thing is a quantum, a particle, or a wave, no one knows. Only when an observer appears does it become a particle; when no observer appears, it is a wave. If this wave function did not exist, if all those possibilities did not exist, then your act of choosing one from among the many possibilities and letting it manifest could not happen. Because if that pool of possibilities, that reservoir, did not exist, how could the world happen? You must first have many possibilities, first have one of three choices, before you can choose one from among them. If those three choices did not exist, how could there be a human life? How could the physical world come into being? So this is what he is trying to say.

The categories of these entities are endless. Your smallest action affects their realization — these entities are actually spiritual or psychological beings. Spirituality and psyche themselves cannot be seen or touched, so he uses the word "entity" to make you feel that they have a reality like that of an object. He uses this to tell you that these spiritual or psychological entities are the very foundation of your real world's existence. The categories of these entities themselves are endless, not just a few kinds. Your smallest actions all affect their world, and vice versa — they also affect your every tiny action. It is that kind of relationship.

In physical terms, to a certain degree, in the dream state you can perceive these entities more clearly, just as stars become more visible at night. Because in dreams your attention is no longer focused on the physical world; when you focus on these spiritual and psychological worlds, you can perceive these entities more clearly.

No High or Low, Noble or Base Among Souls

Psychic reality cannot be compared in terms of size, or bigger and smaller. Because the validity and brilliance of each existence carries such a uniquely individualized intensity that it precludes any such ideas. Every existence in the psychic world contains the power and ability to create an entire universe, so how can you compare sizes? Although at the moment it may only have created the smallest of trivial matters -- even something as small as giving you this one breath -- the energy within it is inexhaustible. The event it manifests may be extremely insignificant, but the energy behind that event, the spiritual world and psychic world from which it arises, cannot be called big or small, because it itself possesses a very strong validity and brilliance. Validity means it can actualize whenever it wishes to actualize, and brilliance means its energy is infinite.

Moreover, every existence is completely different. Every psychic world and spiritual world carries a very strong personal character, and this personal character precludes any talk of big or small, strong or weak -- each one is incomparable. You cannot say this soul is more advanced than that soul, or higher by some degree. There is no comparability. Be sure to remember this.

So many people say, "My soul's energy is very high," "That soul's energy is very low," "This is an advanced soul," "That is a lowly soul" -- there is no such distinction. Anyone who uses this kind of talk to promote themselves, telling you to raise your level, raise your energy, raise your frequency, or else something bad will happen, and that you must train your abilities -- all of that is nonsense. At the level of the soul, there is no distinction of high and low, noble and base. They are all exactly the same -- not in the sense of being uniform, but in the sense that their quality and essence are exactly the same. There is no distinction of high and low, noble and base, nor of big and small, strong and weak. Be sure to remember this. Never belittle yourself, saying, "Oh, I'm not good enough, I need to go worship some master, so-and-so is so powerful, such-and-such a person is this or that" -- none of these thoughts are allowed. You are already that existence of the highest quality. In terms of quality, you cannot go any higher. You are exactly the same in quality as All That Is of the entire universe. He has repeatedly emphasized this statement in many places.

Stars, Flowers, and You

In your terms, the life of a star and the life of a flower are completely different in their duration, size, and characteristics. How big is a sun? It keeps nine planets revolving around it; its gravitational pull is that great. Why does the Earth revolve around it? Because its mass is so enormous that it draws the Earth into its orbit. How big would you say it is? A star's lifespan is at least ten to twenty billion years¹⁷. A flower, on the other hand, may wither in a few days, and its size cannot even be compared. But he says, each exists within a certainty of experience—a flower is a flower, a sun is a sun; this is the certainty of their respective experiences. A flower cannot become a sun, and a sun cannot become a flower. The sun's experience is to shine upon all things, and all things depend on the sun to grow; but a flower does not matter in that way—anyone can live without it. So this kind of comparison loses its meaning.

You might say the sun's experience is more meaningful, more important, and that a flower is too insignificant to compare with the sun—do you think such a comparison is meaningful? Is the soul of a sun more advanced than the soul of a flower? They cannot be compared; there is no meaning in it.

Likewise, comparing your own consciousness with a consciousness that possesses the attributes of a star-like psyche or spirituality is of no help either. But the psychological mobility of consciousness—this mobility by which the psyche can shift—allows for an inexpressible inner communication, an interlocking spiritual and biological language. The flower's experience as a flower, the star's experience as a star, your experience as you—these arise through the inexpressible inner communication between you and all things in the world. They use an interlocking spiritual and biological language, and in the process of that communication your experience is born from it, and changes through it.

Therefore, many of your dreams are a translation of events that occur in a larger psyche, a larger spiritual world. In that larger spiritual world, events do not depend on time; on your side, however, you must deal with the time-bound version of events. So dreams provide a wonderful framework, allowing you to interpret timeless time and then place it appropriately within the categories of your physical world. This appropriate placement depends considerably on inner knowledge of probable future worlds—what exactly you place, what you do not place, and at what time you place it; this depends on your inner knowledge of events that may happen in the future but have not yet happened for you. Your inner knowledge determines where in our three-dimensional world this event is placed.

Unconscious Knowledge of the Future

If you did not have this unconscious knowledge of the future, your present would be an impossible achievement. Be sure to remember that this knowledge is unconscious—how come I don't know what the future is? How come I can't predict the future? Because on the unconscious level you do know the future, you do possess this knowledge. If you did not have a knowledge of the events that may possibly occur in the future, the event happening in your present would be impossible.

In other words, every event happening in your present is based on your inner soul's understanding of the events that may possibly occur in the future, and only then is the present event arranged to be exactly right, and could not be better. Although from your perspective it may not be the best arrangement—your field of vision is so shortsighted, you cannot see future events, and you do not know how the future will unfold, so how do you know the present arrangement is not the best? From your present shortsighted perspective, it may not be the best, but your spiritual level is looking at the future. It takes into account all the possibilities of the future and arranges for you the best possible result for your present.

So you must understand why it is said to accept the present, accept yourself, and affirm yourself: because you do not know that the events happening in your present have all already undergone precise calculation. This precise calculation takes into account the interrelationships of all events in the past, present, and future, and it has selected an optimal choice for you. But you cannot understand it. You may say, "Then how could my getting into a car accident be the optimal result? How could my encountering a criminal be the optimal result?" Right, from your present shortsighted perspective, you can only use your current understanding to perceive it, and there is nothing wrong with that. But from within a vaster space, how do you know it is not the optimal result? So this is a difference in perspective.

The Synthesis of Dreams and the Focus of Life

He says your dreams are a synthesis of the past, the present, and the future. In that dream, one main event is used as a focus, and present events are gathered around it. In dreams you cross time and space, mixing past, present, and future together in your consideration, and then you choose one action that you most want to do right now, that is also best for your future, and that fits what you are most willing and most desirable to do at present, and you make it the focus of an event.

Remember, in a dream there is a main event — that is, what the center and theme of your life has been during this recent period. In the dream, he will comprehensively consider your past, your abilities, your actual situation, as well as the possible directions and trends of the future, and then give you a focus that you should pay attention to right now. For example, right now you should focus on studying, right now you should focus on your emotional life, right now you should focus on your career development, right now you should focus on the improvement of your spiritual aspect. In different periods and different stages of life, he will give you a different main event as the focus, and around this focus, the things happening in your present all come about around it.

When you carefully savor your dreams, record these dreams, and think about these dreams, you will gradually discover what the focus of the main event in your present life is. You will suddenly have a moment of realization and understand that all these things that have happened actually have far-reaching significance. When you do not know this main focus, you will feel that the things happening around you are all in a mess — how come this happens today, and that happens tomorrow. So this entirely depends on your own degree of keenness and the insight and wisdom in between.

How to Approach Seth Material You Cannot Understand

The difficulty of the whole of Chapter Nine may be a bit higher -- actually, starting from Chapter Eight, the difficulty has already been rising. I also hope everyone can keep up with my pace, do not be afraid, let us take it step by step. If you cannot accept it or digest it all at once, that is very normal, it does not matter. Because Seth's theories and viewpoints really do transcend human wisdom. If you cannot understand it, do not be discouraged, this is all very normal. Human wisdom is limited, and once you study spiritual knowledge, you will know that it is indeed limited. With our limited knowledge, we can only do our best to understand, and those things we cannot understand are simply too normal.

So we can, during meditation, during dreams, and at other levels and stages of our consciousness, perhaps get answers at that level, get some feelings, some experiences. Do not be in a hurry to say that when we are awake we must get everything thoroughly and clearly figured out -- that is not right. Because you cannot structure these spiritual things -- spirituality itself is an unstructured thing. If you insist on writing it out point by point like a paper, "On What Spirituality Is," with arguments and evidence, then you have completely misunderstood Seth's meaning. You cannot use this structured way to understand it.

Just use whatever means you can to ponder the meaning behind Seth's language, and that is enough. Whatever degree of understanding you reach, do not be anxious, just set it aside. At certain points in time, when certain events occur, you will suddenly have a flash of realization and understand some things. If you do not understand for now, that is fine too, it is all very normal. If you can understand everything, if you can grasp everything he says, then that is wonderful -- then you have already reached a state and level where you are on the same frequency as him, and at this moment, in this present, this Seth material is actually the most suitable material for your spiritual advancement. Then you should continue to seize the time and learn and understand more of the content that follows in Seth.

Session 788: Events and Significance

The second part of the interpretation of Chapter 9 of The Nature of the Psyche, which is Session 788 of the book, held on Monday, September 6, 1976, at 9:27 p.m.

Before the session began, Jane had just finished typing her own manuscript about Paul Cezanne's worldview. She was going to type it up and send it to the publisher. Meanwhile, Rob was preparing the final version of Volume 1 of The "Unknown" Reality. In their explanation of The "Unknown" Reality, they said they had decided to publish Seth's very long manuscript in two volumes. Why two volumes? First, the manuscript was too long, and combining it into one volume would make it extremely thick; second, readers could get the first half of the material sooner, without having to wait for the entire publication preparation to be completed before seeing the whole book. At the same time, Rob was also preparing Volume 2, which was much thicker than Volume 1, for publication.

Typing was not Jane's preferred form of exercise; she did not like typing. So when Jane announced that she was willing to help Rob type part of the final draft of Volume 1, Rob was very surprised -- perhaps because Jane felt that Rob was working too hard. All the books we see were typed out word by word by Rob before being sent to the publisher. So that day they spent most of their time at their respective typewriters, working on the final draft of Volume 1 of The "Unknown" Reality. Meanwhile, Seth continued to stride forward as usual with his book The Nature of the Psyche. Jane often joked that if only Seth could type too, then they would not have to transcribe everything again -- they still had to transcribe the handwritten notes into typed form, then proofread, then produce the final completed draft.

Then Seth came through and began to deliver the next content of The Nature of the Psyche.

Events Have Nothing to Do with Cause and Effect

Seth began by saying:

Basically, events have nothing to do with what you think of as cause and effect.

He emphasized again that events have nothing to do with the cause and effect we imagine, the cause and effect we think of. Cause and effect has a beginning and an end -- something causes something else, that is what we call cause and effect. Many people keep denying it, saying, "You always say there is no cause and effect, no cause and effect," and they do not understand: your beliefs create reality, and that is also cause and effect -- first there is belief, then there is reality, and that is also cause and effect. What they say is not wrong. But I emphasize again: in our three-dimensional world, there is cause and effect; once you leave the three-dimensional world and return to the essence of the psyche, there is no cause and effect. So let us not discuss this question any further.

The essence of events has nothing to do with the cause and effect we understand. Although the essence has nothing to do with it, once it lands in our three-dimensional reality, it appears to have cause and effect. When you study events in dreams, perhaps this point can become obvious to some degree -- in dreams, the kind of connectedness you are accustomed to using to link events together has mostly disappeared. The wild flights of fancy and the chaos in dreams -- the logic, causality, and continuity between events that we are familiar with in reality are all absent in dreams.

Seth put it the other way around -- not saying it is absolute, for actually many dreams still have a certain continuity and causality, just like an event in our three-dimensional world. Conversely, events can be said to be built up from significance. He was talking about how events actually come into being: events are built up from this kind of significance.

This word is one that Seth specifically introduced here: significance. You can see that he actually never wanted to use special terms to express things, but at certain times he had no choice but to use special words as substitutes. The moment this word appears, you will have many different interpretations. For example, "events are built up from significance" -- many people will interpret it as: what kind of significance? Important to whom? Meaningful to whom?

So Seth quickly added: for now, forget that term -- significance.

Association: Approaching How Significance Works

If you want to understand what significance means, just think about the association you are already familiar with -- how you ordinarily associate things. Your stream of consciousness operates in that associative way.

The fundamental nature of each consciousness is a specific, special, unique focus of perception, and through its own uniqueness it experiences any possible reality. Be sure to remember: any possible reality. This is a fundamental attribute of every consciousness.

Here he emphasized again: consciousness is specific and special. Why specific? Each consciousness is different from every other consciousness; it has a one-of-a-kind uniqueness. This uniqueness produces a perceptual focus different from others. In other words, each consciousness looks at problems from a different angle, perceives problems differently, and has a different viewpoint and angle for understanding the world, so its perceptual focus is completely different. Every person is different, and every consciousness is also different. It is through such characteristics -- through this special perceptual focus -- that it experiences any possible reality.

This is a fundamental attribute of consciousness; be sure to remember it. You see, he first mentioned "significance," and then immediately told you to forget it. He was not actually asking you to remember the word, but to understand what "significance" is about. Below he will use a passage to explain it.

He said that each consciousness also has its own imprint -- like a seal. Suppose each consciousness has its own unique digital signature; if we use modern science to understand it, a digital signature is simpler. If you understand modern cryptography or the internet, you know there are signatures involved: digital certificates, certificates on servers and between clients. Whenever you carry out any encrypted transmission, certificates are required, and in the process of using certificates, digital signatures are generated. Every piece of information you send out carries your own unique digital signature, and this digital signature cannot be cracked or altered. Once the digital signature is changed, the other side will not match up.

In Seth's time he used the word "seal," because the concept of digital signatures did not exist in that era. It is as if each consciousness holds a seal in its hand, with your name written on it. You stamp your imprint onto the universe. No part of the universe is inactive or passive -- be sure to remember, no part of the universe is inactive or passive; it is all active, whether it appears organized or unorganized. Each consciousness stamps the universe in its own way, and each consciousness stamps it differently.

Its very existence establishes a significance of importance -- he mentioned this word again. The very existence of each consciousness is itself a kind of significance; it does not need to do anything else to have significance. The things it does are like stamping seals onto the universe; and its existence itself is significance.

The universe is interpreted through such significance. How is it interpreted? The universe is understood by every consciousness through each consciousness's unique and different perceptual focus -- this perceptual focus is like a seal stamped upon the universe. Interpretation means being understood, being cognized. The universe is cognized in this way, cognized by every consciousness from its own unique angle. Just like the blind men touching the elephant, each person's angle is different, and each consciousness's angle is also different.

The universe also knows itself through such significance. This is a mutual relationship: each consciousness knows the universe in this way, and the universe also knows itself through the way each consciousness knows the universe. In other words, if the universe did not know itself through these small consciousnesses, it would have no way to know itself; only through this method can it know itself.

This is very much like what I discussed in Conversations with God¹⁸ -- I also talked about it in Seth Speaks: All That Is divides itself into countless small existences, and each existence in turn cognizes this world through its own perspective. Those many perspectives combined form an overall perspective. Through this overall perspective, it knows itself as All That Is. If not through this method, it could not obtain cognition of itself.

The Multidimensional Creativity of Each Consciousness

Each consciousness is endowed with a multidimensional creativity -- the creative ability of multidimensional space. It can create in different dimensions and different reality spaces, whether two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional, or six-dimensional. Therefore it will seek out and create as many realities as possible. It inherently has the ability of multidimensional creation, so why would it not create more realities? Because its essence is to experience as many possible realities as it can. Since it wants to experience as many possible realities as possible, it must continually create so many realities, and then use its own significance as the focus -- its significance is its unique, distinctive perceptual focus -- to draw all possible events from the universe into its experience.

Thus each consciousness attracts events from the universe, and its own existence itself is significance. So at the same time that consciousness exists, it also stamps a seal upon the universe, like a digital signature or a seal, becoming a practice bearing the imprint of its own nature -- distinctive and indelible.

To put it simply, each consciousness has a self-awareness, and each consciousness is an energy body -- a pure energy body, self-aware. But the consciousness of this self-aware pure energy body deviates from the consciousness we humans understand: it includes the consciousness humans understand, but is not limited to human-understood consciousness; it transcends it. Today we are discussing consciousness itself, and it is a bit hard to understand; I will try to explain it clearly.

The existence of each consciousness has its own self-awareness; it knows who it is. This self-cognition can also be called consciousness, because it is itself consciousness -- a self-cognizing energy cluster with its own consciousness, so we can call it consciousness. This consciousness is different from other consciousnesses; it has its own uniqueness, its one-of-a-kind characteristic, and this uniqueness can be called a kind of "significance."

Seth created a term called "significance" because he could not think of a better term to explain it. This significance is like a unique, distinctive code or digital signature of a consciousness. All That Is is like the holder of the root certificate, and each consciousness has its own digital certificate, a unique digital signature. This digital signature is unique, proving that the existence of this consciousness is different from other consciousnesses. This thing is called the significance of this consciousness -- significance, meaning importance, meaning. There is no need to get hung up on the word itself; the translation is quite good; it just means something very important.

This way you can understand: for a consciousness, is its uniqueness the most important thing? It is the very uniqueness that distinguishes it from other consciousnesses. How is that uniqueness expressed? He used "significance" to explain it -- each consciousness has its own unique significance, different from the significance of other consciousnesses.

Each consciousness, according to its own uniqueness, the characteristics of its digital signature, its one-of-a-kind traits, attracts from the universe those events it wants to experience, practice, and undergo. The universe as a great practice is a library of all events, like an enormous database, and all events are in it. Each consciousness draws from it the events that match its significance, and each consciousness draws different ones. After attracting them, it continues to experience and undergo these events. After an event has been experienced by it, it is as if the event has been stamped with its seal and added with its digital signature through its experience, and then this event becomes its event, an event bearing its imprint. Then this event returns to the universe -- the universe is a whole -- and returns to the great experience library of the universe. It is just that the event in this experience library has changed from an event that originally had no imprint of it into an event bearing its imprint.

Understanding Significance from the Human Perspective

What was said above is a bit complicated, so Seth switched to a simpler method to help you understand:

From another viewpoint, as you know, each of you has certain abilities and characteristics.

He is now trying to explain from the human perspective, which may be easier to understand. What is significance? Each person has certain characteristics and abilities that are different from others. You experience reality through the mold of these abilities and characteristics. This unique combination of abilities and characteristics is like a mold, or a model, a pattern, a template. The word he used is actually still "pattern." All things must come out of this mold.

Each person has such a unique mold; your mold is different from others, so the things you do carry your characteristics. The words you speak and the things you do carry a deep imprint of you. In daily life, people with some social experience will say, "This matter is clearly so-and-so's handiwork," or "This kind of thing is clearly how so-and-so does things." Because when things are done, they carry the unique characteristics of certain people. That thing is like a mold; although all the things he does are varied and different, in these different things you can see the shadow of this person. That thing is this person's mold, and you can also say that is this person's significance.

At the same time, you also stamp your imprint upon the universe with your own unique characteristics. After you finish doing something, this matter is stamped with your imprint and bears your mark. And you attract events suited to your nature, rather than other events. You cannot choose to experience events that do not suit you.

For example, if you are born tone-deaf, you will not attract the event of "becoming a singer." You can love singing and can go to karaoke, but the event of becoming a singer has little to do with you -- unless one day human society likes listening to tone-deaf people sing, and then you could become a singer too. That is what I mean.

His significance falls into a certain pattern. Significance is your uniqueness, the one-of-a-kind uniqueness of your consciousness, falling into a certain pattern -- what pattern? A pattern that matches the abilities and characteristics of your life in the three-dimensional world. Every soul, every psyche, every consciousness has its own unique "significance," and when it arrives in the three-dimensional world, it must fall into the pattern of the three-dimensional world. No matter what significance your consciousness has, what kind of one-of-a-kind uniqueness, it must conform to your character setting in the three-dimensional world, to your abilities and characteristics. This is a specific pattern of yours.

When these become obvious, they manifest in the appearance of cause and effect. What does it mean to manifest in the way of cause and effect? It means that because you have such thoughts, such things happen. When these events fall into this pattern and the pattern becomes more and more obvious, you will feel that there is a certain causality in between.

So-called cause and effect is nothing more than significance that has been actualized.

What are cause and effect? In our three-dimensional world, significance is a manifestation in the three-dimensional world, and it becomes what you consider cause and effect. That is how you should understand it.

Aunt Sara: An Example of Association

He said:

Your associative processes and habits are probably the closest example that can give you a clue as to how significance operates.

If you do not understand how significance operates, just think about how you ordinarily associate things; that process and those habits can let you get relatively close to understanding how significance operates behind the scenes. Association is the closest to the operating mode of significance.

But even so, even so, "association" is also a process that deals with time; whereas basically, significance does not deal with time and has nothing to do with time. The process and habits of association can only be close, not identical to the way significance operates -- because significance does not deal with time-related matters.

He began to give an example. He said, for instance, you associate to your Aunt Sara -- in English it is Sarah. The associative process will bring you some images: you may recall a period of time when you visited Aunt Sara, think of the friends and neighbors in her home, think of the objects in her house, and things related to your relationship. This is association. But suppose at the same time, when you think of Aunt Sara, Sara does not know you are thinking of her. And at the same time you also do not know what Aunt Sara is doing. At this moment, suppose you had another perspective that could see Aunt Sara, and you would find that she might pick up a blue vase -- exactly the vase you saw in your mind, the one on the shelf in her living room. Your aunt might think of the person who gave her the vase. That person might now be at the other end of the United States -- they were on the East Coast, and that person was on the West Coast.

You see, these are three things happening simultaneously to three people: you think of Aunt Sara, think of a series of images, and may also think of that vase; Aunt Sara happens to be touching this vase and thinking of the person who gave it to her; the person who gave the vase may be thinking of what gift to give someone, thinking, "Maybe I should give a vase, because when I gave Aunt Sara this kind of vase she was very satisfied," and he may also happen to think of Aunt Sara, or may not think of her, or may be humming a song, and that song happens to contain the name Sara.

These three scenes are three things happening simultaneously to three people. If in the associative process there existed anywhere a contrary association, this chain reaction of associations might break. For example, the woman who gave the vase last -- she originally thought about whether to buy a vase as a gift for a friend, and at that moment she might think, "Do not give a vase; why do I always give people vases" -- suppose she had such an association, this would be a contrary association, interrupting the chain of associations.

The element of time, in your view, seems to make one thing cause another: you first thought of Aunt Sara, which then caused Aunt Sara to touch that vase and think of the person who bought the vase, and then the person who bought the vase thought of giving someone a gift. This series of events, you think, is "one thing causing another." But at that inner level of significance, these associations exist simultaneously -- there is no before or after; it is not because you first thought of Aunt Sara that Aunt Sara then touched the blue vase. They may be happening at the same time.

Any point in time can be targeted.

These associations exist simultaneously, and they have their own reality. Although they appear to be within time, basically they are separate from time. Those three sets of events -- you thinking of Aunt Sara, Aunt Sara touching the blue vase and thinking of the person who gave the vase, and the person who gave the vase thinking of giving someone else a gift -- can easily happen to the three people at the same time. If no normal communication occurs, if the three of them do not compare notes, none of them will know the mystery within. Unless the three of you happen to have a conference call and communicate about what just happened simultaneously, then you would know that there was such a connection in between.

The inner weaving of events is precisely the handling of such associations. How do we weave these associated events, how do we weave them into reality? He said:

Emotional intensity and significance make up the essence of events.

Emotional intensity is the inner emotion between you and the event itself -- how important Aunt Sara is to you, how much you like her, how much you miss her. Significance is your uniqueness, your one-of-a-kind characteristics. These two determine how events occur. For example, the person who gave the vase -- he has certainly given vases to others more than once in his life, because he feels that giving a vase is a very meaningful thing. The act of giving a vase carries this person's unique uniqueness, his unique significance -- other people would not think of giving a vase.

Exploration in Dreams

In dreams, he said:

You work with the intensity involved, exploring multiple significances.

That is the intensity he just described -- the three things happening to three people, the inner connections between three seemingly unrelated scenes. In dreams you work at that intensity, handling three things simultaneously, and you are exploring this multiple significance -- these three people, for the three people there are three significances. How strong is your working intensity in dreams? It is that strong, and it is handled simultaneously.

These are like charged emotional patterns, formed by your own highly personal emotions and images.

This associative process, this exploration of multiple significances, is like charged emotional patterns, formed by your very unique personal emotions, your intentions, and the purposes you want to achieve. So you are actually very busy in dreams.

Using this significance as a yardstick, you accept and exclude possible events. The way you associate is the way you organize events -- what you have not associated to is what you exclude; what you have associated to is what you accept. You now think of going to the beach for vacation, think of studying abroad -- these are all associations. You use significance as the yardstick, that is, you use your unique focus of consciousness as the yardstick -- you use how you view this world and cognize this world as the yardstick, you use the one-of-a-kind uniqueness of your own consciousness as the yardstick. What conforms to your will, to the characteristics of your consciousness, to your current emotions and intentions, is accepted by you; what does not conform is excluded by you. That standard is your significance.

You leave your imprint or digital signature in the universe with your own significance, and then use that as the focus -- as the focus of your unique experience and cognition of events -- to draw or attract from the universe those events suited to your unique purposes and needs.

There is a misunderstanding here: this "you" refers to the larger you, not your current ego. The ego is one part of it. It takes the ego's needs into account, but it is not entirely the ego's needs; this is a comprehensive process.

Enhancing the Possibilities of the Universe

As you do this, to some degree you enhance the many possibilities that can be created in the universe. You choose which events you want to experience according to the focus of your significance, draw them from the universe, and experience them, undergo them, and interpret them with your one-of-a-kind perceptual focus. After this event has been processed by you, it may bring about more events -- one event may associate to other events, and this event, through your experience, has been enriched to a greater or lesser degree; it has already changed and is no longer the original event.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose studying abroad is only a possible event. When you graduate from high school, you could take the college entrance exam in your home country, you could start working, you could join the military, or you could study abroad. One of many possibilities. You chose to study abroad, and this conformed to the needs of your significance at that time -- you wanted to broaden your horizons, and you had an open mindset. Studying abroad was at first only a simple possible event, but because you chose it, a series of things subsequently arose: all your life in a foreign country unfolded and enriched because of this choice. You might meet new friends, find a new job, possibly stay, and establish a family and career. This series of subsequent events all arose because of the single possibility of "studying abroad" and were greatly enriched.

This way you can better understand what he said. So many possibilities can be created, and all of these are accomplished by you. Every event that arises after studying abroad bears your imprint -- just like the digital signature I mentioned, after each thing is done you sign your name, digital, invisible, but unique. These events occur within the great system of the universe, involving other people and other matters, and other people are also affected by these events. This one possibility then gives rise to many subsequent possibilities, greatly enriching the great database of events in the universe. Because of your choice, more events occur; is the whole universe not enriched?

Because of your choice, you form in the universe a world that belongs to you personally -- a reality entirely belonging to your personal angle, bearing the attributes of your strong personal visual focus. In that world, if it were not for your initial choice to study abroad, those subsequent events would not have occurred. So your personal reality is guided step by step by the choices of your own significance.

Your thought of studying abroad may have been just from watching a TV drama as a child, and the drama happened to have a plot about "Dad takes you to study abroad," or a piece of news or an article about studying abroad. At the time it was just a thought, but later, after it was actualized step by step through your practice, you would find that the association and the idea from back then had turned into reality later on. That formed your world -- a world unique to you.

Immeasurable Influence

As you do this, you add immeasurably to the reality of other consciousnesses by increasing the store of reality from which all consciousness draws.

Let me give an example. After you go abroad, you post about your daily life as a student on WeChat Moments -- studying in the library, going to a coffee shop for coffee, working on a project with friends. You really enjoy this process, and you share it. But what you don't know is that a distant relative of yours, someone on your Moments list whom you normally never contact or speak with, someone you only happened to add on WeChat at a large family gathering one year, saw a photo you reposted or a beautiful passage you wrote, and it may have sparked in him the idea of studying abroad as well. Several years later, because of you, he began his own journey of studying in a foreign land. This kind of influence is far-reaching and mutual, something you don't know about, and you don't understand how the connections in between came about.

So you immeasurably increase the richness of other consciousnesses. All consciousness must draw material from the universe's database, and to some degree, you influence the richness of all consciousness, raising their shared store.

There Is No Purposeless Motion

Seth says:

Basically speaking, there is no such thing as purposeless motion, and no such thing as chaos.

In other words, there is no such thing as "impermanence" either. This point differs somewhat from Buddhism. Buddhism teaches that life is impermanent¹⁹, that all things in the three-dimensional world are impermanent. Here he tells you: there is no such thing. Nothing is without pattern, nothing is purposeless, nothing is chaotic, random, or accidental.

Under whatever name, or in whatever guise, the universe is acquainted with its reality through the ordered sequence of significant meaning.

No matter what you see, what you perceive, or what theories others give you -- for example, when it comes to doctrines, there is the theory of entropy: without human intervention, the entire universe tends toward a state of chaos and disorder, rather than toward a state of regularity or order. It is a dissipative process, like water molecules dissipating into the atmosphere, never able to return -- without human intervention, the water molecules that have dissipated can never come back to form water again; it is an irreversible process. That is the theory of entropy. No matter what theory it is -- the theory of entropy holds that all of this is random -- or whether the scenes you actually see also seem impermanent, random, chaotic, accidental, and unexpected, Seth says none of these are so.

Deep within them all there is a profound pattern. What pattern? It is through the matter of "significant meaning." All things that happen in the universe -- not only in our physical world, but in all worlds -- must obtain an ordered sequence through their significant meaning.

What does that mean? Things that appear chaotic are actually all processes in which the consciousnesses behind them seek to understand the reality of this world through each consciousness's own unique significant meaning. Everything that happens in the world happens in the manner of association; it is just that the inner pattern of this association is not yet understood by us humans.

What is the pattern of the universe's association? It is formed by an inner impetus in which every consciousness seeks, through its own unique perspective, to understand as much of the reality of as many possibilities as possible -- not limited to three-dimensional reality, but multidimensional reality. Every consciousness wants to understand as much of reality as possible; they all want to do this. When each consciousness does this, through its own unique significant meaning and its own unique focus of perception, it attracts events that match its abilities, its characteristics, and its intentions to occur around it. In the process of these events occurring, they take on its imprint, and the imprinted events return to the universe and in turn influence other consciousnesses to draw new experience and understanding from them. This is a cyclical, repeating process.

Because we humans cannot understand this grand computational rule or the meaning behind it, we think these things are impermanent and without pattern. But its true meaning and pattern lie right here.

Many people leave comments saying that Seth's words are "every word a footprint," every word a gem. His words truly are such that every single word, if you carefully weigh it, contains a deeply hidden meaning. It is just that he has not spoken so thoroughly -- actually, he has already spoken very thoroughly; it is just that perhaps our capacity for understanding is insufficient, and we cannot grasp the deeper meaning behind it.

The universe is acquainted with its reality through the ordered sequence of significant meaning. What is significant meaning? Significant meaning is a kind of pattern. Each consciousness has its own significant meaning, and through the ordered sequence of its own significant meaning, it becomes acquainted with its reality. The word "reality" can be translated as "actuality," or as "world." The universe is precisely through these consciousnesses, through the inner pattern of their own significant meaning, that it obtains each of their realities; all these realities added together form our universe. Your personal reality, plus his personal reality, plus the personal reality of every consciousness -- these personal realities added together, overlapping, layer upon layer, constitute the universe we have today. You have your world, I have my world, our worlds come together, and all people's worlds come together, and that is our shared world. That is how the universe comes to be.

The reason I cannot see the pattern clearly is because of differences in our understanding. When your level of cognition is higher, you will be able to understand the meaning behind it.

I am saying a bit more about this because this point differs from Buddhism. Buddhism's initial cognition holds that things are impermanent. Why does Buddhism say impermanence? Because in that era and that environment, he had to make people detach from real life. He was deconstructing the illusory nature of real life, and had no choice but to use this method to pull people out of real life. If he did not use this method, people would remain stuck in mechanical living -- earning money, living, raising a family, and then this life ends. Only through such an extreme statement could he make you recognize the impermanence of the human world, and through cultivation reach the state of ultimate nirvana. This is a method, a means, a matter of stages.

Unified Yet Separate Systems of Reality

He says:

These significant meanings, in the various separate systems of actuality, are indeed still combined in a unified fashion.

Because each person's significant meaning is different, and each consciousness's significant meaning is different, each significant meaning has its own reality -- the world that is true in its own eyes. Every consciousness has its own unique reality, and within its own reality, events occur according to the choices of its own significant meaning. And the occurrence of these events will inevitably influence other people and other things. So while they appear to be worlds each independent of the others, they are still combined in a unified fashion. Each person has one world, and between each world there is an inner overlap and unity.

The sequence of cause and effect that we understand is built upon such a non-causal level of significant meaning.

From the Perspective of Significant Meaning, There Is No Cause and Effect

Each consciousness's significant meaning is different, and therefore produces its own reality; within different systems of reality, events are still combined in a unified fashion. The causal order we understand is built upon the non-causal level of significant meaning.

From the perspective of significant meaning, there is no cause and effect. So what is significant meaning? If we put it in a way we humans can understand, in one sentence -- significant meaning is our way of associating. How we associate things is how significant meaning organizes; how we associate events is how significant meaning organizes events. It is just that what we associate are only things in our minds, while what significant meaning organizes are actual events, events that occur in our three-dimensional world. The mechanism is the same: how we associate events is how our consciousness organizes events to occur in the three-dimensional world.

And association itself has no causal relations whatsoever; it is unconstrained and free-ranging. Didn't I give the example earlier about buying the vase? The three events had no relation to one another, but was there not some inner connection? But did their inner connection have causality? There was no causality. You think it was because you first thought of Aunt Sara's matter, but actually it had nothing to do with that -- even if you had not thought of Aunt Sara, Aunt Sara would still have picked up the vase to look at it. So he says the causality you think exists is what you think; but the causality you recognize in real life, its underlying essence, is built upon this non-causal level, built upon the non-causal level of association.

If you replace the term "significant meaning" with "association," it becomes easier to understand, but it is not the same as association: association does not involve the actual occurrence of events, while significant meaning directly brings about events that you will actually experience.

He puts it in a way that says, the dream you remember is like a message that has been numbered, and has been tailored to fit your own intents and purposes.

The dream you can recall is like a message that has been encoded, tailored to fit your own intents and purposes, interpreted according to your own understanding and interpretation. So it fits the topography of your mind so perfectly -- it matches the topography of your mind. If your current mind is very pessimistic, then no matter what your dream gives you, in your interpretation it will be a pessimistic result; if you are now extremely joyful and delighted, then any dream, in your interpretation, will be a joyful result. So the dream must fit the topography of your present mind so perfectly that you forget the larger experience from which they are drawn.

You only see the phenomena of the dream, the events and expressions of the dream, but you forget where the dream obtained its events from. The dream obtains a translation from a larger level of reality that you do not know. The dreams you know are all translations of deeper levels of reality occurring on a level you can understand. You only focus on the dream's interpretation of your present real life, and do not truly investigate what the reality that came from that deeper level actually is. You have forgotten them -- you only see the dream leaning toward your reality, and do not think that this dream actually has little to do with your reality; it is a translation of something from your deeper levels.

Dreams Are the Most Precise Calculations and Activities

Whether physically or psychically, dreams themselves are the most precise calculations and activities.

This sentence must be highlighted. Whether in the body's healing, treatment, recovery, and adjustment, or in the psyche and spirituality, dreams themselves are the most precise calculations and activities. They are not as chaotic as you imagine; they are the most precise calculations and activities.

In them, the most complex dramas and interactions occur.

In dreams, the most complex dramas, and the interactions between events and events, between people and people within the dramas, are all occurring. And they are highly excited and intense -- the performances in dreams are not bland. You would not have a dream in which, for decades, day after day, you go to work; such dreams would not occur to you. These things do not appear in dreams. In dreams you must have intense conflict and strong excitement.

Yet they are completely disconnected from bodily participation.

There is no participation of your physical body. In a dream you eat with great relish and run very fast, but in real life you neither open your mouth nor move; you are lying in bed the whole time.

So then, these significant meanings involve certain biological cues of yours -- remember, significant meaning is the key point of this session. What actually are these intense conflicts and strong emotions in dreams? They are certain biological cues, representing certain things in our bodies.

It regulates an intersection between psychological events and physical activity in space and time.

It determines which of our psychological events will occur in our actual activities in reality. It uses the word "intersection" -- psychological events intersect with our space and time, and once they intersect, they become real events. So all of this is determined by significant meaning.

Only when all of your conditions meet your own very specialized requirements are the necessary cues activated, giving you physical experience.

Only when all conditions meet your specialized requirements -- meet your present requirements, meet the requirements of your significant meaning -- when all these conditions are met, are the necessary cues activated, forming our experience in the three-dimensional world.

In Dreams You Are on Standby

So what are you in dreams? In dreams you are on standby. You are involved in a range of activity, and you are deciding which events will manifest in the three-dimensional world. What is the standby state? You are waiting. For example, in a dream that stage play keeps performing, all kinds of plays, plays of all kinds of possibilities are being performed, and you are there waiting and watching. You watch until an event meets all your requirements, and you say: this one, let it happen in the three-dimensional world.

I give this vivid example to help you understand: you are below the stage, like a director. A director has many versions of every shot, constantly filming and performing. Which one will be put on the big screen, edited into your final film? You are that director -- keep this shot, this shot meets all your requirements, the other shots can all be deleted.

In dreams you design a very large range of activity, too vast to fit actual earthly experience. The stage of the dream state you are in is extremely vast, and many worlds within it are not suitable for Earth, not suitable for manifestation in the three-dimensional world -- conditions are not ripe, and all kinds of possibilities are not present. At this time you are the one who selects which world will manifest in reality. You must consider both the feasibility of its landing and whether it meets your requirements -- between meeting your requirements and the concrete practice of real life, you must select from among them the one that satisfies all requirements, and the others are excluded by you.

Significant Meaning Establishes Its Own Code

So then, these significant meanings establish their own code systems. Each significant meaning has its own unique code. Therefore actual events must be coded in a certain way, while dreams use another set of codes. Thus, a state that may be called "predream" -- or a state of experience -- is the state from which dreams are formed.

This passage is a bit complex. As I said earlier, this Chapter 9 is somewhat difficult. What he means to say is this: each consciousness's own significant meaning establishes its own code system. How should we understand this? It means that among these possible events, which ones can actually manifest in reality -- the possible event must match the code of this significant meaning; the two must correspond. This code, you can understand it as having special requirements.

You can understand this code this way: each significant meaning has its own specialized requirements, and whichever event in real life is to occur must be coded in a certain way, must conform to this code. As if it has been digitally signed by him. Why do I keep using the term "digital signature"? It fits this concept quite well. It means that among the countless possible events, you select one to manifest in real life, and the process of this manifestation itself has already added the code of your significant meaning, added the digital signature of your significant meaning.

Can you understand this? If not, I will say it again. Each significant meaning, we can understand in plain terms as having its own set of requirements, a kind of specialized requirement. This specialized requirement we can regard as a kind of code, or an encrypted signature. In the process of selecting one event from among countless possible events to manifest, the event you select itself is equivalent to matching your code, corresponding to it -- it meets your requirements, so this event itself carries your code.

Therefore every event that occurs in the real world is as if it has been stamped by you, had a code attached by you. Events that occur in the three-dimensional world all carry the unique characteristics of your consciousness, carry a unique seal upon them -- this event was definitely done by this consciousness, not by another consciousness. That is what he means.

And dreams have another set of codes, completely different from this code; they are two encryption systems. How events occur in dreams follows another set of code rules. In other words, suppose ten events occur in a dream, and in real life you select one to manifest -- this one event necessarily meets the requirements of your consciousness's significant meaning, carrying the imprint of your significant meaning. Then, do these ten events in the dream also have a predream state, from which ten events were selected out of a hundred to occur in your dream? How to select these ten out of a hundred events is like how to select one out of ten dream events to manifest in reality -- they are two completely different code systems, but the working mechanism is similar. So you can see this material is a little difficult, but don't worry, just follow along.

This experience will carry a different code, making the dream further removed from bodily activity, and from intersection with space and time.

This experience refers to the predream experience -- be sure to remember, predream can be called a state, or a state of experience. Dreams are produced from this state, and this state is further removed from our three-dimensional world, further removed from our physical bodies. If you think about it, you can see that it is certainly further removed.

Dream Variations on Themes and the Predream State

Actual events that occur in the three-dimensional world all happen to you -- put this in quotation marks, referring to the ego -- happen to yourself. But in dreams, you may experience an event as if you were another person, or you may find yourself in the past or the future, rather than the present. And you may become a different person: in waking life you have your own family, friends, and profession, but in dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, not your current spouse, or living a completely different life.

In a certain manner, dreams are like variations on the themes of your life.

Although in real life, your life is a theme selected from among your possible versions, your life in dreams may be another choice. So in dreams you can change roles and live a life different from your present life.

However, to a certain degree, dream events are largely very similar to physical events -- the house in your dream is very similar to your house in the three-dimensional world, and perception in dreams seems to be embodied; you also walk, run, eat, and drink. There are indeed many other conditions of existence, but for now we are only discussing the predream condition, the state from which dreams are produced.

In fact, the predream condition is composed of several actual conditions.

Comparatively speaking, as you go from the dream state further into inner reality, the physical aspects of this place largely disappear. When your dream enters a deeper level, in that dream state you can no longer see the images of real life. When a dream reaches a certain degree, when it goes deep enough, it completely transcends your understanding. At the ordinary level of dreams, you can still understand, because you still have bodily activity -- eating, walking, chatting -- it is very similar to your real life; but at the deeper levels of dreams, these images are gone.

For you, experience seems to become broader and less definite -- at that level, possibilities are broader, experience is broader, but less definite; there are no images, no substantial pictures of events; you are left only with a feeling, something hazy, without visual imagery. But this is not actually the case.

Why is it not the case? Your experience has indeed broadened, but its nature has also changed. It is not that it has become less definite; its nature has simply changed. How has it changed? For example:

One moment of this experience can provide the dream with five years of usable information.

The dreams a person would have over five years, in the predream state, can all be obtained in a single moment. So how does this work for you? You might say, just give me five years of life, wouldn't that be enough? It is not to be understood that way -- five years in dreams is not five years in three-dimensional life; it is extremely rich, containing countless possibilities. And all of this is obtained in a single moment.

Is this somewhat like what is said in Inception²⁰: each time you go one level deeper into a dream, time becomes slower. Did director Nolan receive something like divine assistance? Some things are shown through the film. If today you look at it from a spiritual perspective, many of the film's expressive techniques have profound meanings -- the dream within a dream is actually the predream state. Each time you enter a predream state, time in our three-dimensional world becomes many times slower. If you have not seen it, you can go back and watch Inception²⁰ again; perhaps the feeling you have watching it today will be different from the feeling you had then.

To use another analogy, you joyfully leave behind the normal trappings of your daily life, and pilot your own larger psyche into a greater sea of experience.

This tells you that the predream state is not inaccurate or unclear -- it is that you can no longer understand it; its nature has completely changed. The experience of the predream state occurs according to the intensity of the experience itself, and the knowledge of this experience is converted into information, which in the dream state is then broken down into more definite data -- data that is highly symbolic, and data that meets our personal requirements.

And you often indulge in that other reality.

He says this is an analogy, but its inspiration and essence are transmitted to yourself. You often enter this predream state, and you often go into your inner reality; its inspiration and essence are transmitted to you, but you may not remember -- because the material at that level is too condensed, or its nature is already different, and you cannot understand it with your understanding, and those events cannot even be called events. But it does not matter; as long as you have entered it, its inspiration and help can be transmitted to you.

That self is the one you come to know through the formation of dreams -- only when you enter that predream experience, or enter that predream state, can you truly realize what that true self is about. Only in that state can you truly know that self.

Using Indestructible Actuality as Bait

In your terms, dreaming takes time. From our perspective, even having several dreams in one night takes time. Your dreams are ultimately formed by this larger experience, and this experience involves you in a kind of journey.

To use another analogy, you joyfully leave behind the normal trappings of your daily life, and pilot your own larger psyche into a greater sea of experience. The sea of experience here is already different from the sea of experience we understand -- it is not the experiences of daily life we imagine; the nature of those experiences has completely changed. What does it mean that the nature has completely changed? For example, in the three-dimensional world you see a tree, you embrace it, you lie beneath it in the shade -- that is your experience in the three-dimensional world. When you reach that level, suppose you are experiencing a tree, it is not experienced that way: you instantly feel the consciousness of the tree, instantly feel how, as a tree, it perceives this world; you instantly have both your consciousness and the tree's consciousness at the same time, instantly feel the entire process of this tree growing from a tiny seed into a towering tree, and finally, hundreds of years later, growing old, falling to the ground, and turning into soil. That kind of experience is completely different from your present experience.

You leave behind the physicalized nature of events -- that is, the nature of our three-dimensional world -- and enter the region where those events are formed, the source from which events arise. In a way that is most difficult to describe, you make use of far broader inner senses, contacting the universe in a more direct manner. Our traditional contact with the universe through the five senses is always indirect; only by using the inner senses do we contact the universe in a more direct way. The inner senses have been mentioned many times before; Seth divides the human inner senses into nine kinds. On that journey, you can no longer use your ordinary senses; what you use are all inner senses. You might ask, when I am in a dream, am I also using the inner senses? No. In a dream, what you use are simulated three-dimensional physical senses -- in a dream you can see, hear, eat, run, and jump, but you do not have the sensations of the inner senses. Occasionally you do, but most of the time what you use are still the senses designed for three dimensions. When you truly travel into the world that exists before dreams are formed, you must rely on your inner senses; otherwise your traditional senses can no longer comprehend it -- this feeling of one second being five years, you certainly cannot understand it.

Using your indestructible certainty as a lure, you go forward, drawing experience from the universe, raw natural material.

In that state, you use your indestructible certainty as a lure -- your consciousness can never be destroyed; this is an absolutely true certainty. Because it is indestructible, you dare to charge forward, dare to rush toward this unknown world. You draw directly from the universe raw natural material that has not been processed, rather than material that has been disguised by our camouflage world.

There, you are yourself, but you are also a part of the universe -- you yourself originate from that universe, and that universe is your source; this is a mutually nested relationship. And its power and certainty are your own: the power is the creative power of the universe, and the certainty is the certain recognition that you are yourself, without the slightest doubt about your own identity.

And this power and certainty are waiting to be uniquely focused.

Is the unique focused point not your significant purpose? He says that significant purpose is a unique, focused point of awareness. So at this time you are still using your own significant purpose to explore and to know this world, except that before you used the outer senses, and now you are using the inner senses more and more.

In your terms, you truly look backward and forward.

From our human perspective, when you reach that level you can transcend time and space, looking everywhere, forward and backward, left and right, seeing across time your own personal self and your civilization -- how this life of yours came about, your past lives and present life, even your future, including the entire history of human civilization; you can see it all. All your reincarnations, everything about you personally, and the whole of human civilization are united as one at that level. You feel the infinite connections within it -- between individual and individual, between one lifetime and another, between you and human civilization, between you and this planet, and between you and All That Is and the universe. How are they connected? All through your significant purpose.

Personal events are also world events

Therefore, all the events you choose as your own are also chosen as a world event, and are participated in by others to whatever degree, adding to the experience available to humanity.

The reason you are you -- is it not made up of every event that happens to you from birth to death? And is not every one of these events chosen by you? You choose all these events to make yourself. Every one of these events, whether great or small, is both your personal event and a world event. Your most insignificant action, a single move, a single behavior, truly affects the whole world -- only the degree of influence differs. Participated in by others to whatever degree: maybe one person participates, two people, a hundred people, ten thousand people; whether the participation is deep or shallow, many people or few, it all adds to the experience available to humanity, and all other people can draw nourishment and energy from what you have added.

When you go exploring in the inner world, you can truly understand: you are a member of this world, you are a member of the universe. None of your actions are insignificant; they all affect this world and every person in it. You are this miraculous and this great; never belittle yourself by saying I am just a nobody -- never, ever think that. The influence and inner connections among them exceed the range of your cognition in the three-dimensional world. Only when you reach that level -- the inner world, the place where dreams arise -- can you feel it, perceive it, and realize it.

So this reminds me of a song from before, an old song by Angus Tung called "The Place Where Dreams Arise"²¹ -- what is the place where dreams arise? It is your inner world.

This is a cognition involving intuition. In it, each consciousness knows what every other is doing, the position of the other consciousness, and the meaning of its experience.

This is a direct cognition, beyond our logical thinking and rational analysis; it is an intuitive, direct cognition -- among the nine inner senses there is this process of directly cognizing knowledge and concepts. In this direct cognition, every consciousness knows every consciousness in the world: what it is doing, where its position is, what the inner meaning of its experience is -- that is, what the underlying meaning of what it is doing is, what the inner connections among these events are, what the inner relationships driving the whole of human civilization are, and what role each person plays within it. Every consciousness at that level knows all of this. So the understanding among them exceeds the range of what you can cognize.

The entire organization and structure of time and reality is determined at every point, and its probabilities are all explored and understood.

At the level of the whole universe, the organizational structure of time and reality is composed of these consciousnesses. Every consciousness knows its own position within the entire structure; together they form the overall structure, each performing its own function, driving the formation of the whole structure. And within it, all the probabilities of every consciousness have already been explored and understood, and the behavior most valuable and most meaningful to the overall structure has been chosen. It is this grand a system. And our three-dimensional world emerges from this larger world -- with the layer of dreams in between; they form the world within dreams, and we in turn select some things from the dream world to practice in real life.

Taking the body as an example: the astonishing calculations of the cells

Does this sound a bit complicated? Actually it is not that complicated.

Yet, in a different way, the same process also occurs on other levels.

For example, on the level of our physical body, the same thing is happening. In its own way -- in the way of each cell itself, the consciousness of every cell perceives, in exhaustive detail, all the probabilities concerning the survival of the physical body. There are countless possible ways for your physical body to survive, yet every one of your cells knows them; it has already worked through them all. It has already understood all the probabilities of the entire structure, the entire organization, and then adopted the most effective, most probable, most realistic way to manifest in our world.

Our body has 50 trillion cells²², and every one of them knows -- exhaustively, in complete detail, down to the finest detail -- all the probabilities of physical survival. And at this moment, the cells in your body know the living conditions occurring at any location on this planet.

Furthermore, your cells are aware of the motion of the planets, as well as all conditions concerning the balance, stability, and survival of the body, and it is according to the results of these calculations that the body is continually formed.

Does that sound very complicated? Does this project exceed all the scope of human imagination? 50 trillion cells²² -- the population of Earth right now is 7 billion -- 50 trillion cells²², each one knowing everything that will happen to the whole body, is like every person on Earth knowing all the possible developments of the whole world. Your every cell is ten thousand times more numerous than the population of Earth, and each one knows all the probabilities of this human body. Not only that, it also knows everything happening at every location in this world, and it also knows the way the whole Earth operates -- even we humans do not know, but it knows.

Under this premise, it gathers all this information together and carries out a calculation beyond human imagination. It must balance all probabilities, make trade-offs, maintain balance, maintain stability -- from the greatest probability of survival, the greatest stability of your body, the most stable and balanced change. After it has evaluated all these things, it gives you an instruction on how your body should act, and only then can the continual generation of new cells in your body take shape.

He uses this as an analogy for what he just said about the relationship between each of our consciousnesses and the whole universe, All That Is -- it is the same as the relationship with the body. Our universe is formed in this way, and our body is also formed in this way, in ways you do not know. We do not know the methods by which they operate, nor do we know where such powerful computational ability comes from, but he at least allows us a glimpse into the inner laws and logic within it.

The psyche participates in and contributes to infinite existence

Broadly speaking, in this predream state, you know all the activities of your larger psyche.

In the predream state, you know all the activities of your psyche -- the part of you that is the larger psyche.

The psyche participates in and contributes to the infinite existence of psychic consciousness, and is aware of the psychological events by which it forms a stable structure.

In the psychic world, the consciousness of this psychic world exists infinitely. Every psyche participates in and contributes to this infinite existence, and is aware of what psychological events it should adopt in order to maintain a stable structure for this infinitely existing consciousness -- that is, how it should hold itself in order to maintain the state of the whole structure. For example, it is like every cell knowing what the best state is in which to maintain itself, so that the body can be maintained in an optimal state.

(Seth said, "You may take a break or end the session, as you prefer. I did not go to the dentist" -- he made a joke, because last Friday Rob had a tooth pulled, and the tooth had not fully recovered. In foreign countries, after having a tooth pulled you still have to take painkillers, and a person feels a little dizzy.)

Unless certain specific requirements are met, and certain specific codes are activated, events do not become physical.

This sentence is a supplement to the previous point: only when some events in dreams meet all the requirements of that significant purpose -- which is equivalent to matching the codes, matching the password -- can those dream events possibly become physically real in real life. Otherwise they will not happen in our three-dimensional world. Because in the passage mentioned earlier, every one knows what it should do in order to become the most powerfully supportive member of the entire infinite system; that has been precisely calculated.

Experience at this predream level occurs according to its own intensity, and it is then transferred into information; dreams then break it down into more specific material.

Predream experience occurs according to its own intensity, and after it occurs it is transferred into a kind of message, and this message is then broken down in dreams into more specific material -- highly symbolic, and material that conforms to our personal requirements.

Then, in a ghostly fashion, it is test-driven in the body.

In a nonphysical way, it is tried out in our body: an event occurs, and we see what kind of effect it has on our body. Although our physical body does not directly participate in dream events, our body still has all kinds of perceptions, so it is test-driven in our body.

Then it is further processed into personal significant purposes, impulses, or images.

During the test-driving of these dream events, this information is further processed into significant purposes, impulses, or images related to each individual person. We say dreams come true -- why? Things in dreams often become an impulse or an image for you, or represent your significant purpose.

Thus it is transformed into the necessary codes.

Because it meets our requirements, meets the special requirements of our consciousness, meets the significant purpose of consciousness.

Then the nature of the physical event to be actualized is determined.

We then decide, based on our significant purposes, impulses, and images, which events to allow to happen in the three-dimensional world. During the rehearsal in the dream theater, we have been observing all along, watching which ones best match our purposes, impulses, and images, and whichever event we choose is the one we allow to happen in the three-dimensional world.

Before information is registered as physical, or before information is experienced as a physical event, it must have a certain specific intensity.

For a piece of information to be registered as "this thing is going to become a physical event," it must have a certain specific intensity; if the intensity is insufficient, it cannot be manifested.

Part of this process occurs in the dream state, and the creative preparatory process plays an important role.

In this process, creativity is of vital importance. Do not forget that Seth has always been reminding you of your creativity -- your creativity plays an important role in this preparatory process. How the play in your dream theater is performed, whether it is performed well or poorly, and which one you choose to actualize in practice -- this depends on the creative talent of the director. If the director has strong creative talent, the plays he rehearses in dreams are rich and varied, and from these rich and varied plays he can choose the event most meaningful to him at the moment and actualize it. If this director has no creativity and no inspiration, then the plays in dreams are all the same, and the play of life is also dull, like a running account; then no matter how you choose from it, you cannot choose a truly splendid event to actualize.

So Seth tells us that the improvement of our creativity -- whether we are awake or dreaming -- is always very meaningful. If your creativity is lacking, it proves that this director has no ideas and no inspiration, and in the dream rehearsals there is also no inspiration or ideas, so no good plays can be rehearsed, and therefore real life also appears very plain, dull, and boring; this is caused by your insufficient creativity.

This part of Chapter Nine is very important, and the whole of Chapter Nine is becoming more and more important.

Seth and Jane's Notes

Two days ago, Jane received her first printed copy of The Politics of the Psyche; the book had been published, and she was very pleased. Rob said he felt the same way, because both of them had been too busy to write any detailed notes for The Nature of the Psyche, the way he had done for my other Seth books. Seth had promised at the beginning of this book that he would indeed build up a kind of background from time to time by discussing our activities, but he was more interested in delivering this information. Jane also had no time to provide her own notes.

What this passage means is that when Seth wrote The Nature of the Psyche, he did not write many notes, Rob had no time to write them either, and Jane had no time to write them. So Seth could only use the class sessions to frequently discuss Jane's and Rob's activities, building up some background -- this background is like pillars, the causes and effects surrounding events, taking the things that happened to Rob and Jane and using them as footnotes, as background material for this book.

When we felt that the importance of Seth's work far exceeded our own comments, that was certain. But Rob also wanted to remind Seth of something: Jane's delivery of these sessions was spontaneous; no matter what she had been doing earlier that day, as soon as the session began, Seth came through automatically. He was either joking or serious, dictating a chapter, or making some general comments about our lives or the world. He was always ready to share his own perceptions and awareness with us, insofar as he could interpret them into words that we could understand.

When Jane spoke for him, her eyes were always much darker, black, and they seemed larger too, with a compelling brilliance that was both mysterious and attractive. Seth's voice came through Jane with its own distinctive accent, could be as gentle as a whisper, and when he wanted to drive a point home, it could be as thunderous as he wished. When Jane came out of trance, she might remember what she had said, or she might not remember it at all; it was never certain.

The Pre-Dream State and Direct Knowing

He said tonight we begin the dictation on the nature of the psyche. Then we look at what Seth says in this session. He said I will call this place the pre-dream state -- the previous session discussed the state before dreaming. This pre-dream state is actually a state we are forever immersed in, whether you are awake or asleep, you are immersed in it; whether you know it or not; or whether, in your terms, you are dead or alive, you are immersed in such a state.

In this pre-dream state, its primary function is direct knowing, that is, direct knowing, and this is its main purpose. This direct knowing is also one of the abilities among the nine inner senses. He said:

The pre-dream state is one of the most natural states of your existence, and sometimes we may know it, sometimes not. So in a broad sense, nature involves a state that includes both life and death. It is a far broader frame of reference, because it includes both life and death within it at the same time, a state that transcends life and death.

It is also best characterized by a more perceptive psychological organization. Only this more perceptive psychological organization can express its characteristics; an ordinary psychological organization cannot do it. In the pre-dream state, you participate in this organization -- what organization? It is this more perceptive psychological organization. Our ordinary psychological state, our ordinary psychological structure cannot perceive it; only that super-perceptive psychological organization, that psychological framework, can perceive it.

At the same time, although upon waking, you will bring back to your physical body information that can be concretely recognized and utilized. That is to say, when you wake up, you can bring back the information that the physical body can use, the information that can be recognized, the information that can be utilized. It is very important to remember: your experience and knowledge also grow on other levels of actuality. After you bring back this experience and knowledge, this information, although it comes from the pre-dream state, crosses through the dream, is transmitted to you through the dream, and you bring it into the waking state, yet in this entire process, this information passes through these several levels, and it has growth and influence on each of these levels. It does not only influence your waking state; it also influences your dream state, and it also influences that underlying pre-dream state. It undergoes changes on all these levels.

The pre-dream state gives rise to the world in the dream, and the dream world in turn gives rise to the world of your everyday life. You experience this world in your everyday life, and it has an influence on this dream world and on this world before the dream -- on the preceding event that gave rise to this event -- it will in turn influence them, growing them, enriching them.

He said even within your physical life, within our actual lifetime, your experience is not limited only to conventional physical events. The experience of our ordinary lifetime is not only not confined by our daily life, functioning only in this three-dimensional world; this experience also influences your dream state and the entire pre-dream state, it influences all levels, and it will in turn influence them.

Those ordinary events, that is, the events that occur in ordinary life, arise from creative impulses occurring on these other levels. Our ordinary events are born from, emerge from, the events on other levels, from these creative impulses. He said please understand, here I am not saying that you do not have conscious control over events. After he says all this, you do not need to interpret it as: since these events all come from the pre-dream events, then to the dream events, then to the three-dimensional events, it seems that this three-dimensional event is completely beyond my control, controlled by that deeper pre-dream event, controlled by that world. He said I am not trying to say that. Why? Because they are formed according to your own feelings, your beliefs, your purposes, and your intents.

Here he emphasizes again: those events, I seem to feel that you are a passive person who can only receive these events, but that is not so. These events are all generated and formed from within according to your own intents, beliefs, and purposes, according to your feelings. Do not misunderstand this. However, what makes events real is the inner information coming from these other sources -- that is, the inner information that makes you feel that three-dimensional events are so real all comes from those places we consider not so real, such as from the dream and the pre-dream state.

The Nature of Events and Possibilities

Most of you do not perceive the fundamental mysterious nature of events. The vast majority of us do not discover that the nature of events is like this, because you never think to study this inner organization, you never think in this direction. You simply feel that an event is an event, it happens in the three-dimensional world, and we just experience it and accept it. You have never thought about what the essence of this event actually is, what generates it, what forms this event, and how it is formed.

The past and future of any particular event provide a kind of thickness. So the occurrence of an event is not a simple, thin, singular event. Behind this event there is a source unknown to you; it does not happen out of thin air without cause. You may not know how it came about, but it has a certain source and cause. Then it has a future. This event occurs in the present, and it will produce subsequent events and a series of later changes, and these subsequent events and changes all form a kind of thickness in time, a kind of depth within time. So every event has thickness; it is not a single, thin event.

The possibilities of an event actually escape your attention. The possible aspects of an event escape our attention. We only focus on the event itself, and do not focus on the causes before this event and the consequences after it.

In the predream state, you are directly confronted with a reality.

In that state, what you confront is reality, without any camouflage whatsoever. Within it, those possibilities are simultaneously present to your perception. In that predream state, you simultaneously perceive all those possibilities; those possibilities are simultaneously present to you. But when we ordinarily experience an event, we only experience one event, and we overlook that this event has numerous possibilities, and these possibilities escape our attention. In that predream state, you confront this reality and all the possibilities of this reality, all the possibilities of this event, and you perceive them simultaneously.

In a dazzling display, you perceive such a world from an infinite number of viewpoints.

In that predream world, it is a dazzling and bewildering scene in which all possibilities occur simultaneously, and you must perceive them all at once, so your viewpoint must be infinite. What does an infinite viewpoint mean? You simultaneously have that many viewpoints to track all the possible events occurring at the same time — however many possible events there are, that is how many viewpoints you have.

Session 789

You cannot consciously grasp this information, let alone take any action on it.

We cannot consciously grasp it again, because our consciousness cannot keep up with it, still less take any action on this kind of experience, this kind of information; we cannot even get hold of it.

Nor can you maintain your particular, unique psychological state at the same time.

You cannot experience all these possibilities simultaneously and at the same time still maintain your own unique psychological state -- what does that mean? It means that when you are experiencing within all the possibilities at the same time, you lose your uniqueness and your singularity. Let me give a simple example so it is easier to understand: for instance, your usual perception of yourself, that is, "what you are like," is a unique, one-of-a-kind, singular self-perception. But in this pre-dream state, all possibilities occur at once, and if you perceive them simultaneously -- for example, you are married to Zhang San, and at the same time married to Li Si, and at the same time married to Zhao Wu -- when you are married to all these people at the same time, your sense of identity no longer has any particularity or singularity. That is what he means here by particular and unique. So you cannot maintain it the way you do in ordinary daily life, where you are married only to Zhang San; your identity would become that you are married to all these people at once, so how could your identity be maintained? This is a very subtle feeling, and ordinarily it is very hard for us to understand.

So there is no way for you to understand it at that level with your ordinary consciousness. Although you cannot understand it, cannot grasp it, cannot take action, you still make use of that level of existence -- that pre-dream level of existence -- and make use of that unfathomable data, that information, as the foundation for forming the reality that you know. It is indeed unfathomable: all possibilities occur in parallel, you perceive them simultaneously, and this unfathomable information provides you with the foundation of that information, and through that foundation you form the events that we know. The things that happen in the world we know all come from that foundation.

The Two-Way Connection of Dreams

To a certain degree, your dreaming state connects the life you recognize with this much larger dimension. In a certain sense, your dreams are connected at both ends: one end connects to your waking reality, and the other end connects to this larger dimensional space that precedes dreams. This dimension of the pre-dream state is one of the sources of your waking life—all of our waking life comes from there.

So dreaming involves a far greater input of information than you know. A dream is not an output of information; it is not merely an output of information—it also involves an input of information. Where does this information come in from? Where do the things in dreams come from? They all come in from this pre-dream state. So it involves a great deal of this kind of information input that we ordinarily do not understand. That is to say, when you are dreaming, you receive far more information than when you are awake. Because when you are awake, this input cannot get through; only during dreams can the information from this pre-dream state enter into the dream. Although it is a different kind of information, a kind that is different from our waking information—the previous session covered what that kind of information is like.

You form part of your dreams from that information; a portion of your dreams is obtained directly from that information. The dreams themselves are further processed so that they can become material that can be recognized as waking events. This has already been covered earlier—that is the relationship: the pre-dream reality, the dream reality, and your physical reality—the relationship among these three is exactly this. The material of our waking events all comes from the material of dreams, and the material of dreams all comes from the pre-dream reality.

The drama of dreams is highly complex, an artistic product.

The drama within dreams is far more complex than we understand. On the one hand, the drama of dreams represents a symbolic performance within the dream of other events from the pre-dream state. The natural condition of these pre-dream events exceeds your understanding—the natural condition of the pre-dream state, that is, its inherent attributes, already exceed our understanding, so he cannot explain it. Yet these events are not lost. Although we cannot understand them, the events themselves are not discarded; rather, they are translated into dreams.

When your own consciousness returns, drawing closer to home base—home base being our waking world—drawing closer to the waking world, every aspect of the dream appears in coded form as a symbol of a larger, incomprehensible event. As you gradually draw closer to our home base, gradually draw closer to our physical life, every level of the dream appears in coded form, becoming a symbol of a larger, incomprehensible event.

How should we understand this sentence? The larger, incomprehensible events are the events that occur in that pre-dream state. Those events are all larger and incomprehensible—incomprehensible meaning beyond understanding; we do not know their meaning. The previous session covered that the information within an instant there is enough to cover five years' worth of our ordinary dream information. At the time, an example was given, and you thought that if one second equals five years, then as long as I can process the conversion, I can understand it too. Then he went on to say, I only gave you an example; what I mean is that the kind and nature of that information is already different from the kind and nature of the information you understand. It is not a quantitative gap where one second equals five years; it is not this quantitative gap—they are already different in nature; it is no longer the nature of the same kind of thing. So the experience, the occurrence, or the events of that pre-dream state cannot be understood by us, because its nature itself is already completely different—completely different from the events, scenes, and things we ordinarily understand. It is a difference in nature.

So every aspect of the dream is a display, in coded form, of an unknowable event from that pre-dream state. It corresponds to a certain event in the pre-dream state, and that event is beyond our understanding, so in the dream it is shown to us through translation. The dream that comes through this translation carries a certain symbolic quality, and these symbolic signs are like a set of codes that directly correspond to—on a level you do not know, on a level you cannot understand—some event or events of the pre-dream state behind it, or a single event, or a group of events, or a combination of events.

Why does he use the word "code" here? It is to indicate that you do not understand, that you cannot grasp such a symbol. For example, suppose you dream that you go fishing by a river. You might interpret it using three-dimensional understanding as simply the matter of fishing by a river. But this matter of fishing by a river, this scene in the dream, may be a set of codes, and this set of codes corresponds to a particular kind of event, a specific event, in your pre-dream state. That is what he means.

Such symbols are so precisely and accurately produced that they also become aspects intimately connected with your daily life.

It not only forms these aspects within the dream—dream events produced by these magical, incomprehensible events—but these dream events also simultaneously become various aspects, related facets, of our physical life. What does this mean? It means that the aspects of the dream span both ends: one end connects to the pre-dream state, corresponding to the pre-dream world through a set of codes, through special symbolic combinations of codes—that world is incomprehensible; but on the side we can understand, this matter of fishing by the river in our dream corresponds to something in our physical life, to a certain aspect of our physical life. It is just that when it comes to this aspect of our physical life, it is also displayed through something similar to codes. So we do not fully understand which thing in our physical life the matter of fishing by the river corresponds to; you cannot completely understand it, because the codes between them are not interchangeable.

Dreams have the codes of dreams, and waking life has the codes of waking life. Saying "codes" may be hard for you to grasp—it means their symbolic meanings are different, their combinations are different. For example, the act of fishing in a dream is a kind of symbol, but what does the symbol of fishing mean within the dream? It represents something in your pre-dream state, related to an event in your pre-dream state. And what does the matter of fishing in a dream mean in physical life? Does it mean that by staying by the river you will become wealthy? That catching a fish means you will have money? In ancient China, there were many dream interpretations where fish and water signified the source of wealth. So does fishing by the water mean you are about to become rich? The very same act of fishing represents one world in the pre-dream state, and represents another thing in our post-waking world; its meaning differs under different code interpretations. That is to say, the symbolic meaning of the act of fishing is different, so we call them different codes.

Dreams, Inspiration, and the Body's Connection

Daily events are also partly -- you see, he uses the word "partly," not entirely -- formed by this kind of dream material. So every event in our physical life is also a symbol of another event that is otherwise incomprehensible. Every single thing that happens in my reality is certainly a manifestation of something in a dream. But the way it manifests corresponds to the dream event through a kind of code, and you do not know which event in your dream this thing corresponds to. You must never understand it as dream events being moved into reality unchanged -- such dreams do exist too, like what are called precognitive dreams or something like that, but they are only one kind. The process by which dream events manifest in reality involves a certain transformation and symbolic meaning in the course of actualization. So when something happens in your reality, you cannot find its source -- did it come from a dream? It did come from a dream, but which dream event corresponds to the things in the phenomenal world is also incomprehensible to you.

That incomprehensible event takes place on those psychological and spiritual levels in which your own existence is immersed. The thing that happens in your reality is manifested out of the dream event of fishing, corresponding in real life through different symbols and different meanings. Even if one day you manage to match something to a dream event -- if you observe your life over a long period and record your dreams, you may find the symbolic correspondences in between -- you still cannot find the relationship to the thing before the dream, so ultimately the origin of the event remains unsolvable and incomprehensible.

This in no way denies the validity of events as you think of them.

What does the validity of an event mean? It means that the event is decided by you, not passive, not a process where something emerges from a space you do not know, then changes from the dream into real life. Because all your physical activity -- after these things and events happen in our three-dimensional world -- this physical activity immediately changes all the relationships on all levels of existence.

This event in your real life certainly comes from an unknown event, and this unknown event passes through the dream and then emerges in reality. Through the dramatic rehearsal of the dream, based on your intentions, wishes, feelings, and desires, you select one to manifest in reality -- this is a normal process. But after you manifest it, when you go to experience this event -- for example, you manifest the event of marrying a certain person -- once you experience it and go through it in the three-dimensional world, it will produce a kind of feedback influence on the other events on the series of levels that produced it. The occurrence of this event will produce a series of chain reactions, and this chain reaction is not just the occurrence of subsequent events in the three-dimensional world; it more so affects the relationships on all the levels involved in between, and every level is influenced by it. So you have the initiative -- remember this, you have the initiative -- because your physical activity determines the whole series of things that follow.

The Source of Inspiration

Most of you are familiar with some form of inspiration. For example, those of you who are not writers, not painters, not poets, not musicians, may often suddenly find that for a period of time you have almost changed into someone else -- changed into what? Suddenly you will create a poem, a song, a piece of music, or a sketch. These things seem to have popped up out of nowhere, as if emerging from beyond the categories of your usual thought patterns. And along with them -- in the moment before this inspiration arrived, there seemed to be no existence of -- understanding, joy, compassion, or an artistic inclination. That is to say, before this song, this painting, this poem arrived, you did not have the normal artist's kind of (emotion). It was not because of a feeling -- because you were very sad you wrote a song, or because you had some feeling in your heart you painted a picture or wrote a poem -- there was none of that, and yet suddenly there would be this creative result and creative inspiration.

Where does this song, this poem, this music come from? These people feel that they suddenly know in a direct way; their experience, so to speak, comes from within, it is knowledge that comes from within, not information that comes from outside. This knowledge comes from within, just like this burst of inspiration, suddenly it is intuitive.

Then dreams come in the same way. Just like intuition, you do not know how a dream directly arrives in your sleeping dream. At night before you go to sleep, you do not need to wonder how to form a dream; you never worry about how dreams come, nor do you need to know any of the mechanisms involved. Therefore a dream is simply a process that happens; it just happens, just as an inspiration seems to arrive.

Dreams' Direct Impact on the Body

People have written some books about the nature of dreams, typically reporting on precognitive dreams, or dreams of saints or revered figures in the Bible who had prophetic dreams. However, apart from these saints' dreams and precognitive dreams, every dream of every person alters the physical world to some degree. He gave an example: a creative idea can lead to a book. A thought, a single idea can produce a book, and that book most likely will be published, and it is undoubtedly a sufficiently physical product that changes a part of this world. When you first start writing a book, it certainly originates from a thought.

He said, using this as an example, dreams are already the most intimate mechanism by which physical events are formed. Dreams, in their simplest form, are that mechanism, that most intimate way by which physical events in our three-dimensional world are formed.

In direct response to a dream, hormonal and chemical changes occur within the body, responding directly to a dream at the finest, most important levels of the cells.

When we dream, the body responds along with it: whether you are afraid, terrified, running, being chased by bad people, all kinds of dream scenarios—when these dream scenarios occur, there will be some hormonal changes, chemical reactions in your body, and these reactions occur at the finest or most important levels of the cells. So your dreams do have an impact on your body.

Your dreams are therefore connected with your biological makeup.

So dreams are not without direct impact on our three-dimensional world; they have a significant impact.

Within the dream imagery that is connected with cellular activity, there are also coded biological connections. This is not a general statement, but very specific and definite.

That is to say, what kind of dream produces what kind of reaction in the body—there is also a kind of code-like relationship in between.

Every object in a dream is chosen with the highest discrimination, so that it can be used as a symbol on many levels, and also sends appropriate information to the individual cells and organs of your body.

The objects that appear in dreams are carefully selected, of the highest discrimination, precisely calculated. Those objects that appear in dreams actually have an influence on many levels of you, and can be regarded as symbolic objects on various levels. And these symbolic objects will produce appropriate and definite information for the individual cells and even organs of your body—called appropriate information.

He said what I want to discuss is the connection between creativity and dreams and the physical world—that is, the three-dimensional world—in their actual formation. A lot has been said before, and the discussion has been about the connection between your personal creativity, dreams, and the actual formation of the three-dimensional world.

At the same time, I also understand that you need some kind of precise terminology. I know you want some kind of precise terminology. Although I also know at the same time that if I speak in a certain way, if for your benefit I become more precise in using professional vocabulary or definite terminology to express this, I may lose a larger issue that escapes these limitations. When I try to use the kind of accurate, precise terminology that you humans want to use to describe this process, I may miss those most important, larger issues that limit your ideas or limit your thinking. That is to say, this process itself is already very difficult for us to understand, and if we insist on describing it accurately in the way we want to, it becomes even more difficult, and much more important information will be lost. He said I also want to avoid the many preconceptions connected with certain words—when I want to use certain words, I also have to avoid the preconceptions that these words themselves bring.

Events and the Stamp You Put on Them

In any case, in dreams you are closely connected with this process of forming physical events. In dreams, you are closely connected with the process of forming events in the three-dimensional world. He says again:

When your own existence, with your beliefs, desires, and personal nature, impresses it upon the universe, events acquire their characteristics from the significant meaning you place upon the universe.

This sentence repeats a point from the previous session, and he repeats it again: you, with the beliefs, desires, and personal nature of your own existence, in the process of experiencing an event, stamp that event with your own imprint. When you then place it back upon the universe, this event takes on its own significant meaning, and it acquires its characteristics because of this significant meaning of yours.

You may ask, what kind of significant meaning do I have, or what exactly is significant meaning? Do you remember what significant meaning was in the previous session? Significant meaning is the way and process by which you make associations, and this is unique. That is, when you think about things, you have your own set of associative ways, and when others think about things, they have their own set of associative ways and patterns. For example, someone can go from sugarcane to sugar, and from sugar to diabetes — that is one way of associating. But you might go from sugarcane to crops, to a farm — that is another way of associating. Someone else might go from sugarcane to the sugarcane juice sold by street vendors — that is also possible. So everyone's way of associating is different, and each person's unique way of associating is their significant meaning — which things are important to them, which combinations of things are more important to them. This is the unique significant meaning of each consciousness. Because an event, having passed through our personal experience and history, has already been marked with the stamp of our personal significant meaning, and then we place it back upon the universe.

It is just as a continent does not exist alone; it must be related to the physical rock strata beneath it.

When you see a continent, on the surface it is not connected to other continents, surrounded on all sides by seawater, but the bottom of this continent must be connected to other continents through the continental shelf and the underlying physical rock strata.

Therefore, in your terms, you form events so that they fit into the framework of the group.

In our terms, we form an event, and this event must be considered within the overall framework of a group event, so events are interconnected with one another. We have both the overall framework of the world and of events, and also the uniqueness of individual events.

An event is like the influence of local weather on world weather: the world's climate is affected by changes in local meteorological conditions, and changes in local meteorological conditions are in turn affected by the world's climate as a whole. That is the relationship between them. Our events are the same.

He says you form your own reality, you form your own world, but you do not form it in isolation or alone — you do not form it by yourself alone; there are also other people, and there is also an overall group reality. You are aware of other — you can be aware of other events and take them into consideration as well. That is, when you go about creating your own reality, you also take into account the existence of other people's worlds.

He gives an example: regardless of how things appear on the surface, you cannot force another person to experience an event that they reject. That is, an event that a person firmly rejects — you cannot force them to experience it. So there are some basic principles here: you cannot impose on others. You can change your own world, change your own beliefs, change your view of a matter, but you cannot force another person to accept something they firmly oppose and firmly reject — you cannot force them. And no one can treat you in the same manner either; they cannot do this to you. The so-called good or bad events each faithfully follow an inner mechanism. What we call good and bad — within them there is an inner mechanism operating that we do not know about. You can rest assured: although our beliefs create reality, and we create our own reality, he tells you again here: you cannot force others, and others cannot force you. So many people ask, can I create a personal reality — for example, make my girlfriend love me more, or make a girl who does not like me like me — this cannot be done. Do not have such thoughts anymore.

The Conditions for Becoming Real

So, in order to become a truly physicalized thing, a probable event must meet certain conditions before it can be realized in our three-dimensional world. It must fall into an appropriate position in space and time. That is to say, the right time, the right place, and the right people must all match up; otherwise this probable event will not occur at that specific time and place. They must also have a psychological suitability, reaching a certain intensity in desire, belief, and intent.

Whether an event can manifest or not depends not only on the coordination of conditions in the three-dimensional world, but also on whether the people in that environment can reach a certain intensity in desire, belief, and intent. When I say "intensity" here, I do not necessarily mean earnest, fervent desire, or determined, conscious intent. When I mention intensity, do you all interpret it as "how hard I push, how much I long for it, how earnest I am, how great my determination is"? None of these are what I mean.

The intensity I refer to is a gathering of some intangible quality, as precise as the focused concentration of physical activity.

The intensity spoken of here is not effort, not earnestness, not determination, but rather a certain formless, massless aggregate -- that is, EE units, electromagnetic energy units. It is as precise as the focal point where physical activity concentrates, and that focal point is its intensity.

Events and Fields of Activity

Physical events, that is, physical events in the three-dimensional world, imply that fundamentally nonphysical forces have gathered together into an organization, and this organization originally exists outside the categories of time and space.

It is a psychological organization, containing within it a group of selected probable events. You could say that these events are all waiting in the wings for physical realization -- "wings" is a stage term, referring to the sides of the curtain, the side where the actors have not yet stepped onto the stage. If you have watched a stage play, you know that before the actors come out, they wait there in the wings, and when the plot reaches the right moment, they walk out from there and step onto the stage to begin their performance. The audience cannot see them, but the actors themselves know that everything is already prepared. These events waiting in the wings are all waiting to be actualized in the three-dimensional world.

And the final trigger for that realization can come either from the waking state or from the dream state. That is, how exactly this event gets triggered, how it becomes actualized in the three-dimensional world -- the triggering mechanism may occur while awake, or it may occur while dreaming. But it represents the final, last element required: the quickening of inspiration, desire, and purpose. It will suddenly set into motion the original psychological organization, and it becomes a physical occurrence.

Think of these probable events as little children sitting in rows, ready to go on stage and perform. Which one actually goes on stage? Which event changes from a probability into an event actualized in the three-dimensional world? It is determined by that final factor -- the sudden quickening of your inspiration, desire, and purpose. Such a sudden quickening and setting into motion will cause one particular event among them to become a physical occurrence.

The Role of EE Units

In other material, I have mentioned that EE units are important. In Seth Speaks²³ he mentioned them, and in Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment²⁴ he talked about them the most.

EE units are composed of units of consciousness (CUs). Units of consciousness form electromagnetic energy units, that is, EE units. EE units themselves are something belonging to the invisible world, but they already lie between the invisible and the visible. And the units of consciousness that make up EE units belong purely to the nonphysical world, purely to the realm of consciousness. So units of consciousness lean more toward the invisible world, while EE units already lie between the visible and the invisible.

Under specific combinations, and with the stimulation of a certain amount of energy, a series of EE units can form certain elementary particles. When a certain number of EE units are matched with energy -- that is, as just mentioned, under the blessing and accelerating impetus of your wishes, desires, purposes, and inspiration -- EE units can then materialize into certain physical properties. Because EE units themselves are electromagnetic energy units, they operate within an electromagnetic energy range, so they immediately become matter; they are only one step away from matter. They initiate certain responses in the brain and nervous system.

However, the event itself involves a stable condition of highly correlated activity existing among the EE units. If we imagine EE units as a kind of particle state, then between each EE unit there is a field -- this field is called the activity field. What does that mean? It means that when an event is about to materialize, there must first be an activity field in a stable state. This activity field must be stable to a certain degree before it can materialize. You might say, I suddenly have a thought, and there is also an electromagnetic unit activity field, but that is not enough; this thing must be stable, and the more stable it is, the more readily the event can materialize.

Every possible event corresponds to an EE unit activity field. Which one materializes, and which ones remain merely possible events, depends on how strong the stability of that EE unit activity field is; the more stable it is, the clearer its focus. The shape of this aggregate depends on how precise and how concentrated your focus is. The more concentrated your focus, the more stable this group of EE unit activity fields becomes, and it materializes.

In The Nature of Personal Reality²⁵, or in the "Operating Instructions for the Human Robot," and also in the "Psychological Laws," this is the principle throughout. How does materialization happen? It is that the more concentrated your attention is, and the more aligned you are with the inner self, with the goals of the inner self, the more it shows that you are concentrating your attention, concentrating your energy, bringing your focus into play, and making the EE unit activity field become very stable. Elsewhere Seth also spoke of something called a "stable stream of consciousness," which means the same thing: only a stable stream of consciousness can allow an event to materialize; only a stable EE unit activity field can allow an event to materialize in physical reality.

Like a Nuclear Explosion

These fields involve psychological reactions, not physical ones; they are invisible to the naked eye, yet in themselves they are as explosive as a nuclear blast.

This field of activity is somewhat like the intensity of an atomic bomb explosion, possessing that much force and explosiveness, but it is itself invisible, and it is a psychological reaction. To put it another way, these psychological activities pass through an explosiveness like that of an atomic bomb blast and become physical events. Seth has been emphasizing all along that this is how our beliefs create.

These activities, through certain transformations and chargings, are purely mental actions that break through the barriers of time and space, and enter the material world in the guise of reality. That is, with the properties of particles, or the properties of matter, they enter our three-dimensional world and become a kind of substance. The breakthrough from spirit to matter requires this kind of energy eruption; you can imagine it as an atomic bomb explosion—powerful enough to transform a nonphysical, purely mental energy into something materialized and manifested.

Black Holes and White Holes

This process is very difficult to describe. But in earlier material, he described this energy unit. I remember it was in The Nature of Personal Reality²⁵ or in the appendix of Seth Speaks²³ that he specifically talked about this: EE units go in, just like an object entering a black hole—but that black hole has a special characteristic: it is both a black hole and a white hole. After the EE unit goes in, it attaches energy to it like a black hole, and then throws it back out like a white hole. But when it is thrown out, this EE unit is already full of energy; the energy has been fully charged.

So it is a "charging" process: the energy of this EE unit is enormously filled, because after going through the process of being sucked in by a black hole and thrown out by a white hole, its own energy has already been amplified by an incalculable multiple—hundreds of millions of times or trillions of times. I cannot remember the exact example he gave at the time, but it was amplified by an incalculable multiple. Only this amplified energy can be felt by us in the three-dimensional world. I think the Big Bang theory may have come from this—perhaps it borrowed this kind of inspiration.

A particle of matter appears out of nowhere in our space, just like a white hole. A black hole sucks all matter in, and a white hole throws everything out. The EE unit is sucked in by an invisible, extremely tiny point that is both a black hole and a white hole, gets charged, and is then thrown out from the white hole; after it is thrown out, it already carries energy that is trillions, hundreds of trillions, countless trillions of times greater than its original energy. This enhanced energy "bangs" and bursts forth in the three-dimensional world; when it is thrown out by the white hole, it is already a material thing. That is how matter comes into being.

If quantum mechanics is closer to reality, then at this moment what does it become? The smallest string, an energy segment vibrating at extremely high speed. And the different vibration modes and combinations of vibrations of this string form different particles; different particles combine to form what should be the most basic 13 kinds of particles²⁶; these 13 kinds of particles then combine to form larger particles, and only then do we get the electrons, photons, bosons²⁷ that we know; these then combine to form quarks; quarks then form protons and neutrons; protons and neutrons then form atomic nuclei, with electrons orbiting outside, and only then can an atom be formed. This whole series of complex work is all subsequent matters, and humanity has already studied this part very clearly. But what humanity cannot figure out is how that very first matter came out. Seth explained it as best he could, but the core part is still not so easy to understand. I am adding that part of the knowledge here for everyone, so that it may be easier to understand. The way it turns energy into matter is similar to atomic and nuclear explosions—in space there are very, very tiny places invisible to the naked eye where violent nuclear explosions are occurring; you can imagine it as nuclear explosions, and only that can turn energy into matter.

The Landing of the Spaceship

In a certain way, EE units occur at the farthest reaches of these activities.

If an event is a physical vehicle, he gives another example -- say, a spaceship. First get the concept straight: an event is a spaceship, and EE units are what allow this ship to land in your world. Without EE units, this ship could not land in our three-dimensional world. So EE units are somewhat removed from our reality itself, yet they are not the original propulsion system. What does that mean? EE units allow the spaceship to land in our world, but they are not the ship's propulsion system. Landing the ship requires propulsion -- whether changing direction or providing reverse thrust before touchdown, propulsion is needed. EE units allow an event to manifest in our three-dimensional world; without them it cannot happen. Yet they are not the most direct driving force when the event manifests. So what is the propulsion system?

The propulsion system is the sympathetic field of the psyche.

This part is a bit harder to understand, because it touches on a core question humanity has never figured out: how does the nonphysical become physical? How does spirit become matter? Seth explains as best he can. Then he asks us to use an analogy:

He says, pretend you are a planet. He says that in certain ways, you actually are a planet. You exist within an extremely complex and mature universe, and you know that space is filled with all kinds of inhabitants -- the universe contains all sorts of alien inhabitants, interstellar inhabitants. Now, let us compare these inhabitants of space to probable events. You dwell in this universe as a planet, and this universe is mature and complex; space is home to many different alien inhabitants. So as a planet, you are necessarily different from other planets; you have your own characteristics.

For example, as Earth, you have an atmosphere, you have oxygen, and the proportion of oxygen to nitrogen in the air is 72 percent and 78 percent²⁸. As a planet, you are necessarily different from other planets. And some inhabitants of space simply cannot land under these conditions -- for instance, some aliens cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment. To us, Earth's air is incomparably sweet; to certain aliens, it may be poison gas, and they could not survive even one second, so they cannot land.

These conditions represent your own psychological personalization.

As a planet, the characteristics of your planet itself determine which aliens are suited to land and which are not. The characteristics of this planet can actually be compared to your psychological individuality -- the place where your psyche differs from others, where your psychological structure belongs only to you and carries your strong personal stamp. So your psychological structure, this individuality of your psyche, is like the characteristics of this planet, determining which alien inhabitants can land and which cannot.

You send out messages to the stars because you are lonely, and you wish they would all come.

You long for visits from alien beings. And visitors are one of the main ways you acquire experiential knowledge. Why do you like these aliens to come? Because only when aliens come can you gain experience, can you receive outside information, can you know what is happening in this universe. If they do not come, how would you know? You need exchange, just as in our ordinary business dealings -- it is the same principle.

So when alien visitors come to your planet as guests, it is like the process by which a probable event becomes manifest in your physical life, becomes a physical event. You need these events in order to know them; you long for these probable events to manifest in physical life, just as you long for aliens to visit you and bring you news of the universe.

In order to land their rocket ship, alien travelers must enter your atmosphere and make use of its conditions. How else could they enter? If they want to enter your atmosphere, they must make use of your atmospheric conditions -- they need to know what your atmosphere is like, whether they can breathe, whether they can use this atmosphere, while at the same time maintaining their own integrity. They must both make use of our atmosphere and pass through our atmosphere, yet still preserve their integrity. They cannot be like rain -- for example, like hail or snowflakes that turn into water when passing through the atmosphere. But water at least still preserves the nature of snow or ice; if it burns up and explodes, its nature changes. So when these aliens pass through your planet's atmosphere, they must not undergo change; they must maintain their integrity. And they have their own reasons for making such a visit. In other words, when these probable events manifest in reality, they also have their own reasons for manifesting, and you also have your own desire for them to manifest -- both are present.

He draws an analogy between aliens and probable events, between the landing of aliens on a planet and the manifestation of probable events in the three-dimensional world, to help you understand what specific role EE units actually play in the manifestation of events. That is the theme of this session.

EE Units and the Atmosphere

So what exactly do EE units do? As I said earlier, you can't do without them; without EE units, probable events can't come in, can't descend onto this planet. But is having EE units alone enough? He says no.

This is a bit hard to explain. EE units are somewhat like the feeling of our atmosphere -- I'm just casually giving an example, and it may not be entirely apt. The atmosphere stretches between outer space and the Earth, and it's an in-between thing; an alien creature wanting to enter the Earth must first pass through the atmosphere, and without passing through the atmosphere it cannot enter the Earth's space. I'm using this as an example to point out that it has this kind of property -- when an alien spaceship enters the atmosphere, how does it descend? It's not that the atmosphere is its propulsion system. The atmosphere is not the propulsion system, but it must pass through this atmosphere.

In other words, EE units merely provide you with energy, providing a function and property that turns something psychic or nonphysical into something physical. They have the ability to manifest a nonphysical thing into a physical thing. They are an energy-operating mechanism, and you can understand them that way. But they themselves are not the trigger, nor are they the propulsion system that makes it descend. You can't do without them, but by themselves they cannot make events manifest. The manifestation of events cannot do without EE units.

So how exactly do events manifest? It requires the existence of an interactive sympathetic field on the psychic level -- a psychic sympathetic field. This interactive sympathetic field is what can activate the field of activity. EE units can keep this field of activity in a very stable state, but within this there needs to be a focus of yours -- your focus of consciousness can make it manifest. And this focus of consciousness is precisely your psychic interactive sympathetic field.

At this point, I think some people may have roughly understood, but some people may be completely lost. If you don't know what a field is, or don't understand the electromagnetic waves within a field or the interactions between particles, it may be hard to grasp. I can only explain it to this extent; beyond this, I don't know how to talk about it either.

Events Enter Your World

It can only be understood in this way.

Let us say that any physical event is somewhat like the impact of a rocket ship from somewhere else entering your world.

Any event that occurs in your three-dimensional world is like an impact of an alien rocket entering your world, landing in your world.

Thoughts often seem to swim into or out of your system of consciousness, and you hardly notice. Events often appear and disappear in the same way.

Your thoughts constantly swim in and out of your consciousness, yet you often do not notice; events also constantly appear and disappear in your three-dimensional world in the same way, and you do not notice either. But they do affect your reality, they do affect your world. To some degree you attract these events; you attract them, and they are also attracted to you. That is the kind of relationship you have.

A related field is temporarily established.

What is meant by a related field? You attract these events, and these events are also willing to be attracted by you -- interesting, is it not? You attract these events, and the event itself also wants to manifest; you attract it, and it also attracts you. Such a process establishes a related field. You may call it a sympathetic field, or call it some other kind of field; it is in fact a field of mutual resonance. You want this event to manifest, and the event itself also wants to manifest.

But establishing this field is not enough; it must be charged, it must be extremely charged -- if it cannot be charged, if it cannot carry such great energy, it cannot manifest either. And this process of extreme charging is determined by the EE units in between. The EE units determine how to charge it: first establish such an interactive field, then establish such a charging mechanism. The EE units are in the middle, responsible for the formation of this charging mechanism; they provide an inner pathway. Through it, probable events flow into the range of events that you perceive.

He puts it very beautifully: the probable world then manifests, and in our three-dimensional world it becomes a real world, a physical world, a material world -- all the same. A world of probability manifests in this way, through an inner pathway. It must be an inner pathway. Why must it be an inner pathway? Because it requires the participation of your psyche; it requires your psyche to attract this event, and this event can also be attracted by you. Then, under the premise of extreme charging, through the transformation of the EE units, such a probable event truly occurs in the three-dimensional world. This is the deepest few layers of the movement mechanism behind manifestation.

Inner Pathways and Perception

So in this short passage, Seth is actually explaining—because this book is about the nature of the psyche, he has to make clear what this psyche actually is and how the psyche functions in the three-dimensional world. So he has to touch on the transformation from the nonphysical to the physical world, and the transformation of probable worlds. You have to understand, this is what he means.

He says this inner pathway exists on the psychological level—be sure to remember, it is on the psychological level. It activates your perceptual mechanisms, and these mechanisms in turn respond and are responsible for perception. This pathway is on the psychological level, and at the same time it activates your perceptual mechanisms, and only then can you perceive the occurrence of events. If there were no perceptual mechanisms, then even if an event manifested in the three-dimensional world, you would not be able to perceive it. So how does this event actually happen in the three-dimensional world? Mainly, you perceive it, and you feel that this thing has happened. And these mechanisms in turn respond and are responsible for perception, and moreover are responsible for perceiving more responsibly—once you perceive this world, there will be sharper, more detailed, and further perception.

Your intents, purposes, or beliefs are among the main attractions. They are used to search the universe.

But in our ordinary process of manifestation, these conditions must also exist—they must happen to match each other exactly. If you want something to manifest in the three-dimensional world, your intents, purposes, and beliefs are the main attractions: whether you can attract these events into your three-dimensional world depends on your intents, your purposes, your beliefs. After you attract them over, it is like using a flashlight to explore the vast, dark universe—you are using this light-speed to search throughout the entire universe for these events that match you, these probable events, and attract them in. But once attracted over, will they necessarily manifest? The probable events may all have arrived, but still not necessarily. There must also be external conditions for manifestation: the conditions for manifestation must also be present, and if they are not present, it cannot emerge. So they must happen to match each other exactly, they must be just right: the conditions for manifestation are present, and the attractive power of your intents, purposes, and beliefs is also present. Only when both of these are present can this matter truly happen in your real life, can it manifest.

The One Universe You Perceive

He went on to say, first of all, your own universe is not isolated either. It is merely the one you perceive. He emphasized again: the universe does not exist in isolation; it is only the one universe you perceive. Among all possible events, whichever one manifests — in this process of manifestation, it is actually mainly through your perceptual system that you perceive it — once you perceive that it exists, it really does exist. Does it really exist or not? Let us not explore that question for now. But it tells you that you perceived its existence: your eyes saw it, your hands touched it, so it truly exists. Whether it really exists or not depends on the angle from which you look at it: from the perspective of the three-dimensional world, it really exists and really happened; from the perspective of a higher level, it is merely one among many possibilities, the one your perceptual system happens to be able to perceive.

So here he emphasizes: your universe is merely the one you perceive. The universe also has other parallel universes, multiple universes. Basically speaking, within the universe you know there are other universes, and in those universes other events occur that you are unaware of. Universes are nested within universes; one universe exists inside another universe, and their events likewise occur one inside another.

This question — if you use your mind a little, you can sense it — is just like the relationship between the painter and the person in the painting that he talked about earlier. If you can understand that point, you can understand this one: universes are nested within universes, and events are nested within events. Although any particular event in itself seems to be only what you know it to be, and any event happens just as you think it did, it is nevertheless part of an endless event that exists one within another. You think that when an event occurs, that particular situation happened. But that event itself may be an event that exists within other events. At certain levels, it is impossible to separate these parts. You say this event is part of that event, so can I separate this event, which is part of another event, from that larger event? Seth says it is impossible. Just as you cannot take a person in a painting and the painter — who is both a person in the painting and the painter — how would you separate the two? You cannot separate them. That is the kind of relationship between them.

Dreams Are a Window into the Psyche

On this point, your daily life seems to give you very little evidence, and you cannot feel it in your ordinary life. Your dreams, however, often include this kind of mutual relatedness. In real life you cannot find evidence of it, but in dreams you can often find this relatedness.

Because you perceive time in your present manner. When you see the familiar physical universe, of course you see the familiar physical universe—because you are using the outer senses to perceive this world, which is quite normal. But the dream world is not so precise in space and time, because it can often be used as a framework through which you can glimpse evidence of other universes. No system is closed, therefore all universes interact with one another; universes are interconnected, not closed. Nor is any psychological system closed—even though it maintains an indestructible, inviolable essence, it is still not closed. What is emphasized here is the nature of the psyche: your psychological structure is not closed. Although the psyche itself is indestructible and inviolable, even so, it is not closed; it is open.

Dreams operate like a vast mass communications network, and on certain levels of the psyche they are far more effective than physical television. Your dreams are like a mass communications network—a television network, a broadcast network—and that is how they operate. Certain levels of your psyche are far more effective than the television sets in our ordinary lives, because the range of information they can receive far exceeds that of a television set, since they also involve much inner information. Thus, dreamscapes can be used as a psychological or psychic platform. Because of this characteristic of dreams, they can be used as a kind of psychological or psychic platform from which to view other realities—from this platform in dreams you can view other realities—and they can also be used to glimpse an inner mechanism: the mechanism by which, in your world, nonphysical events become definite events. He says, in this process you can take a peek.

Transformation Before Dreaming

The dictation ends here for this session. This session's interpretation is a little difficult. It is actually talking about how the nonphysical becomes physical -- the state before dreaming, how the reality before dreaming passes through the reality of dreams, and then becomes the process of that event which can be manifested in our three-dimensional world. Seth wants to explain this entire process to you clearly, every link and step within it. But there are some things in here that cannot be put into words; he has no way to do so, he is powerless. As for the other main questions, he does his best -- you see, he uses analogies and gives examples, all of which are actually meant to help you understand the layers of steps and key points in this process of physical manifestation. The interpretation of this session ends here.

Session 790: Seth's Preface on the Nature of His Own Reality

Monday, January 3, 1977, 9:20 p.m.²⁹ Today's session was resumed after a three-month break. The previous session was held in September 1976³⁰, so by January, more than three months had passed.

During that period, Rob was doing the final typing for Volume One of The "Unknown" Reality³¹, and Jane was helping him. They had just sent the manuscript to the publisher, Prentice Hall³². Seth said that now they could begin the final work on Volume Two.

Besides that, they were also very busy during that time. For example, among many other things, they met with the last few professionals they had scheduled during the final months of the summer of 1976, and many unscheduled visitors also arrived. While they were busy with these external activities, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's passed in between.

For Jane and Rob, that autumn was a sad yet educational season. Their sixteen-year-old cat, Willy, showed signs of illness for the first time. This cat had appeared in the books from the very beginning of the Seth sessions, and now he was sixteen years old—when they began transmitting the Seth material, Willy was only two, still a kitten. The veterinarian told them that the cat's heart was failing.

Why was it sad yet educational? Because the courage and submission Willy displayed in facing death made them feel humble, and also filled them with awe at the mysteries of nature. Animals do not have fear when they die, not the way humans do; they face it calmly. Willy undoubtedly died with an absolute trust—he believed that though his body died, his soul would live on forever. This is a state that people find extremely difficult to achieve. So Willy's death was very educational for them; from this animal's death, they saw the state in which animals face nature with both courage and submission.

They buried Willy in the backyard. Almost every time they walked in or out of the driveway, they would glance at the pile of stones on Willy's grave.

On the weekend after Willy died, Jane insisted on immediately getting a new kitten. She said she was afraid that if they did not do so, they might never keep a small animal again, because Willy's passing had actually hit them quite hard. So they went to the nearby animal protection society to adopt—in America, small animals are generally adopted, and there is rarely any buying or selling. In some states, such as California, it is not allowed to buy or sell small animals³³; breeding purebred cats or dogs for the purpose of selling them is illegal. You can give them away, or send them to an adoption center for others to adopt. This is done to stop people from profiting off animals.

The new kitten was so tiny, almost only the size of a palm. They named him Willy Two, using the name Linglan. Tonight, during this session, the kitten was sleeping beside the sofa. Seth began this session by finishing the preface Jane had written for Paul Cezanne's worldview. In that preface, Seth transmitted an excellent short explanatory piece based on his worldview theory. This book would also be published by Prentice Hall³² later that year.

Because this book has too many typographical errors, many enthusiastic readers now want to find a copy with fewer errors, but it is very hard to find. Many caring people have been reorganizing it, and based on the errors discovered during the process of interpreting this book, they are reorganizing a version with fewer errors, with all these mistakes corrected. In this version, they will also include the preface about Paul Cezanne's worldview, because this preface has been mentioned many times. Helen is currently leading this effort, and this work is also very demanding.

Seth said that there is a great psychological and psychic distance separating my reality from your own. This distance separates Seth's world from our world. To some degree, Ruburt's mind is the connection between us. Because Seth can transmit through Jane, Jane's mind is the bridge connecting the two worlds.

Therefore, when I speak in the sessions, I am not entirely myself.

Because a part of Ruburt is mixed in as well; he must transmit through her—Ruburt is like the transmitter spanning these two worlds. I am a self transposed through your reality, just as the events in dreams are transposed from a deeper reality into dream scenes. So what you hear me say in the sessions has all been transposed within your reality; it is not the most original me.

I do have personal characteristics. Those who come to the sessions can identify me by them.

I have a distinctive voice, with my own accent—that European accent and rugged voice are very obvious. He said, let us say for now, that it is distinctive and personal. However, I come to your world by a strange path. This path does not involve the distances of roads or highways, but rather the path of psychological drama. It bends backward, as if entering a pathway into the history of your human psychology.

To some degree, I am like a particularly vivid image that insistently and repeatedly appears in a dream, visiting the psyche of this group—the mass psyche. Except that it carries a reality not limited to dreams, a dream image that has reached psychological fullness. Psychologically speaking, compared with such fullness, ordinary consciousness seems like only a faint ghost.

Let us go through this section briefly. He said that I have been transmitting material to you through Seth, through Jane. This is somewhat like an image that repeatedly appears in your dreams—some of us have such dreams, where a certain person keeps appearing in dreams, perhaps for a period of time, for years or even more than a decade, you keep having the same dream, and the same person keeps appearing in it. I am like that feeling. Because dream images also come from another world, another reality space, and I also come from another reality space. I appear in your three-dimensional world again and again, just as the image in your dream appears again and again—except that it appears in dreams, while I appear in your waking world. But I am not confined to the reality of dreams; I am transmitting material vividly in the three-dimensional world. So compared with the fullness of the images in your ordinary dreams, the fullness of my presence makes your dream images seem as faint as ghosts. What he means is that his fullness is greater, and the energy he brings is stronger.

In the previous sessions, we talked about dream events and waking reality, and also discussed what the nature of creativity is, and how events are realized in the dream world and in reality. Especially in the third section above, he mentioned the process by which a spiritual thing manifests into an actual object in reality.

We have also spoken of, in your terms, a vast psychological entity that forms the psychological structure from which your own reality emerges, from which it rises.

There is a vast psychological entity, and upon that psychological entity is formed the source of our reality. The source of our world, of our reality, is a psychological structure. In that connection, Seth said, the nature of the world in which I myself live becomes of vital importance. Why is it so important? Because your world comes from that world—our physical world comes from that spiritual world, so understanding the nature of that world becomes extremely important.

But here, I am not talking about those gods—those various gods.

But rather about psychological structures different from those you know.

I am talking about the source of your world. What is that source? It is a psychological structure, not a god. In their present form of organization, they cannot directly perceive or experience your reality. Those psychological structures, the psychological structures that are the source of our reality, cannot directly perceive and experience our three-dimensional world. Because they do not have physical bodies, they cannot experience the sensations of our three-dimensional world. What they can experience are things of the spiritual world, but not things of our three-dimensional world. What is said here is that they cannot perceive directly; they can do so indirectly.

In a manner of speaking, they are in the background.

They are like a vast background, and our experience, our world, is like the foreground, emerging from that background. They appear in your dreams in many ways. They are like those bolts of cloth—just as when you make clothes, you cut pieces of fabric from rolls of cloth to make garments. They are the whole bolts of cloth, and you are the pieces cut out from them, cutting the size and style you want according to your own will and ideas, and then making clothes. And they are the raw material. The reality of our present three-dimensional world is produced from that raw material.

They are forces that do not need names.

They are a kind of force, and in themselves they have no names. All That Is, entities, higher selves, souls—these are all for convenience, needed so that we can understand; they themselves do not need names. Those psychological structures are also great initiators of energy, the originators of events—the initiators of all events, the initiators of all energy.

They very seldom materialize physically. In that spiritual world, although we see our three-dimensional world as so rich, so vast, with everything one could want, that world actually has only a very, very small portion that is actualized, truly materialized, manifested in our three-dimensional world. The vast majority of the spiritual world has not been manifested—because it is too large, and there is no need to manifest it; at that level, it has already resolved the problems it wanted to accomplish. Moreover, those things cannot be manifested in our three-dimensional world at all; the understanding at that level is already completely different from ours. As was said in the previous sessions, at that level, the nature of events is different, the nature of experience is different—events are not the kind of events we humans understand, experience is not the kind of experience we understand, and even knowledge is not the kind of knowledge we understand. So it cannot manifest in the three-dimensional world in its original form; it can only manifest a very small portion in symbolic, transposed ways.

But they are very responsive to people's psyches, to spiritual needs—they answer every request. Why? First, your spirit at that level is inherently connected with him; it is something of the same world. Second, what you ask for is, to him, already readily available. For example, making you a millionaire—to you this may be a wish, a vision, an ideal, but in the spiritual world, the things you ask for are just one of many possibilities; he has already experienced them long ago. Whatever you ask of him, to him it is nothing at all. So he responds to all your requests—he simply lets you choose one among the many possibilities.

Therefore, at various times in history, they appear, bringing certain information and certain dreams. Just like those prophets, sages, and enlightened ones—they are all a line of sight from them into our world. The way they appear is like dreams, like scenes appearing in your personal world, in the same manner.

In the most cosmic and the most minute ways, physical experience springs out of inner reality.

Whether in the most macroscopic or the most microscopic manner, the experience of our physical three-dimensional world springs out of inner reality, out of the inner world. Events are initiated from within, and then appear without.

In your terms, I have no physical existence. Yet these books have initiated quite physical events. Although Seth has no material existence, through Jane he has written so many books, and even today, decades later, we are still reading his books. These books are real events in our three-dimensional world. These books give readers a better grasp of life, allowing them to expand their own consciousness, making consciousness freer, unlocked, and aware of a greater ability of their own. If you like, you can say that I am even a dream image lacking a form.

But if that is so, then every person whose life has been changed by my words must surely ask: what is a dream?

I keep appearing in your reality space, writing books through Jane. Although I do not have a physical form, the books truly exist, and they will influence millions upon millions of people, influencing human history for decades, even for hundreds of years to come. These are real events. Although I appear through Jane each time, I have no form, just as if I kept appearing in a dream, speaking to you in the dream, but you cannot see my form. Then you would naturally ask: what is this dream? This is equivalent to asking: what is the world in which Seth lives? What is the dimension, the space, in which he resides?

Just as my personality exists without a physical form, so do you yourselves.

You and I are the same, except that you now think you have that physical body. But from the perspective of your essence, from the essence of your soul, you do not have physical existence. The difference is that your dream and waking experiences have a direct impact on the entire universe—whether sleeping or in waking life, the events we experience have a direct impact on all levels of the entire universe. The difference is that you do not consciously know what you are doing. Seth said, I know what I am doing, but you do not know what you are doing, nor do you know what specific impacts you have on this universe, or which levels you affect. You can only see this level of the physical world. And I change a world—to some degree I change a world, although in your terms, I do not truly sit in a chair, or wave to you on the street, or watch the coming and going of sunrise and sunset. I do not have a physical body to sit in a chair, or greet you on the road, or see the sunrise and sunset. But the changes I bring to your world may be greater than those of any person with a physical body.

To me, your world is a dream universe that I have been invited to visit.

Be sure to remember this: it is by invitation. So to Seth, our world is like a dream world of Seth's, and this dream invites Seth to come and speak to us within the dream. This three-dimensional world is, to Seth, like a dream universe. Within this dream, he can change this world.

I have discovered a very unique and very intimate probable reality.

Remember, he uses the term "probable reality" here—our current version of Earth is only one among the possible versions of Earth. Why is it unique and intimate? Because Seth has lived on Earth many times; he has feelings for this Earth. He is very intimate with this storyline, this version of Earth.

It is indeed a reality in which I no longer have direct experience, because I am not immersed in it the way you are. I can tell you many things about it because your precise focus necessarily creates a narrow and concentrated perspective.

Just as in a dream, you cannot experience it as truly as when you are awake. For example, if you feast in a dream, you will not be full. It is precisely because Seth cannot directly experience this reality that he does not immerse himself completely in it the way we do. That is why he can tell us many things about this reality—precisely because he does not, like us, pour all his attention into the physical reality before him, looking only from such a narrow and concentrated perspective. His perspective is far broader than ours. And we are simply too focused on this physical world.

In your dreams, you often visit other realities.

In your dreams, just as I come to your reality, you also often visit realities like this one. But you have not learned to organize your perceptions, or to direct them. When you encounter those worlds in dreams, it is the same as when I come to your world. But you have not learned to organize your perceptions—your perception of dreams is completely scattered and passive—nor have you learned to direct them, to consciously direct, arrange, and weave your dreams within the dream world. You are merely experiencing your dreams; you are not playing the role of the screenwriter, nor the role of the director.

If entities such as myself form the background of your own entity's existence, in the same way, entities such as yourselves also become a psychological structure that forms the background in which other such organizations exist. In all such relationships, there is always mutual give-and-take.

Entities like Seth, purely spiritual entities, form the background of the existence of entities in our three-dimensional world—all the raw material from which our world is generated comes from that spiritual world. In the same way, our present existence in this physical world also becomes a background psychological structure for the existence of other such organizations. Our universe is also a background structure for the formation of other universes. So in such relationships, mutual give-and-take is very normal. The spiritual world generated our three-dimensional world, and our three-dimensional world is at the same time the source of another world.

Therefore, your psychological reality is implied within my own reality.

Because your world is produced from my spiritual world, your psychological reality is implied within Seth's world, within this spiritual world. And I am also within you—of course he is; he transmits material through Jane, and has spoken for so many years; is he not within our three-dimensional world? Of course he is. This kind of nested relationship is so complex that it is not like the structures or hierarchical relationships we ordinarily understand—where one level is higher than another, one level is larger than another, always with a staircase-like shape, divided from lower to higher. Seth here, and at other times as well, repeatedly emphasizes: there is no such relationship of higher and lower. All worlds are fused together, without boundaries, all open. In all worlds, you are within me and I am within you, mutually nested together, impossible to separate even if you tried.

Just as your own reality is also implied within the reality of Willy Two—their new little kitten—and he is within you.

Is the world we humans currently perceive also within this kitten's world? Is the world you see also within the cat's eyes, within the cat's mind? From the cat's perspective, does the cat see itself as the first-person protagonist? Does it proceed from its own perspective? Would it think that you are just a cat slave? Many people have read articles written from a cat's psychological perspective—from the cat's point of view, these people who keep cats are all its slaves, there to prepare its food and drink. From your perspective, you think you keep a pet to keep you company; but from the cat's perspective, are you not like a slave? Every day you scoop its litter, bathe it, feed it, take it out to play, pet it, stroke it, coax it, tease it. Cat slave, cat slave—that is where the term comes from. From the cat's perspective, you are the slave. Using this analogy, in the cat's eyes, is our world within the cat's world? Of course it is. And from our perspective, is the cat a pet in our world? Of course it is. So which world is it? It depends on whose perspective you take. Are you looking from the cat's perspective, or from the cat slave's perspective? That is what he is saying here. Do you find it mind-bending? It is not mind-bending; it is easy to understand. Do you find it easy to understand? Actually, it is not that easy to understand either.

It is very difficult to explain the workings of the inner psyche, or the activities that go on behind dreams. For such experience exists outside the structure and imagery of our language.

This kind of experience exists outside the structure of our language and words, and even outside imagery. Language cannot describe it; it transcends the structure and expression of language—imagery is the limit of linguistic expression, and it transcends even imagery. So how can you express it in language? That is why it is very difficult to explain.

It basically deals with the nature and behavior of psychological and psychic, spiritual energy.

These actions behind dreams, these workings of the psyche, this kind of experience basically deals with matters concerning the nature and behavior of psychological or spiritual energy. When dealing with these matters, our language is helpless; it exceeds the limits of its expression.

I am a source of personalized energy.

I come from a world of pure energy, a source of personalized energy. And you are the same; you also come from such a source of energy. In your terms, I have lived many lives, reincarnated many times. But from another perspective—from the spiritual perspective, not the human perspective, from the perspective of the spirit and soul—I have never lived in a physical body at all, but rather lent my energy to those lives that arose from my reality, lives that are not me.

This passage is very meaningful. From your human perspective, I have had many reincarnations, many lives: I have been a beggar, a prostitute, a king, a pope, a painter, a merchant. That is from the human perspective, from the material perspective. But from another perspective, from the spiritual perspective? It is like the lightning ball perspective I mentioned to you a couple of days ago—from the perspective of a lightning ball, it has never existed in physical form. From its perspective, those physical bodies arise from its reality. Physical reality is produced from spiritual, nonphysical reality, and is manifested. The manifested portion of physical reality is produced from the spiritual world; that is to say, a physical body is produced within the nonphysical world. Then you lend your own energy to it, lend it to those lives. Those lives cannot survive without your energy; only by borrowing your energy do they truly have life—have perception, have consciousness, and only then do they seem to have life.

So what exactly is life? What is our human life? What is our reincarnation? It depends on which perspective you take. If you cannot leave the human perspective, if you always refuse to believe that this world has other perspectives, then you will never be able to detach from this physical world. I mean detachment—not just physical detachment, but the inability of your mental state to detach. Only when you can truly recognize that this world has countless perspectives, countless ways of looking at things—you can look at things from the perspective of a cat, from the perspective of a flower, from the perspective of the Earth, from the perspective of a cloud, and of course from the perspective of pure spirituality. When you look at things from different perspectives, the face this world presents to you, and the angle from which you think about this world and experience it, are all different. That is the key point.

All right, at this point, Seth goes further in explaining what the spiritual is.

The Environment of the Psyche (Continued)

The psyche is a kind of pure energy. The theme of this chapter -- the theme of Chapter Nine -- is the properties and characteristics of pure energy. Our psyche, our soul, is itself a body of pure energy.

He says that in the same way, you conceive the images in your own dreams, and are barely aware that you have done so. You do not feel that you have conceived anything in your dreams, or consciously done anything; you are not aware that you are being powered by an independent psychological reality that has escaped your attention. You do not notice that you are the one providing the power to these images in your dreams, that you are the one supplying them with energy, and that it is because of you that the images in your dreams become rich and vivid. The dream story you begin continues on its own -- in the dream, this scene, this story, plays itself out. No dream is stillborn; no dream fails to continue unfolding. Dreams are all alive.

Every chapter of this book is written in this same way, in the way dreams are written, in the way we dream, so that the concepts presented set in motion an intuition of your own, and open up what? They open up the passageway between your dreaming state and your waking state, between the dream-time state and the waking-time state, so that there is no longer that barrier between your dreams and your waking, no longer that clear distinction saying that dreams and waking are two completely separate worlds. What he has always been trying to tell you is that both the dream world and the waking world are your world. The world in dreams is also your world, and the world in waking is also your world. And the waking world is only the manifestation, in the three-dimensional world, of events selected from among the many events in dreams.

He uses this dream example to illustrate that in dreams we are alive and vital, and that every character in a dream is alive and vital. He raises this example to illustrate the meaning of the sentence above: our life in the three-dimensional world merely borrows the energy of a higher-level soul, just as the characters in our dreams borrow the energy given to them by us, the people in the three-dimensional world. Because you endow the you in the dream with energy, that character becomes vivid; just as the soul endows our physical body with energy, and so we, the people of the flesh, become vivid. And after the energy is endowed, how this person's story should unfold, how this person's development in the three-dimensional world should proceed -- he must walk his own path, and this story he must act out himself. Just as the story of the dream characters is also acted out by the dream characters themselves.

Although it has its own inner laws -- its inner laws were already discussed in the previous two sections, the "significant meaning," organizing these events through "significant meaning," which the previous sections have been emphasizing -- what he emphasizes here is another point: it is entirely up to the protagonist of the story to continue the performance. This drama proceeds entirely according to his own manner of association; the things he attaches more emotional weight to, the things he focuses on more, are naturally the things he will associate into being. That is his way of creating events.

At every moment, a larger reality of your own hovers about you.

At any time, in any place, you have a larger world hovering all around you.

If you knew precisely how you grew from an embryo into a human being, if you could consciously follow that process, you would not necessarily be better off, and you might well impede your growth. For you would begin to ask, "Am I doing this right?" And the perfection of the process would make you uneasy.

What he means in this passage is that all around your life, in every present moment, there is a larger reality hovering around you. In other words, you are surrounded by, or immersed in, a larger reality, and your present life and reality are all generated by that larger reality. And that larger reality operates with a precision and perfection beyond your imagination. Yet your little head is always thinking: is there perhaps a better way for me? You use your limited judgment and your limited perspective; you judge only from your own angle, and you always want to pursue a better development. But you do not know that behind you there is a larger reality that has been helping you to consider, to calculate, to arrange.

What is said here does not mean passivity or fatalism. It does not mean that since it arranges everything, I have no initiative of my own. That is not so. This is a process of mutual influence, and you have complete autonomy. I am only describing the mechanism. You must remember: do not lean to one side when I say one thing, and then lean to the other side when I say another. This is something that all spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, have always emphasized: you must hold to the middle view, you must not fall into either extreme, you must hold to the middle way, the middle view. This is the point that all the great masters of Buddhism, including the Buddha himself, have always stressed. When he speaks of this side, you must not suddenly lean over to this side; when he speaks of that side, you must not suddenly lean over to that side. You must be like what? Like a peacemaker: both sides have their reasons, and it is better for you to take the middle.

So what he is saying here, we will only discuss within his context: there is an unknown reality around you that is manifesting the world you now live in.

Then he gives an example: if you knew precisely, while you were developing and growing in your mother's womb, what every step of development, every stage of growth, should produce -- for example, which organ should develop first, which part should grow first, which part should grow next -- suppose it were up to you to decide, or suppose you could participate, then it would be a disaster. You would grow worse, and you would impede your own growth. Not only would you fail to help your growth, you would actually hinder it. Why? Because you would always be asking questions like: should I develop this part first, or should I develop this organ first? Is that right? Should I do it this way? Is it good for me to do it this way? Am I doing it correctly? The more you ask, the more you lose your natural essence, and the more you obstruct the normal development of the fetus. Because from your limited consciousness and limited angle, you cannot understand how a larger reality behind it is operating. You only see the things and events right in front of you, and you always raise these doubts from your own angle, and you always want to intervene in the process. You always think that from your angle there is a better solution, and you always reach out to interfere. But your interference, from a larger perspective, is extremely foolish and utterly laughable. Yet at the time you do not feel that way, because what you see at the time is the fact: if you do not step in to fix it, it will be too late. So letting you control the growth and development of an infant would only produce the opposite of the desired result.

Why? Because when you leave it alone, you will find that the infant develops so perfectly that you feel uneasy; you will think: how can this be? How can the Creator be so miraculous? How can a fertilized egg know with such precision when to divide, what to divide into, and how the organs are completed step by step? If you have ever watched a documentary on fetal growth, you will know.

By the same reasoning, regarding the nature of dreams, this step-by-step diagramming of the nature of dreams -- as he has been doing since the beginning of this chapter, diagramming our dreams: how dreams come about, what it is like before dreams, where dreams are born from, and the relationship between dreams and our waking reality -- if you really try to diagram it step by step, it may well make you too neurotic. Why? If you have read the previous sections, you will know: so the world of our three-dimensional reality has all been rehearsed in dreams first; in dreams there is a continuous performance of dramas, and then according to one's needs, certain ones are selected to be manifested in waking life; and the world before dreams provides the material for dreams, and the events in dreams are all supplied by that pre-dream state; and the pre-dream state is a state that we humans at present cannot probe, cannot even understand, and that he cannot even describe to you. So at this point a person will develop a kind of dread, a kind of neurosis, and will ask questions like: did I do this dream correctly today? Should I have had such a dream? Was this dream appropriate or not? I had a dream last night, and I do not know whether I should have had that dream. Because you will say: the events in dreams will all be realized in reality, or carry some symbolic meaning, so what do I do? Since dreams are so important, and I cannot control them, then I am truly filled with dread, and I become neurotic. Every dream must be investigated. This is a normal feeling.

In the earlier example of the fetus, he compares the entire process from fertilized egg to final birth, the ten months of gestation, to the process of manifestation from a dream event to a three-dimensional event. If, in the state of a fetus, you were to point and gesture, to pull up the seedlings to help them grow, or to add legs to a snake, any of these would be possible. Then in the process of transformation and manifestation from dream to waking reality, you would do the same thing. But is this something you should be doing? It is not. If you do it, it will only produce the opposite result. Yet you cannot control your dread, and you become neurotic. So many people begin to hold their dreams in awe: "So dreams are this important! Before, I thought dreams were especially unimportant, and now I think dreams are especially important." They begin to hold their dreams in awe, and they fear anything that cannot be consciously controlled. Why are they afraid? Because they cannot control dreams, and people instinctively fear things their consciousness cannot control.

But if you think of your dreams as extensions of your own experience in another category, then you can indeed learn to take them in stride.

If you change your angle of thinking: think of dreams as extensions of your own experience, in another category, on another level, on another stage, then you can indeed learn to take them in stride, and you will not be so tense. In dreams you are not without control. You still need to rely on your experience in dreams; it is just that the experience in dreams is not processed in the way of our three-dimensional world. It has its own way of processing, but your experience is still used there, treated as your own experience. At this point, because it is your own experience, merely performed on a different stage, he says you will not be so afraid, and you will take it in stride.

From another angle, how should we understand the meaning of this sentence? To put it simply: just treat dreams as a stage, except that this dream stage is different from the stage of your ordinary three-dimensional world. On the dream stage, the scenery, the props, the extras -- they come as soon as you call them. Including the dead, and those not yet born in the future, you can call them all over to help you act, to help you put together a cast. The scenes in dreams, you do not need to spend money to buy them, you do not need to spend money to rent them, you do not need to go to any film studio, you do not need to go to Hollywood to rent someone's soundstage, you do not need to go to the Hengdian film center or the Suzhou film center -- none of that. In a dream, the scene appears the moment you think of it; if you want a palace, there is a palace.

Treat dreams as this kind of theatrical stage. On this theatrical stage, you are the chief director, you are the chief screenwriter, and of course you are also the lead actor. You are also the audience, sitting there watching. It is all you, just you alone. But you have different costumes, different appearances, different outfits. When you put on the director's costume, you are the director; when you put on the screenwriter's costume, you are the screenwriter; when you dress up as the character, you are the character itself; when you sit below as an audience member eating melon and cracking sunflower seeds, then you should eat your melon well and crack your sunflower seeds well, and do your job as the commenting audience: is this play well performed or not, is this character overacted, too fake, and so on. So you must play multiple roles in this one person. But here, whether you are the audience, it is still from your experience and perspective; whether you are the director, it is still from your experience and perspective; whether you are the actor or the screenwriter, it is all from your experience and perspective. There is nothing here that escapes beyond your experience; it is just different from our three-dimensional world.

In dreams, you must rehearse every drama you might possibly want to perform. For example, suppose you once pursued the class beauty of your class, or you pursued a goddess, and she never agreed to be with you. Well then, in the drama you can act it out: what if she had agreed, had accepted, and the two of you fell in love, got married, had children, and spent a lifetime together -- what would that be like? Rehearse it once, take a look. Call the goddess over to act with you, perform it once -- it can be done, and in dreams it can be realized.

If you think about it from this angle, this drama is all being rehearsed by you, entirely under your control. Look, the whole production crew is all you, so what is there to be uneasy about? From director, producer, screenwriter, to actor, lead actor, audience -- all you, and there is no box-office pressure. No one says whether the box office is good or bad; there is no pressure, so what do you have to worry about? Just perform freely, perform with abandon. That is why you can take it in stride. Do not worry about whether it is performed well or badly; there is no censorship department, no State Administration of Radio and Television, and no audience throwing eggs at you. If it is not performed well, no problem.

You will more easily recall your dreams.

If you consider your dreams with this mindset, you will more easily recall your dreams, because you regard yourself as the master of the dream, rather than passively participating in the dream as before. And when you do that, you will likely maintain a sense of continuity between the waking state and the dream state. Because when you are awake, you are also doing this, only you are not aware of it. When you are awake, is it not true that whatever you want to do is entirely up to you? Is the drama of waking life not also being performed by you? It is just that the drama of waking life is subject to many restrictions, while the drama in dreams is subject to very few restrictions and is relatively free.

After the relatively free dream dramas have been rehearsed, after many scenes and plots have been rehearsed, which plot can land and be realized in waking life? You must necessarily make a consideration: among all these dramas, which drama, or which plot elements, might possibly be realized in reality? It is meaningless to talk about things that cannot possibly be realized. For example, suppose you rehearse a dream in which you propose to your beloved goddess on the moon -- that is meaningless; no matter how many times you rehearse that scene, it cannot be realized. That is to say, there is necessarily a limitation between possible events and their actual manifestation in the three-dimensional world. Whether an event can manifest is influenced by many factors. In addition to being influenced by intensity -- as mentioned earlier, by the intensity of your feelings, emotions, ideas, and images -- he also emphasizes again that this intensity is not the kind of intensity you understand, not how hard you try, how seriously you think, how much you long for it. It is not that kind of intensity. Rather, it refers to the vitality field, that is, whether the intensity of the field where the EE units reside is sufficiently stable and clear. If the intensity of this field is very stable and very clear, then this thing can manifest. That is one precondition. But there must also be a trigger point: your interactive sensing system, the interactive sensing system between your psyche and this world itself, and only then can it be realized in your waking life. This is the content of the previous section or the previous two sections. Some people may have learned the later parts and forgotten the earlier parts, so I am reminding everyone.

When you have this kind of mindset, when in dreams you rehearse various dramas with your own experience, and consider things with this mindset, then you will have a certain sense of continuity between reality and dreams. When this happens, the terrain of your own psyche will emerge more clearly.

As he has said before, what is the psyche -- in Chapter One, "The Environment of the Psyche," he discussed it -- the psyche is like a terrain: there are high mountains, rivers, oceans, grasslands, all kinds of things. He uses this as an analogy, saying that your psychic world also has such a terrain. However, those terrain lines will not be displayed in exact numbers or theorems. The terrain of the psyche is not like the three-dimensional world, where you can open Google Maps and see elevation, altitude, topographic maps. It is not that kind of terrain. The terrain of the human psyche cannot be expressed in exact numbers, nor can it be depicted by any theorem or formula. Rather, it is revealed through creative techniques, through symbols, through feelings, through desires. The terrain of your psyche is revealed through these means, not through the symbols and numbers you might imagine.

The creative characteristics are most clearly shown in children.

Children's creativity is the strongest. Creativity implies a kind of abandon within a framework -- "abandon" means being very unrestrained, very willful, doing whatever one wants; this is called abandon, meaning I will do whatever I want to do. This is more clearly displayed in children. Although children's abilities are the smallest -- children have no money, no particular abilities, little strength, and seem very weak -- yet in their own creativity, children are far stronger than us adults. They completely do whatever they want to do. But we adults, before we even do anything, have already restricted ourselves: this kind of thing cannot be done, that kind of thing cannot be done. Before doing anything, we draw a circle around ourselves and box ourselves in. Therefore creativity is best and most clearly displayed in children.

Because that is accepted for its own sake, accepted by their own selves. That is, this ecstatic creation of the psyche -- Seth often uses the phrase: "to create with ecstasy, or with this wild joy." This matter itself is the essence of the psyche. The psyche accepts this kind of creation carried out in this state of abandon. Moreover, it is only for its own sake; it does not consider anything else. It is immersed only in the joy and pleasure of its own creativity. In this process, it never thinks: if I create this thing, will I break the radio my father just bought? Will I get a beating? It never thinks of that. It just wants to create, wants to take the radio apart to see what is inside, how it was made, and whether it can be reassembled into something else. So when a child is creating, he considers only himself. Therefore, in our real lives, adults will feel that these children often do the kinds of things only naughty kids would do. He simply does not consider whether the thing is expensive or cheap, whether it is very precious, whether it is the only one in the house. He does not consider any of that; he is creating purely for the sake of creation.

If in your waking time you fabricate a dream for your own amusement, and then interpret that dream well, without worrying about any of its implications, just for its own sake.

This is one of the exercises in Chapter Three, Section Three: he asks you, while awake, in broad daylight, to fabricate a dream yourself, to imagine a daydream, to devise a dream, and you may devise it however you like. Then you should interpret that dream well -- perform it, rehearse it, interpret it -- without worrying about its implications, without worrying about its meaning, without worrying about what the dream itself represents, or what deep significance the events in the dream carry. Do not think about that; just play boldly, interpret it boldly, purely for the sake of the amusement itself, purely for the sake of fabricating such a dream to amuse yourself. Make it as fun as possible, as interesting as possible.

When you do this, you inadvertently touch upon the essence of your own nighttime dreams. When you dream at night, the same mechanism is at work. What mechanism? It is your consciousness creating, fabricating a dream, experiencing various possibilities, creating various possibilities, fabricating these scenes to continually try and experience. It does not have much purpose, not the strong sense of purpose you imagine, for the sake of something, for some reason. Of course, it follows your inner true desires and wishes, which are your original nature. Setting that aside for now, does it create the dream entirely according to your ideas? At night it is the same.

To say it simply once more: during the day you fabricate a dream, and then you wantonly play with this dream, toy with this dream, and devise all kinds of scenes, situations, and plots for it. And in the process of playing with it, do not pay attention to any of its meanings -- do not say, is it inappropriate for me to play with it this way? Is it a little immoral? Am I losing the basic moral conscience of being human? Do not consider these things; this is a dream. Do not add so many restrictions to yourself in it; consider only the fun of the dream. If you have any inspiration, just develop it to the fullest; you may let your imagination run wild, think of anything you like. When you do this, you can truly understand that when you dream at night, it is the same -- the mechanism of your nighttime dreaming is the same as the mechanism of your daytime fabrication of this dream. If during the day you can completely let go of the constraints of the world, and wholeheartedly construct a wildly imaginative dream, then congratulations: you are very close to the nighttime state. The sleeping you is doing the same thing.

Your regular dreams and this deliberately manufactured dream will have many similarities.

The dreams you regularly have at night, and the dream you deliberately manufacture during the day, have many similarities. And the process of manufacturing the dream will familiarize you with the alteration of consciousness. What is the alteration of consciousness? It is that when you dream at night, this consciousness is not subject to any restrictions of the three-dimensional world; it is a free consciousness. But when you do anything during the day, you must consider its effects, consequences, and limitations; you must consider the consequences of everything you do. Yet in dreams you do not need to consider any of that at all. This is the alteration of your consciousness. He wants you to become familiar with this alteration of consciousness: from the consciousness of the waking daytime state, to the completely free, wildly imaginative consciousness of the nighttime dream state. If you become very familiar with this alteration of consciousness, you can switch whenever you want, switch to daytime when you want, switch to nighttime when you want. To what degree? After reaching a certain degree, you will find that every night you can consciously construct your own dreams. Before going to sleep, you will give yourself a suggestion: tonight I will have such-and-such a dream, its general plot is such-and-such, and some parts I will not arrange in advance, I will improvise in the dream. When you have this ability, and it grows stronger and stronger, hey, you will find that at night you really do begin to have the dreams you planned before going to sleep, and your dreams unfold according to your plan, according to your conception, according to your design.

When your dreams can unfold according to your waking design, you will then have a sense of continuity between these two different consciousnesses, the waking and the sleeping. The younger you are, the easier it is to achieve; many small children can easily do this, while some adults find it harder, but with practice they can also do it. You can also review the exercise in Chapter Three, Section Three -- the exercise about how to weave a dream event while awake -- once more. He says this is an excellent exercise, a very good exercise, especially beneficial for those whose mental frameworks are too rigid. It lets you break through all the restrictions on your consciousness. Practice it often, and do not be afraid.

In most studies of dreams, the playful and creative aspects of dreams have been greatly underestimated.

When we modern people study dreams, we greatly underestimate the playful and creative aspects of dreams. What does this mean? It means we tend to think of dreams either as predicting something, prophesying something, or as carrying some meaning for our lives. You often overlook that dreams themselves carry a strong quality of playfulness and creativity.

Children often use play to frighten themselves, yet they always know the framework of the play. For example, the bogeyman in the garden -- at dinnertime, they know they can return to the safe universe of tea and cookies.

Children often play at night, hiding here and there. As soon as it gets dark, they come out as all kinds of ghosts, pretending to be all sorts of ghosts to scare people. The younger the children, the more they love playing this kind of scary ghost game. It is very frightening. But these garden ghosts, when it comes to dinner -- generally in other countries, after the parents have finished cooking, they ring a bell outside to tell the children it is time to come home for dinner, that dinner is ready -- by then the children are hungry too, so they all come running back and stop playing the game. And so the ghosts disappear. Children can tell clearly: this is a game. No matter how scary it is, they are not afraid, because it is a game. In dreams we are the same. No matter what kind of scene you imagine in a dream, it is all a dream. So the child returns to the safe universe of tea and refreshments, comes home to the warm dinner table, grabs something to eat, and the matter of the ghosts is temporarily set aside.

Dreams often serve the same purpose.

In dreams, fear is confronted. In dreams there are often nightmares, very frightening things, but in dreams do we not confront them? Just like when a small child plays games in the yard, he is also truly afraid. I do not know whether you ever played that kind of game as a child where you were truly afraid: facing the darkness, facing the pretend ghosts hidden there. Actually you know those ghosts are all your friends, other children pretending, but even though you know they are pretending, you are still afraid. It is the same as going into a haunted house at an amusement park. Even though you know all those ghosts are played by people, they can still scare you half to death. It is the same in dreams. Although nothing in the dream can truly harm you, you do confront real fear. When dawn comes, when the sun rises, the dreamer wakes up, stretches, eats breakfast, washes his face, and that fear is then regarded as unimportant, as not real -- just a fear in a dream.

People do the same thing.

People also do this same thing in dreams, just like children playing games. What is he doing? He is playing, he is creating. Dreams also have these two main attributes.

This is not an explanation for all uncomfortable dreams.

He says that what he means is not an explanation for all nightmares -- that all nightmares are just for fun. No. Seth never forgets to remind you of this, because he is afraid you will misunderstand. Because I gave such an explanation, you might think that all nightmares are for this purpose. No. Some of them are like this, but not all.

Why? Because some nightmares do indeed have precognitive and guiding significance in real life. But he reminds us: not all such events are neurotic, nor are they all symbols of substantial future problems. Although he does not say that absolutely every nightmare is of no consequence, he tells you that not every nightmare necessarily foretells the occurrence of some future terrifying event. There is no necessary connection between the two, so you do not need to be so tense and so neurotic about every dream.

Ruburt and Joseph have a small cat. They had just adopted a kitten.

Within the cat's great and exuberant physical energy, he chases his own tail, climbs the furniture, and wears himself out. Or in a somewhat similar fashion, the human mind is full of vitality and plays with itself.

If you have ever kept a cat, you know that a cat's energy is extremely abundant. Besides playing by himself, he is always pestering you to play with him. You use a teaser wand, toys, and all kinds of glowing things to tease him, and he will play with you frantically, until he is so exhausted he truly cannot play anymore. This cat plays with himself, just as the human mind is also full of energy. So what does it do when it is full of energy? If no one plays with it, it plays with itself. So in dreams, it begins to play with itself.

In dreams he freely uses all those splendid, vigorous abilities.

He used a phrase: "splendid, vigorous abilities." In dreams he gives free rein to them, using all his energetic abilities, and he can draw on all kinds of material. He does not need to be careful or to question, he does not need to worry, because in dreams there is nothing substantial.

He seeks reality, and gives birth to psychological patterns.

He is producing one reality after another, and then through experiencing these realities in dreams, he enriches your psychological patterns. When you have experienced things you have never experienced before, is your psyche not a little richer? Your psychological experience becomes richer. So he prompts the growth of psychological patterns, making them richer. He indulges freely in mental activity using himself -- he refers to the mind, to this abundant vitality of the human mind. Just as a kitten plays games on the physical level, he plays such games on the mental level.

When you try to explore spirituality with rigid seriousness, it will always elude you.

When you want to put on a stern face, adopt the manner of a pedant, and study spirituality from a scientific angle and with a scientific attitude, it will always elude you. You can never find it. It simply will not let you study it, just like a mischievous child.

Your dreams may be interpreted as dramas, but never as diagrams.

Your dreams can be interpreted as some kind of drama, or a series of dramas, but your dreams can never be diagrams that can be digitally quantified.

Do yourself a favor, and do not try to pull the interpretation of dreams down to your level.

Stop interpreting dreams, stop explaining dreams, from the perspective of your three-dimensional human world. Stop explaining dreams from your own perspective, because your perspective is too low. Instead, you should try to enter into the reality of the dream in a playful, imaginative way.

Allow your waking consciousness to rise to a freer interpretation of events.

Allow yourself to attain ultimate freedom in dreams. This is a most important point: do not keep lecturing yourself in dreams -- this is wrong, that is wrong, this violates the rules, that violates morality, that violates this code of conduct. Do not lecture yourself in dreams. In dreams, let yourself go completely. Let your ordinary waking consciousness rise, rise to a freer interpretation of events. Do not rigidly interpret events: does this event hint at something, does this event foretell something, is this event bad, and so on. Do not do that. Shift to a freer angle, a playful angle rich in imagination, and interpret this world from the angle of all kinds of possibilities, rather than interpreting this world from your three-dimensional perspective.

In which energy is not limited or imprisoned by space and time.

In this state, when you have completely set your consciousness free, your energy will no longer be limited or imprisoned by time and space. Besides being limited by time and space, you are also limited by your consciousness. So energy is no longer restricted by these three -- not by space, not by time, and not by the restrictions of your consciousness. Then energy flows freely, and from it you can obtain an endless source of energy. This is a most basic principle: let your consciousness be free. If you cannot do it in waking life, then first do it in dreams. After doing it in dreams for a long time, in waking life your consciousness will also become freer, because reality is generated out of the dream state.

All right, he says that the dictation for this chapter and this session is finished. He then gave them one page of personal data, and then it ended. So the fourth part of the interpretation of Chapter 9 ends here.

Finally, let me remind everyone once more: although the previous sessions all discussed the great significance of dreams and their relationship to our waking lives, in this session he did a kind of reverse work, letting us relax our mindset. Do not, because you studied the previous sessions and discovered how important dreams are, become more reverent toward dreams, more serious, more fearful, more afraid to dream. None of that is necessary. What he wants to tell you in the end is to understand your dreams entirely in a playful way, in a way rich in imagination, and not to understand your dreams from the angle of your three-dimensional world.

This session is Session 791, Monday, January 17, 1977, at 9:42 p.m. At the beginning, Rob said that although they were somewhat reluctant, Jane and he had finally gotten an unlisted telephone number. In the United States, in the old days, telephone directories listed names along with numbers. If you looked someone up, just like the old telephone directories in our country -- whether the China Yellow Pages or the local telephone directory -- you could find a person's telephone number by their name. As Jane and Rob published more and more books, many readers would call them directly. He usually received as many as twenty calls a day, sometimes more, day and night. Added up over a month, that came to about six hundred calls, and Jane had to answer most of them, because callers usually wanted to speak with her. Jane was the person who channeled Seth, and most of the time she enjoyed this personal interaction, often spending about half an hour helping a particular person. But in the end she truly did not have time to return calls that frequently -- if she spent a long time resolving each of the twenty-some calls a day, she would not be able to do anything else all day, while still having to complete her own work, and her workload was also very heavy. She changed her number to one that could not be found in the telephone directory, so that only their friends, relatives, or relevant staff at the publishing house could reach them. Seth came through and began the dictation for this session.

Pretend that you are a fine actor, and that you are acting in a multidimensional theater.

Suppose you are an excellent actor, but your stage is not the stage of our traditional three-dimensional world, but a multidimensional stage. On this multidimensional stage, every role you play -- what does every role on a multidimensional stage mean? Because it is itself multidimensional, you are needed to play roles in multiple times and spaces: you have to play in the three-dimensional world, you have to play in dreams, you have to play in the state before dreams, you have to play in parallel space-times, and you have to play in every reincarnation. You have to play many roles, and each role you play acquires a vitality far surpassing the creative power of any ordinary drama. In an ordinary play we usually play only one role, not multiple roles by one person. But this playing of multiple roles by one person means shuttling through different times and spaces to act, so your creative power is far better than those actors. Every one of us is engaged in such an effort. Every one of us is a very fine actor, all making such an effort. You lose yourself in your role -- losing yourself means becoming lost in yourself. You forget yourself, and you become immersed in the role.

Session 791

You are also involved in a creative dilemma.

What does "dilemma" mean here? It means you do not know whether to play yourself or to play the role, because you have played this role for far too long, and you have become confused with the role. For example, if you play a role for a few months, that is fine; if you play it for a year or two -- a very long TV series, or a very serious film, might take a year or two to shoot -- that is still fine. But what if it goes on longer? What if this role is played for three years, for five years? What if this role is played for fifty years, for eighty years, for your whole life? Then, as you keep playing it, do you not gradually lose the ability to tell which is the role and which is your true self? So you fall into a dilemma: you do not know how to create within this role, or how to create outside the role as the actor yourself -- you do not know whether you are creating as the actor or as the character, so you enter a creative dilemma.

I said that after my death, I must maintain my individuality.

That is, the part that is me. It is as if, after the play is over, the person who played Hamlet stayed in that role, refused to learn other roles, and continued his own Hamlet career -- in fact, he forgot that he was an actor and took himself to be Hamlet. He said, I am Hamlet, and I will forever follow my dilemma and challenge. Hamlet has his own dilemma, which is "to be or not to be³⁴" -- that is his dilemma, and it is not the same thing as the dilemma mentioned earlier.

In the dream state, actors are to some degree aware of the roles they are playing.

When you are awake, you basically cannot discover this, but in dreams you may sometimes become aware that, oh, I am actually acting. Because the dream itself is like a theater, where plays of all kinds of possibilities are being rehearsed, so it is not the same as the waking state. When you are awake, you play only one role, and it is not easy to discover the difference between yourself and the role, because you only have one role to play. But in dreams it is different, because in dreams you play many roles, so sometimes you can discover, oh, so I am an actor. In dreams you can sense that behind the actor's craft there is a true personal identity -- you discover that behind all these roles in so many different times and spaces, there is a true self.

I have spoken of this before, but remember that even to the self that you know, you impose a certain artificial, exaggerated sense of continuity.

Even if you discover the true identity of the actor behind these roles, you will still impose upon that identity a great deal of artificial, exaggerated continuity. What does that mean? Look at what he says next:

Your experience is constantly changing, and the intimate scope of your life is also always changing, but you focus only on those points that are regular.

We actually live in a state where both ourselves and our external environment are changing at every moment, in a constantly changing state, yet we often prefer to look for the unchanging things in life, the things that follow regular patterns. In our terms, that actually narrows the scope of your experience -- the irregular things, the things without logic, escape your cognition. You only like to pay attention to the regular things, and this makes the events in your life easier to understand, because they follow patterns. In fact, your consciousness is not limited by this regularity.

To put it simply, what he means is this: although in the dream state, when one person plays many roles, you may have this kind of awareness and discover that the actor playing all these roles is your true identity, while these roles are only temporarily played -- even if you discover this, you will still impose upon the actor behind the roles in various times and spaces some artificial sense of continuity. What is an artificial sense of continuity? It means you will still carry some qualities from these roles onto the actor. At this point you no longer identify yourself as belonging to one particular role, unlike the Hamlet mentioned above, who was foolish enough to think he was Hamlet -- you will discover that you actually have many roles, many identities. But you will still imagine the actor's identity as having attributes very similar to those of the roles. I do not know whether you can understand what I am saying: in fact, this actor and the roles he plays are essentially different, but we cannot recognize this difference. We think there are many similarities between the actor and these roles, and these similarities are exactly the logical life, the regular life, that we ordinarily like. The irregular, the illogical -- you basically do not notice those. But he says that is not the case: your consciousness is not subject to any limitation, not subject to rules, logic, or regularity. You are originally free and unrestricted. But after acting for too long, you become limited by these different roles.

You have a group psychological environment, and it corresponds to a worldly stage.

We live in this world with a group psychological environment, and this group environment forms our worldly culture. This group psychological environment corresponds to our worldly world, to its era, to the characteristics of the era and the social culture it is situated in. Experience then occurs on that worldly stage, on the stage of our three-dimensional world.

Certain psychological traditions are used as props.

Psychological traditions, that is, certain cultural traditions and a kind of shared social cognition, are like props. Why are they like props? Because for a story to happen, there must be a background. When we tell a story, we will certainly say that this event happened in the late Eastern Han dynasty, or that this story happened in the late Qing dynasty -- these all imply the social environment and background of that time. So this kind of psychological tradition is similar; it is also a kind of prop.

How much is formal psychological arrangement, used as reference points or background.

What he means is that your psychological traditions are used as background, but sometimes you cannot tell whether a psychological arrangement is a background, or whether it belongs to you uniquely rather than being a shared attribute of this era or this society. You organize your experience within those arrangements -- you can only organize your experience within such a large arrangement, and these arrangements thus shape the psychic time of your physical perception. What arrangements? That is, according to the psychological traditions of your entire group, you take them as a background, and then you perform your events on such a worldly stage. You must conform to the social environment and conditions of that worldly stage at that time. So the performances arranged within such a background form the psychic time of our physical perception -- the psychic time we perceive is necessarily influenced by the era and culture we are in.

He says the last sentence is important:

In your lifetime, your experience must be felt and interpreted in flesh.

In your life, you must experience these feelings and experiences through your own personal experience, and apart from that you have no better way. But even so:

Events originate from a nonphysical source.

Although you need to experience these events personally through the physical body, to undergo the feelings, realizations, and insights they bring, these events themselves originate from a nonphysical source. The preceding passages have been discussing how these events come about. As mentioned earlier, the dreams you remember are already an interpretation of other nonphysical events -- your dreams actually come from a translation or symbolization of other nonphysical events; they are already a process of translation. And the world of your three-dimensional world still comes from the rehearsals in your dream theater, one rehearsal among many plays of possibilities. To put it as simply as possible, we should not make this matter more and more complicated. Your actual experience is far too vast, because you are performing on a multidimensional stage.

Far more than you can actually follow.

Your true experience is far too vast; there is simply no way to manifest, follow, or feel it in this three-dimensional world. In other words, it cannot be experienced one by one through our physical bodies. Our physical bodies can only experience a very, very small part of it, and most of the ways cannot be experienced physically in the three-dimensional world.

Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of focusing upon one particular area.

Our human specific consciousness focuses on the material world, which is a particular area. It is precisely because our consciousness focuses on the material world that our consciousness has characteristics different from others. You imagine it to be absolute -- the vast majority of people in our current society believe that this material-based world is absolutely real and absolutely correct, beyond question and beyond challenge. Although we who have studied spirituality now know that it is only a very, very small layer of conscious perception, we humans still treat it as absolute reality.

It seems to involve some completely exclusive states.

It is exclusive; it believes that all events and happenings of the nonphysical world are not truly existent, and that only the things of the three-dimensional and material world are absolutely real. It does not allow that state of simultaneous existence to occur, and that includes the identity you claim for yourself. This exclusivity also includes the identification of identity -- you only believe that this one identity in this one life, in this one lifetime in the three-dimensional world, is your only identity, because it denies all identities of probability. On your multidimensional stage you play many roles; your present identity is only one role, and you are an actor. At this point you have forgotten that you are an actor; you even identify yourself completely with this role -- you neither know that other roles exist, nor do you know that you are only an actor, that you are not these different roles at all, and still less are you one of these roles.

You give it a kingdom's boundaries.

You draw a boundary for this consciousness of yours, saying that only the perception and cognition of this material world are real, that this is the territory of my consciousness, the kingdom of my own consciousness, and that all other things of the nonphysical world are incorrect and unreal.

Yet it is some kind of inviolate organization, even when it is part of other kinds of consciousness with their own focus.

In fact, your true consciousness is an inviolate organization, even when it is part of other kinds of consciousness with their own focus. What he means is, suppose your consciousness mixes with the consciousness of a tree -- you mix with other kinds of consciousness, and you become part of other kinds of consciousness -- even so, you are inviolate, and you still maintain the independence and uniqueness of your consciousness. Seth earlier also called this a kind of quasi-consciousness, one similar to consciousness, but it is not the consciousness we ordinarily understand; it is a mixture of two or several consciousnesses, of multiple consciousnesses. Even in that state of mixed consciousness, your consciousness still maintains its own uniqueness.

Your body itself is composed of conscious, self-aware organizations.

Your body itself is composed of the consciousnesses of many things in the universe, of the natural world. He said earlier that the things you have eaten, whether animals, plants, minerals, water -- all the things you have eaten, all things in the world, they all have consciousness. Or you may say I have not eaten them, but you are constantly exchanging with the world around you; you are constantly exchanging information with your surrounding environment. In this process of exchange, your consciousness mixes with the consciousnesses of all things in nature. Your consciousness is not as pure as you think; it is a mixed consciousness.

You may say, if these mixed consciousnesses are all mixed together, then where is my own consciousness? Your own consciousness sits there peacefully within this mixed consciousness; it has not changed. As he said earlier, within mixed consciousness it will not be profaned, nor will it be deprived of its uniqueness, its individuality. So your body is formed by a mixture of combined consciousnesses. This organization escapes your attention; we do not notice it.

And deals with perceptual information completely foreign to our own ways.

It is completely unfamiliar with the daily information we ordinarily process -- that is, you completely do not understand that my consciousness is actually a mixed consciousness. This is completely different from the self-cognition you ordinarily understand. You previously thought of yourself as a very pure, independent self; you never thought that it is an organization of consciousness. The original English word for this organizational structure is "organization," meaning a kind of organization.

There is a most refined... even leaping over the boundaries of species.

The word "refined" he uses here was carefully chosen after much deliberation. This word can ordinarily be compared to someone with social experience, with life experience, or what we call a seasoned old hand, worldly-wise -- that is the meaning. This sentence is actually very hard to understand. What he means is that among species there is a way of forming a cross-species alliance of consciousness above the species level, and their way of alliance is extremely sophisticated -- a way that is very rich in experience, very rich in life experience, combined again into an alliance of consciousness. This way of organizing and allying is very skilled, very seasoned; it even transcends species and leaps over the boundaries of species. It can cross species, between humans and animals, between humans and plants, between plants and animals, between plants and plants, between animals and animals -- among all kinds of species, it can cross. It is a trans-species existence; this is what he hopes you can understand. So when it comes to the nature of the psyche discussed here, there is still a certain depth to it.

You see a cultural world of yours, with its arts and manufacturing, its cities, its technology, and well-developed applications of the intellect.

Look at our cultural world: there is art, and manufacturing, and technology, and cities, and society, and organization, and applications that our intellect can develop and utilize.

You are conquered by your own religions, sciences, archaeology, and conquest of the environment, because it seems to you that no other consciousness has produced the things that mankind has produced.

Why are you conquered by them? Because you will find that human beings are very great in the development of civilization, and apart from human beings no other species can create these things. So people develop a sense of pride and self-satisfaction, or a feeling of standing at the top of the food chain -- only human beings can create these things, no other species can, so this feeling arises.

One product of your consciousness is indeed unique, creative, and forms a characteristic mosaic, with its own beauty and nobility.

I do not deny this product of your consciousness. What are the products of our consciousness? They are our art, technology, culture, cities -- everything of our present human civilization is a product of our consciousness. The products of your human consciousness are indeed unique and creative, and they form a characteristic mosaic -- what is meant by a mosaic? It is inlaid upon the great background of nature, and it has its own beauty and nobility; this is beyond question.

Yet some organizations of consciousness, while surpassing mankind, have not produced art or science.

Human consciousness has produced all of human civilization, but some organizations of consciousness have not produced science, have not produced civilization, and have not produced the art as we know it. Yet such organizations, which have produced nothing at all, together form the living earth and the physical creatures upon it. Although they have not created anything of human civilization, including artistic creation, they nevertheless together with us form our present earth and the various real creatures upon the earth.

This kind of organization of consciousness produced the oceans upon which you sail, the skies through which you fly, the land upon which your cities spread, and the reality that makes your culture or any culture possible.

It did not produce the things we humans are familiar with, but it produced a greater background and environment. It produced the oceans upon which our ships can sail, the sky in which we can fly, the land upon which our cities depend and spread, and the reality in which all our cultures need to manifest and exist. The reality in which culture exists is different from our physical reality; you need to understand this -- do not say, is the reality of culture the three-dimensional world? No. The reality of culture is something on another level, something on the psychological level. It produced both our physical environment and our psychological environment; without this psychological environment, our culture and art could not exist there.

Mankind is also part of that cross-species consciousness, as are plants and animals.

There is a consciousness that is an organization of consciousness spanning all species, and animals and plants are also part of it. At the same time, part of human reality contributes to that cross-species organization -- we are also part of this great consciousness as a whole, and the things that happen to us also enrich this consciousness.

But he has not chosen to focus his practical daily consciousness in that direction, or to identify his individuality with that cross-species consciousness.

We ordinarily do not direct our consciousness toward that direction, do not focus upon it, and do not believe in the existence of a consciousness that transcends species and spans species; we do not identify with it.

As a result, he does not understand the larger natural mobility that mankind himself possesses, nor can he practically perceive the natural psychological gestalt of which he is a part.

Because human beings do not identify with this consciousness, they cannot know that they are part of this nature. As part of nature, we have our own mobility within nature -- by mobility, it means we can, among the consciousnesses of various species, experience things from their perspectives. And we also cannot perceive the gestalt that belongs to the whole of nature, because we are part of it, so of course we can also feel this psychological gestalt, but because of our non-identification, we cannot feel it.

This natural psychological gestalt is what our physical world rises out of. In dreams, this relationship is often revealed.

The truth behind such relationships inherently exists in all the legends of half-gods and half-humans, or half-beasts and half-humans, or in myths. The word "myth" is not well used here; it actually means legends and myths. The existence of this cross-species consciousness, in our ancient mythological stories -- those myths of half-human and half-beast, half-beast and half-human -- actually hints to us that between ourselves and nature, between species, cross-species existence is possible. Look at the Sphinx of ancient Egypt³⁵; at that time it was actually a hint to us. A hint of what? A hint that we can become one with the lion, that there is a connection between humans and animals and the so-called gods.

That connection implies a reality of psyche and nature.

The connection between humans and animals and gods, the connection in myth, actually implies a real situation of our psyche and nature; it is merely hinted to us through legends and myths. Such myths and legends exist in all times and places, both East and West.

The earth beneath our feet, any given section of it, has an identity of its own.

So in ancient times we spoke of the existence of the local earth god, one earth god responsible for overseeing this piece of land; you could also put it that way. I am not speaking symbolically:

The representative of this identity is that, on the land of any given specific area, the consciousnesses of humans and animals are jointly organized.

On that piece of land, the consciousnesses of humans and animals are jointly organized together, are one. To put it simply:

There are as many kinds of consciousness as there are particles, and these consciousnesses are combined in infinite ways.

How many kinds of particles are there in our world -- particles are the even smaller things below atoms -- there are as many kinds of consciousness as there are particles, and the ways these consciousnesses combine are infinitely many. Be sure to remember this.

In the dream state, certain experiences form a background for the dream drama, experiences that would not otherwise be open to you.

What he is saying is that any piece of land in any region, along with the animals, plants, and rivers growing and living on that land, all have a common consciousness. They combine into a joint, common consciousness, a joint organization, or an alliance of consciousness, a combination of consciousness -- call it whatever you like. The whole of nature has a psychological gestalt, and specific to a certain region, there is a regional gestalt, a regional union of consciousness. This is very much like the ancient Chinese earth god -- when something happens, you call him out and ask him, what has happened in this place, what demons and monsters are here, and he knows it all. The earth god knows the local affairs, which are a common union of the consciousnesses of the animals, plants, and people on that piece of land.

You may say, if he is united with this region, where are his boundaries? Does it mean he cannot unite with other places? No. He tells you that this kind of consciousness is extremely numerous, and the ways consciousnesses unite and combine are also infinitely many. It can today -- no, not today; it can simultaneously belong to different organizations. For example, a tree belongs both to the organization of the consciousness of all trees, and to the organization of the small grove it is in, and to the regional organization of the whole area. If this tree is in your courtyard, then together with the whole house, the courtyard, and the whole atmosphere of the home, it forms a consciousness combination of the home and courtyard. So what he tells you is that the combinations of this kind of consciousness are infinitely many; do not think there is only one kind.

So your consciousness is not as simple as you imagine, like a flashlight; it is a combination of many consciousnesses, and your consciousness is only one part of it. If this were not the case, if these combinations of consciousness formed the background of the dream drama in your dreams -- for example, the total sum of this piece of land, all the animals and plants plus people plus the land, plus the mountains, rivers, and buildings on it, all these together form a joint organization of consciousness for this region. When an event happens, the place where the event occurs necessarily requires the joint organization of consciousness of this region as the background, as the background for the story or event to occur. And when we actually dream, we also need these backgrounds -- these backgrounds are the environment, nature, the scenes in the dream; it also needs a background, and these backgrounds and your entire dream are all part of a joint organization of your consciousness. If this were not the case, you would not easily understand them; without this, they would not be open to you.

Conversely, it is indeed a conglomeration of consciousness foci, swarming together to form your validity, stamped with your identity.

These unions of consciousness are indeed conglomerations of consciousness foci. Although it is all the animals and all the plants on a piece of land -- note, I am not speaking in general terms; it is all the animals and all the plants within it, not simply a metaphor -- although they are a combination of consciousness or an alliance of consciousness, when you cognize it and perceive it, at that focal point of your consciousness, at that point where you perceive it, it is indeed a conglomeration of your consciousness points. For example, when you focus on a tree, on a flower, that is one focus of your consciousness. At this focus of consciousness, although it is a flower, this flower has already gathered the conglomerate of the union of all consciousnesses of this entire region. It looks like a flower, but in fact it is a conglomeration upon which all consciousnesses converge. Then you see this flower and experience this flower; you experience it with your consciousness, and your consciousness in turn combines all the other consciousnesses, but the way of this combination is formed according to your own uniqueness. So when you look at this flower and feel this flower, it already carries your deep imprint, and this imprint is your identity, the seal you have stamped in the universe.

Whether scattered or concentrated in a tight cluster, appearing alone or flying past some other larger grouping, that particular organization represents your identity.

It may scatter or gather into a tight cluster, appear alone, or pass through another larger grouping — what does that larger organization represent? It is a polymer of your consciousness, your joint consciousness, your alliance of consciousness, as if it were an alliance of consciousness spanning all species. You are within it, and your identity is also displayed within it.

You say that is not right, it is an alliance of all animals and plants, so how can my consciousness have uniqueness within it? You must remember this clearly here, and I will emphasize it once more: when I say animals and plants here, I am speaking in general terms. I did not say all animals and all plants. I mean within your experience, within the world related to you. In other words, to put it more bluntly, which animals have you eaten, which foods have you eaten — if you understand your mixture of consciousness in this way, it may be simpler. Although saying it this way is not accurate or objective, let us just put it this way, and it may be easier for you to understand. The animals and plants each person eats are not the same, the amounts eaten are not the same, the kinds eaten are not the same, so each person's joint consciousness is also different. Is it easier to understand when I put it this way? I will just give this simple example. In that case, each person's joint consciousness of this kind is a larger part that transcends your original consciousness, because it combines other species — the grain plants you have eaten, the water you have drunk, the animal meat you have eaten, all of these are in it. Then you can understand that each person's combination of this kind is unique, so when these so-called joint consciousnesses join together, that is your unique identity, different from others. So every person is different from every other person. Although every person is an alliance of consciousness or an organization of consciousness, and this organization is even cross-species, each one is different.

For example, the particles of this particular organization may be scattered throughout the universe, with the galaxy situated among them, yet its identity will be preserved.

Here he means that this particular organization represents your identity. Suppose the particles of this particular organization are scattered throughout the entire universe — you must not imagine it as being around you or in some particular place. Do not forget that it is cross-species: the water you drink, how do you know when that water is from? It could be water from billions of years ago. How do you know that the atoms and molecules contained in the plants and animals you eat did not come from billions of years ago or from some planet or meteorite in the universe more than ten billion years ago that fell to Earth? Is not the whole Earth materially interconnected with the entire galaxy? So he uses this example to say, suppose the scope of this particular consciousness organization of your particular identity is as large as the universe, and the galaxy is merely situated within it. The galaxy is already extremely large — its diameter is about one hundred thousand light-years³⁶, so you can imagine it is very large. Within such a vast universe, the uniqueness of this particular organization of yours is still preserved, that is, the uniqueness of the identity of this organization is still preserved.

So you know that as your identity, that is, your spiritual identity, it is itself mixed with many other consciousnesses within it, and this identity is boundless in its vastness, you cannot measure it. You say if it is that large, does it not then lack a unified attribute or individuality within it? No, it has its individuality, and it also has its personal characteristics, and no matter how large it is, they can be preserved. Then conversely, no matter how small it is, can they also be preserved? Can you understand this?

Certain portions of your consciousness that you are not aware of are mixed with the consciousness of other species, and this has not shaken your own sense of personal identity in the slightest.

Without your awareness, your consciousness is mixed with the consciousness of other species. When your consciousness is mixed with other species — with cats and dogs, with flowers and grass — then is my consciousness still my consciousness? Is it the consciousness of a tree plus my consciousness mixed together and stirred? It is not like that. From the spiritual perspective, consciousness transcends our three-dimensional categories of understanding. This is indeed somewhat difficult, but you absolutely must not think of it in three-dimensional terms. You must not think of it as the state of coffee and milk mixed together — although coffee and milk are mixed together, coffee is still coffee and milk is still milk. Although they appear mixed into one mass, each remains distinctly clear. It is very interesting, this thing is very interesting. Your consciousness mixed with the consciousness of other species has not shaken your sense of personal identity in the slightest; you do not feel in the least that your personal identity has been affected or invaded.

Yet they form in other psychological realities upon which you are not now focused.

They form other psychological realities, that is certain. We only focus on ourselves as our personal identity — in other words, we observe this world from the perspective of ourselves as human beings — we do not observe this world from the perspective of the consciousness of other species, so their other psychological realities are not within our focus. You do not think about how a tree or a flower feels.

In the dream state, animals, humans, and plants intermix their realities to such a degree that information belonging to one species is transmitted to other species through an inner communication or perception that your world would not otherwise know.

The way he says this is as awkward as it can be; you have to reverse the logic several times to understand it. So let us not get hung up on the grammar, and once we straighten it out, you will understand what he means. What he means is that in dreams, although the consciousnesses of animals, humans, and plants are cross-species, they intermix their own realities, their consciousnesses mix together, and when it reaches such a degree, from a certain angle, the information of one species is transmitted to other species through dreams by means of a method that, without dreams, you could not use to transmit it to other species. So only at the level of dreams can you have some awareness, and only there can you transmit information to other species in this cross-species transmission of information, in this cross-species inner communication and perception. So in dreams your abilities are very strong; you can not only travel through time and space and so on, but also act out dramas, and within them you can feel all things in the world.

He took a break from 10:45 until 11:00, then continued.

The formation of the earth's natural structures is the result of the biological cooperation of all species.

The formation of the earth's natural environment is the result of the joint cooperation of all species living on the earth; it is not the work of a single one.

And consciousness itself is independent of any image it may adopt at any given time.

Consciousness itself is independent of any image it adopts at any time. Do not look at it only from the surface of the earth, from which species currently exist, or from what influence which species have on the earth. Let me use an example here, and everyone may understand it better: take the dinosaurs, for instance. They are no longer living on our earth; in our human terms they became extinct millions of years ago³⁷. But although the dinosaurs are gone, the consciousness of the dinosaurs as a species is still a part of the consciousness of the entire earth. It no longer has its image, and you cannot find its image, but its consciousness as dinosaurs is still influencing the entire earth; it is a part of the earth's natural environment. Put this way, you may be able to understand. You say how is that possible? It is possible. If we are strict about it, it is also possible: without the era in which dinosaurs existed, without the dinosaurs' particular living conditions, their particular systems and habits, the characteristics of the earth of that era would not have formed — whether it was the Cretaceous or some other period, the characteristics of the earth of that era.

Consciousness Is a Great Intermingling Across Species

Therefore, in a world that appears very chaotic to us humans—we think the whole world is disorderly and without much regularity—there actually exists a great intermingling of consciousness. Our seemingly chaotic world is, inwardly, a great intermingling of consciousness, a process of continuous exchange of information and open exploration of possibilities. The outcomes of all possibilities—the possible outcomes of the earth, the possible outcomes of the natural environment—are all being constantly explored.

From that perspective, private and mass events emerge.

Our personal events and mass events all emerge from that process.

Seth says he is only explaining the characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and inclinations of nature. All that was said before is actually explaining what the essence of nature really is.

In what you call the dream state, there are so many different levels that it is impossible to list them all.

If one had to list the various levels of dreams, it could only be presented in a rather rigid form—and in fact you cannot list them, because there are far too many, and they exist in a very flexible, unstructured form.

This is especially because these dream events involve biological comprehension that cannot be transferred through language and words. Some dream events are understood directly on a biological level, bypassing language itself, so you cannot transfer them in words.

Many people have this feeling—whether in dreaming or in meditation, many people enter a state where the feelings can only be spoken of in general terms, but cannot be described in language.

Someone has told you that the unconscious is intimately aware of the smallest details of your health, your moods, your interpersonal relationships.

This is true, it is real. You do not know, but that does not mean the unconscious part of you does not know—it knows everything. Not only that, it is aware of the health condition of the earth, even the environmental conditions on the other side of the planet—if you are in China, it knows the situation in America; if you are in America, it also knows the situation in China. This is not through informational guidance, but through genuine perception. It is also familiar with the cultural climate—it is not only familiar with the natural climate, but also with the cultural climate: the local society, culture, customs, mainstream thought—it is familiar with all of it.

How Consciousness Operates Behind the Scenes

Seth says that the consciousness you think you have, the consciousness you believe you understand, actually operates behind the scenes in a way quite different from what we imagine. It is a vast process of information gathering, a process that integrates all species.

Biologically, this information is coded, just like the physical information in the chromosomes and DNA of genetic factors, and it can be altered through experience and mental activity, in other species just as in your own.

What this passage means is that your consciousness operates behind the scenes in just this way -- only we do not know it. We can only know a very small part of it; most of it operates automatically in an unconscious manner. It gathers information from an extremely broad range. You can imagine it gathering information from the entire earth, a process that integrates all species -- not only gathering information related to humans, but also gathering information from animals, plants, and all other kinds of species.

Biologically speaking, this gathering of information is done in a coded manner. What does "coded manner" mean? It means obtaining information in a way that we humans cannot understand or decipher.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose you smell a faint scent in the air, like the smell just before rain arrives, and you know it is going to rain, or that it is raining somewhere nearby. For an experienced person, that smell is information; but for someone without experience, it is like a code. And the way your body perceives information from the entire earth and other species is somewhat similar to this -- it perceives it physically in a coded manner, but this perception is something we humans cannot understand.

He gives an even more vivid example: it is like how we write genetic information into the DNA of cells, transmitting hereditary information through chromosomes. Yet the relationship between these chromosomes and our biological attributes is something we still have not figured out. It is not a single linear arrangement -- it is not that this segment of a gene only affects this one thing. That is different from what we imagine.

Let me give an example. Humans once believed that human DNA should be the most complex among all species in the world -- because humans consider themselves to have the most cells, the most developed brain cells, the richest mental activity, plus language, plus the ability to manipulate tools with precision. But after humans discovered DNA and conducted careful research -- have they not been mapping the human genome all along? It has now been fully sequenced. But during the research process, humans long ago discovered a very strange phenomenon: the human genome has about forty thousand pairs of meaningful nodes³⁸, yet humans discovered that fish have one hundred thousand pairs, while humans only have forty thousand pairs. This left scientists utterly astonished.

And what is even more remarkable is that humans discovered that these DNA segments work in combination, not in a single one-to-one relationship. If you alter one gene, it does not just change that one trait. For example, scientists discovered a gene related to diabetes. After modifying this segment of the gene, the person's diabetic symptoms were alleviated, and insulin secretion returned to normal. The scientists thought, great, this is a way to treat diabetes. But after they modified this gene, the diabetes was temporarily resolved, yet there would be a chain reaction -- because this gene segment works in combination with other genes, so you do not know whether it might trigger the possibility of other diseases. I am just giving a random example.

You do not know whether, after you modify this gene, even though in your observation it seems to only relate to eye color, its alteration might have a more direct relationship with whether this person will develop a certain disease in the future. You do not know. Because they work in combination. If these forty thousand pairs were combined at random, they could produce an infinite number of possibilities -- if you have studied basic permutations and combinations, you know this. So humans seem to have made some progress on the chromosome question, but the more they study it, the more confused they seem to become. It is like entering a game and trying to modify a character's attributes -- anyone who has played games knows that in early games you could go into the files and modify attributes, but when you modify one attribute, other attributes change along with it. It is not a one-to-one relationship; it is extremely complex.

This is what he means: this genetic code is something that only living things -- the cells themselves, the inner workings of the human body -- can understand. You cannot understand it, but your body can; you do not understand it, but your inner self does. This is a kind of biological code.

And Seth says that the information in DNA can be altered through experience or mental activity. It can be changed. It is not that once genetic information is set it cannot be modified. People have already discovered many examples of genetic mutation; under certain special circumstances human genes can mutate, and there are many different kinds of triggers. In other species it is the same as in humans -- they can all obtain the information they want from vast channels, and the way they obtain it is, on the biological level, similar to the way data is encrypted.

Dreams: The Gathering and Processing of Information

On the other hand, animals, and especially humans -- animals also dream, kittens and puppies also dream. The dreams of humans and animals involve not only the processing of information, but also the gathering of information. Why gather information in dreams? Because only in dreams can this cross-species information interact with each other and be transmitted.

By opening up sources of information that cannot be obtained in the waking state, and by providing feedback obtained from beyond the conventional world, dreams keep our lives from becoming closed off.

Dreaming is equivalent to opening a window in our living world that leads to another world, so that we no longer live in a closed three-dimensional world. From another angle, none of us is Truman in The Truman Show -- your dreams are somewhat like a window leading to that broadcast studio, to a larger real world.

In dreams we obtain information, and we also process information. The data obtained through waking learning, effort, and experience is examined in dreams -- not only compared against physical experience, but also processed according to biological and spiritual data. In other words, the experience you gain in real life -- the things you have gone through, your feelings and experiences, the summaries of those experiences -- at the dream level, it is not only compared with your physical world, but more importantly, it is further processed on both your biological and spiritual levels.

You experience something in life -- what effect does it have on your spirituality? While awake you often cannot perceive it, but in dreams it will be processed for you. What effect does your daytime experience have on your body? Unless it is very obvious -- for example, if you drank poison, then of course you know; some subtle and gradual events -- for example, what effect getting a promotion and a raise has on your body -- you do not know, but in dreams it is known.

The acquisition of that data is accomplished by the sleeping consciousness dispersing itself, mixing with its own and other species' consciousness, while at the same time still maintaining and preserving its own identity.

He says that other consciousnesses also disperse themselves in the same way. Simply put, when you sleep, that sleeping consciousness breaks itself apart and disperses into various species -- disperses into a cat, into a plant, into a mineral, into a drop of water. What this dispersal means is that it divides its own consciousness into many portions, and then mixes them with other consciousnesses. Through this process of mixing, it can obtain the information it wants -- it sees problems from others' perspectives: when its consciousness mixes with the consciousness of a tree, it sees problems from the tree's perspective and obtains the tree's information. But even when it disperses itself and mixes with other consciousnesses, it still maintains its own overall identity.

Why is this so? He said earlier that any spiritual portion is an energy -- a pure energy body. A pure energy body has a basic characteristic: any point, even the smallest portion, contains the attributes of the whole within it. The smallest portion of energy possesses all the information, all the energy, and all the functions of the entire energy. So no matter how small your consciousness is divided, it has its own wholeness within it, and will not lose its overall sense of identity. This chapter is closely connected from beginning to end -- because the material is too vast and macroscopic, sometimes as you study you forget the things mentioned earlier, and you need to recall them from time to time in order to have an overall grasp of things.

So each person in this way maintains a picture of the flowing, ever-changing physical and psychological group environment.

"Flowing and ever-changing" means changing without cease, changing at every moment, flowing and changing without being fixed. We use the method described above -- dividing our consciousness into many portions to mix with other consciousnesses, obtaining other consciousnesses' information, while at the same time not losing our own identity -- each person uses this method to maintain a clear picture of the three-dimensional world, the group world, the inner world, and the outer world. That picture is of course always changing rapidly, but it will always maintain a stable picture. The events of the three-dimensional world that we perceive could not exist if it were not through such a method.

Dreams Lay the Foundation for Waking Life

Basically, information is experience. In dreams you obtain the information necessary for your life, and obtain the materials needed for your real life.

The sleeping state is not just the other side of your consciousness; it also makes your waking life and culture possible.

Your sleeping state is not just one side of your consciousness -- you have a waking consciousness and a sleeping consciousness -- it is not just one side of your consciousness; it is also the foundation that makes the life and culture of the world you wake up into possible. The dream state is absolutely necessary.

Death operates in the same way. Animals especially grasp this point -- what way can animals understand? That is to say, without dreams, there would be no real world for us; without death, there would be no life. Animals have long understood this, because their way of organizing time is different from ours -- their perception of time is not the same as ours; they organize time entirely according to the natural way, whereas we humans organize time according to human events.

Dreams therefore provide all the conditions of life and death.

In dreams, all the conditions of life and death are present. In reality we are very afraid of death, but in dreams, death and life exist simultaneously -- so you often dream of people who have passed away before, which is very normal. In dreams there is no concept of life and death.

Here there is a creative mixture, prose-like, attuned to the self-perceiving organization of conscious life.

Your conscious life emerges from this organization of perception. What does prose-like mean? Prose-like means your consciousness is dispersed -- dispersed into every species, dispersed into the entire natural environment and all things in the universe. The form is scattered, but prose has a characteristic: "the form is scattered but the spirit is not scattered" -- your form may be scattered, but the spirit cannot be scattered. So he uses prose as an example, meaning that although your consciousness appears to have dispersed into every species, its wholeness is maintained -- the recognition of self-identity and wholeness is not a problem; dispersal does not affect the whole.

What is the organization of perception? It means your consciousness divides into many parts and goes into every species to mix with their consciousness, forming a web of consciousness. You mix with the consciousness of trees, mix with the consciousness of flowers, mix with the consciousness of dogs, mix with the consciousness of cats -- these different consciousnesses mix together and jointly perceive the whole world and the whole universe. This perceptual system is the organization of perception. Like prose, its form is scattered but its spirit is not scattered; it enters into every species, yet there is a unified self-cognition and self-perception.

Our conscious life emerges from the overall framework of this perceptual organization.

Here is the raw material out of which the daily events of your individual and worldwide perception are made.

All the daily events that occur in your personal world and the whole world -- all the raw materials come from the great perceptual web obtained through the mixing of your consciousness with the consciousness of other species -- the perceptual whole that is gathered together.

The Mutual Nourishment of Dreaming and Waking

In nature, nothing is wasted.

Nature has no waste. Therefore, human dreams — the landscapes of our dream world as they grow — are also meant to be used, just as the growth of plants in nature is meant to be used.

Whether or not the things in these dreams are physically realized, they have their own reality.

Whether or not the dream world manifests in real life, it has its own reality. Manifestation means practice in our three-dimensional world; what does not manifest also has its own world.

Your own individuality is, to some extent, a result of your waking experience.

When we are awake, we handle daily affairs and gain experience, and this experience is taken into the dream state, where it is used to rehearse dramas of possibility. So waking experience is also a result of the dream world; and the results produced by the dream world — events that occur in three-dimensional time — once you experience these events and gain experience from them, that in turn influences how you rehearse those possible events in the dream world.

How you choose, which things manifest into the three-dimensional world — this process of choosing seems unknown and passive, but it is actually determined by the life experience you gain from the events you experience in the three-dimensional world while awake.

To put it simply: the dream is a stage, where dramas of all possibilities are rehearsed. Which possibility manifests and which does not requires your life experience to judge — the skill of this director depends entirely on your experience. Where does your experience come from? From life in the three-dimensional world. How many films you have directed, how well you grasp the storyline, whether you are an experienced director — one reach of the hand reveals it. The better the director, the better the arrangement of the storyline; the richer the storyline, the more experience gained; the more experience, the richer the storyline when you return to the dream to choose the next plot; the richer plot manifests into the three-dimensional world, and your experience becomes richer still. That is the relationship.

This is what Buddhist Yogacara philosophy calls "external conditions perfume the seeds, and the seeds give rise to external conditions." Yogacara discusses the relationship between reality and the seeds — the seeds are equivalent to our most primordial consciousness, and external conditions are the external world, the worlds manifested in the three-dimensional world. The relationship between external conditions and seeds is one of mutual perfuming. Buddhism uses the word "perfume" even better — it is mutual perfuming: reality perfumes the seeds, the seeds generate reality, and the new reality perfumes the seeds again. Who determines whom, who influences whom? It is a relationship of mutual determination and mutual influence.

But they are also formed by your dreaming experience.

What I just described is this nested relationship.

Formed by the learning, knowledge, and encounters that take place in dreams, even though that does not seem to be a legitimate perception of yours.

Legitimate perception means perception in the three-dimensional world. Dream experience seems illegitimate, but it is actually also your legitimate perception. Your waking reality determines how you choose the next possible event in the dream; after the next possible event you choose manifests in real life, you learn, experience, and gain knowledge within it, and that in turn influences again. Dream and reality influence each other in this way, and it is very hard to say clearly who influences whom.

So Seth has always told you to remove the barrier between dream and reality. You must correctly recognize that dream and reality are both your world, and they influence each other.

Dreams Provide the Impetus for Learning

Long before an infant crawls, he has dreams of walking and running, and these serve as an impetus.

Before he has learned to walk, in his dreams he is already running and walking. So when you watch a small child learning to walk, he always wants to walk quickly, carrying a kind of confidence, a kind of certainty and recognition as if he had once known how to walk. When he toddles along, he steps forward very firmly, one step at a time, unafraid of walking—because there is a very strong impetus behind it. Where does this impetus come from? If you have ever raised a child, you know that this impetus comes from dreams.

In very rudimentary form, the child's dreams also involve mathematical concepts, so that formal mathematical training falls upon already fertile ground.

In dreams, children not only learn to crawl, to walk, to run, and to learn all kinds of practical functional movements, they also learn the basic concepts of mathematics. So when you begin to study mathematics, your brain—at the deepest level of consciousness—has already prepared a piece of fertile ground suited for mathematical training. It has already cleared the land, so that the brain possesses the primitive foundation for receiving mathematical theory; the hardware conditions are already in place.

You say, how is that possible? Then tell me, why is it that only humans can learn mathematics, and why can other animals not learn it? Go try teaching them and you will find out. Many of the things humans learn actually have a preliminary groundwork laid in dreams.

Art, science, agriculture—all of these reflect the natural contours and inclinations inherent in the human psyche.

What is meant by natural contours and inclinations? It means that preliminary preparation for learning this knowledge has already been made. There is a kind of inclination—just as a child wants to run, there is an impetus behind it.

They all first emerge in dreams as general rather than specific attributes, and then in the waking state they blossom into specialized intellectual inclinations.

In dreams they are general attributes, not specific ones. For example, the aesthetic sense in art is a general thing, involving every aspect of art—whether painting, sculpture, musical composition, or writing essays, novels, or poetry, all of them involve the question of aesthetic sense. First there is this general thing, and only later does the specialized thing appear. In waking practice, under this prepared premise, you then blossom into specialized, particular skills—a certain way of painting, certain painting techniques, and so on. But the premise is that the general environment and background must be prepared—you must have a basic aesthetic sense.

That thing is very hard to teach you. Whether something looks good or not, you should be able to tell at a glance, but no textbook ever tells you "this is what looks good, this arc at this angle is what looks good." When drawing a person, although there are some basic theoretical frameworks, such as "eight heads tall" or "three sections and five eyes," beneath these basic theoretical frameworks, is there not still a fundamental aesthetic sense at work? An aesthetic sense for art.

So here we are told once again: dreams make a basic, general preparation for what humans call knowledge and wisdom, while those specialized abilities are continually refined through practice in the three-dimensional world.

Therefore long before the age of tribes, cities existed in the dreams of human beings.

At that time, the concept of cities already existed in human dreams; otherwise, how would people ever have thought of building cities? Dreams provide the impetus for growth.

And for the sake of physical survival, the great avenues of information were opened to a consciousness attuned to the earth.

In order for the physical body to survive better, we attune our consciousness to the earth and open the channels of information, and only then do we go about constructing human civilization. And the earliest stages of human civilization were all given to us in dreams as the most basic popular science and education.

That state, however, is also connected with waking life, so you also carry into it many elements of your daily existence.

That state of dreaming is connected with your life, so in dreams you also bring in many elements of daily life. Therefore, the dreams you can remember are often presented in a fairly conventional form—generally, the dreams you can remember are quite similar to your daily life, very much like it.

Generally speaking, you remember the surface reality or unreality of the dream, and by the time you approach your ordinary level of consciousness, the dream has already taken on a transformed appearance.

The closer you get to the waking or ordinary level of consciousness, the more the dream has been translated, the greater the changes, the closer it is to the three-dimensional world, while the inner content and symbolic meaning of the dream itself are diminishing. This was also discussed in Seth Speaks—the more concrete a symbol is, the less information it contains; the more concrete something is, the more it limits many things and negates many things. A very vague piece of information, on the contrary, contains a great deal of meaning. It is like the eight trigrams in the I Ching, or the sixty-four hexagrams derived from them³⁹, which can be used to extrapolate all things in the world—from extreme simplicity, a great amount of information is contained. It is the same idea.

In dreams you are basically aware of many facets of a single event—one event has many possibilities. But these necessarily escape your waking memory. When awake, the dream you remember has only one logic or one plot; you do not rehearse all the possibilities simultaneously. Yet in the actual dream state, what you rehearse is all the possibilities—when you wake, you cannot remember them, and you remember only one storyline. When you try to recall a dream, you often cannot remember it, precisely because in the dream these things happen in parallel, and what you can truly remember is only one of those possibilities, one of those scenes.

True Education Must Include Dreams

Any true education must take the learning process in dreams into consideration.

When we truly want to carry out education, we must take the learning process in dreams into account.

If the recall of dream experience is not encouraged, and if dream education is not creatively applied in waking life, no one can catch a glimpse of the nature of the psyche.

What is this book about? It is about the nature of the psyche. If you want to understand or study the nature of the psyche, if you do not make use of your dreams, it is impossible for you to do so. Dreams are very important to our education, because many things are first laid out and given a foundation in dreams. If the learning process of dreams is not brought into the consideration of true education, we can never gain a true understanding of the psyche.

Speaking of this, I am reminded of a story from before. An enlightened master lived on a mountain, and many people came seeking to learn cultivation from him. Quite a few people came to study with him, of varying levels, and he said to them: "Just go to sleep. You have nothing else to do. For the first month, just go to sleep first. Sleep whenever you want, sleep as long as you want, and when you wake up, do whatever you want. I will not assign you anything. Just sleep like this every day for a month, and stay idle."

At first we did not understand what he was doing. Now that you have studied the Seth material, you know what he was doing — he was training your dream process. He made you idle, so you would have a lot of time and energy to experience things in the dream state. If you do not know how to learn in dreams, then, to put it bluntly, perhaps your spirituality or your spiritual capacity is not sufficient, and it would be very difficult for you to learn those things about the psyche from him. So he first had you sleep soundly for a month, and only then begin to study.

The Kitten's Revelation

This session ends here. Seth said at the end:

I return you to your kitten, who is doing what you wanted him to do. Both of you were thinking about what you wanted him to do.

What is he reminding you of? He is reminding you of life's natural spontaneous creativity -- of the source of your own creativity, purpose, and intention. Where is the source of our creativity, purpose, and intention? It is in nature, in all things of the world, and in the moments when you relax and feel into all things of the world. That is our source. Only with this source can life enter into your art.

The session ran until 12:18 a.m., so it was long. Why did we laugh? Because behind Seth's earlier words, "returning them to their kitten," there was a story: before the session, the kitten was full of energy, jumping on furniture, scratching curtains, scratching people, and messing up their papers, and they felt annoyed. Seth specifically pointed out: you should not blame this kitten; you should go play with it. What do you want it to do? Play! For a kitten, isn't this exactly what it should be doing? Isn't a cat supposed to bounce around and scratch this and that? What is the point of its claws if not to scratch things? Are a cat's claws for doing manicures? They are for scratching. Of course, we humans may very much dislike it scratching up furniture and sofas, but for the cat, this is what it is supposed to do.

If you observe this cat, what will you find? It is reminding you of life's natural spontaneous creativity -- the cat itself is having a great time playing, and it is naturally creating whatever is fun. This creativity itself is natural and spontaneous; no one taught it, and no one taught it how to play, yet it plays with great delight all on its own. This natural spontaneous creativity is the source of the creativity, purpose, and intention that every person -- including Jane and Rob -- originally has. Only when you find this source can your life enter into your works of art. Don't Rob's paintings and Jane's novels and books have to carry the source of life, that vital force, into them? Without this vital force entering in, would that painting still have inspiration? Would it still have spirit? Would it still have soul? Would anyone want to read that book? Even when you make anything or design anything, don't you have to bring your spontaneous, original creativity and that vital force into your works of art? And this original creative vital force, like a cat endlessly bustling about and making mischief, is something every living being originally has.

Seth was specifically emphasizing: you two, don't blame this cat; you haven't seen where the source of creativity is. This cat has given you a demonstration.

For the commentary on Chapter 9, there is one last part remaining. Chapter 9 is divided into six parts in total; today is the fifth part. Chapter 9 as a whole is relatively long, and its difficulty is somewhat deeper than the previous chapters. I hope everyone can be patient and finish studying it. Chapter 9 is a very core and very crucial part; it truly touches the concrete and subtle aspects of the nature of the psyche, and it also involves a great deal of dialectical thought and very broad domains. Every section is crucial, each with its own emphasis. The emphasis of this section is to make us realize that our consciousness is not an exclusively human consciousness -- it is a cross-species existence. Our consciousness divides itself into different units of consciousness (CUs), mixes with the consciousness of other species, obtains different perceptions, and gathers them together to form a self-conscious awareness stamped with its own strong imprint.

The importance and depth of Chapter 9 as a whole are sufficient; everyone must be patient. If it is somewhat hard to understand or follow, you can understand the content of Chapter 9 in a way that is easy for you by drawing diagrams, writing notes, making outlines, or using mind maps. This is very important for building a solid foundation for studying the psyche. We often talk about studying the psyche, but if you do not have a deep and correct understanding of the psyche itself, how can you study? If you don't even know what the psyche is, how can you improve the psyche?

Don't be impatient; settle your mind.

The Source and Birth of Events

We begin the last part of the Chapter 9 reading, which is Session 792 of the book, the session held on Monday evening, January 24, 1977. He did not say much by way of preamble; he simply began the content of the session directly.

He said that within your waking reality, that is, in this daytime world of ours, you obviously share a group world experience. Our entire human society has a common group experience, a common perception of the world. Just as this Earth of ours is a physical environment, we share the entire Earth environment across the whole planet. Our experience is shared with every person in the world, and our environment is also shared with every person in the world.

Again, what you perceive are events already packaged in time sequence.

What does "packaged" mean? It means something that has already been arranged, something that has already been prepared for you in your dream state. Therefore you have become accustomed to perceiving it in a certain order of before and after, because it occurs within a timeline, and we have become accustomed to this before-and-after. But when you build this physical structure, when you construct it in reality, we build it by placing one brick on top of another brick — do we not all think that is how houses are built? And then perhaps psychological events appear to be of a similar structure — we imagine that psychological structures are also built like one brick pressing on another brick, and in this way a psychological structure is built up. After all, we perceive these events as occurring within time, so the psychological structure that events bring us, we believe, is like a building, built up brick by brick.

When you ask how events are formed, you more or less expect an answer given in that temporal manner, in that kind of wording — that is, events should first be like this, then like that, then like this. What you hope for is that events in real life appear in a way that has before and after, cause and effect — this is the answer we expect, because in our real world, we see that everything else is formed this way. But the source of events is not that simple.

The source of events lies in that creative or subjective realm of existence that you ordinarily pay the least attention to.

The source of the world is in there, in the creative and subjective existence that we ordinarily barely concern ourselves with. What is meant by "creative" is that he wants to try all sorts of different, as many as possible, realities — as we mentioned in the previous few sessions, this is one of his main tendencies, to want to experience as many realities as possible. What is meant by "subjective"? Subjective means a mode of operation of association that takes your own perspective as primary, taking the significant meanings that arise from your associations as logic, and producing events through association. Therefore it is subjective, and it is also creative.

The Communication Network and Symbol System in Dreams

The dreaming state provides an inner communication network. In the dreaming state, there is communication between you and other events, between other events and events, and between you and those inner things that exist in the pre-dream state from which dream events arise. This kind of communication itself far surpasses our ordinary technological communication—surpassing so-called 4G, 5G, and even future 6G communication, none of which can reach the level of this inner communication.

Your inner network deals entirely with another kind of perceptual organization. The system that the inner self deals with is completely different from the perceptual system that our three-dimensional world deals with. This point must be remembered—it is another kind.

A rose is a rose is a rose. Important things must be said three times. This is actually a famous line by a woman poet: "The rose is rose is rose, rose is rose, rose is rose.⁴⁰" She said it three times. So when people today say "important things must be said three times," that is not a creation—it is actually copied from someone else. In our physical reality, a rose is a rose. But in a dream, a rose might be a stool, might be a song, might be a grave, might also be a child, and might also be every one of them—what does that mean? In a dream, this rose might be a stool, a song, a grave, and a child all at once; it is every one of them. So you can see that in dreams, our perceptual system is different from when we are awake; it is another kind.

In dreams you deal with symbols.

A symbol is merely an example of another quite objective reality.

A symbolic object, a thing used as an illustration—the event that it symbolizes is itself also objective. These symbols are like the events they "seem to be," but they are actually not those events either; they are only symbols of those events. They are likewise events that do not immediately display themselves—you see an event occur, and the occurrence of this event implies all possible events. Those possible events did not occur, but the event that did occur implies the existence of those possibilities. For example, if you now get up to drink water, that is an event that occurred, which means you did not go out for a walk, did not get up to work, did not go to the bathroom—it only represents the one thing of you getting up to drink water. And the three things—walking, working, going to the bathroom—exist only as possibilities and did not immediately occur.

Therefore a so-called reality event may be a container of many of its events, a container of other events, and you only perceive its outer surface. You call that outer surface a symbol, but that outer surface is actually also an event; it contains many implied events within it, yet we cannot see them. It is like how we can only see the outside of a cup and cannot see what is inside the cup, nor what is inside the container—this is one of our limitations. You see an event, and it is simultaneously a container of other events, within which all possibilities are hidden and implied. Yet those other events within the symbol are just as legitimate as the event you perceive, equally real in existence. Those possible events did not truly happen for you, but he says they are just as real as the real event you perceive.

Session 792

Events are not built one on top of another.

How do they come about, then? They are a kind of spontaneous expansion, born out of one another. Remember, they are first spontaneous, then expansive, then born from one another—you within me, I within you, you gave birth to me, I gave birth to you. Events are not stacked one upon another, nor does one cause another; they arise through mutual expansion, spontaneity, in a way that enhances one another. It is a release of creativity, a blossoming, a bursting into bloom. At the same time, the conscious mind selects those aspects to experience, and those aspects then become what is called an objective event. Events mutually expand, mutually enhance, mutually influence, mutually generate one another, yet your conscious mind selects only a certain aspect of these events, then lets it become an objective event in physical reality, lets it manifest, and then you experience it.

Cross-Species Consciousness and the Cellular Network

The world obviously is not made up only of you humans. The world does not contain only us humans; there are also all the various things of the world around us.

Therefore, as I mentioned in our last session, there is a level of the dream state in which all consciousness that is oriented toward the earth, including all species and all classes, comes together.

In the last session we specifically talked about a combination of this kind of cross-species consciousness, or rather an organization of this kind of cross-species consciousness -- whatever you call it, it does not matter what you call it. This kind of cross-species consciousness exists within your dreams. From the human standpoint, it represents a deep state of unconscious creativity -- we cannot perceive that level, so we call it a deep state of unconscious creativity.

At the cellular level, all cellular life communicates with one another by means of this. Within such an organization of consciousness that exists across species, the cells of all life, or rather the life within all cells, communicate with one another. They form an important biological network, and this network provides the necessary foundation for any kind of higher experience -- it is an underlying, foundational network. If this network did not exist, the events and experiences of our other three-dimensional world would have no basis from which to arise. What you call dreaming obviously depends upon these cellular communications. It distributes life force throughout the entire planet, and even throughout the entire universe, just like the example of the galaxy given in the last session.

The formation of any psychological event depends upon this relationship between species and species -- this is something we humans did not know before.

The psychological symbols with which you are familiar rise upward in a natural manner, like smoke.

They rise naturally, just as smoke drifts and disperses in the air, spontaneously. Between the smoke and the smoke, between the particles of smoke and the particles of smoke, what you finally see is one thing, but they interact with one another. The cellular structure itself is inherent, innate by nature. Our psychological symbols of this kind are normal and inborn.

Animals and plants also possess symbols and respond to symbolic objects. I think you all know this -- the most famous is Pavlov's experiment⁴¹, and also some basic experiments on animals. Certain special sounds, signs, or special things are associated with eating, feeding, or playing. Although these symbols may be difficult for you to understand, to them they are quite normal. For example, if you have kept a pet at home, you will know that when you want to go out, your pet sees you putting on your shoes and knows you are about to leave -- putting on shoes and going out to play, these two are a kind of symbol.

Symbols can also be called a kind of code of the psyche, a kind of code of spirituality. According to the environment in which consciousness finds itself, it can be transferred over in endless ways. It is like a kind of code; the meaning of the code itself is unknowable. In different environments, consciousness can interpret this code according to the environment it is in, and the ways of interpreting this code are as varied as a thousand people with a thousand faces, each seeing it differently. So what a rose ultimately symbolizes depends on your environment and your state at the time; it cannot be generalized. Yet in our actual life, a rose is a rose.

Events Cannot Be Precisely Defined

The world inside dreams comes together in the same way that the universe comes together. Therefore events cannot be precisely defined. You can only speak of a thing in general terms, because if you try to trace its source, it goes on endlessly.

In Buddhism, this matter has already been explained very thoroughly. The occurrence of any thing is composed of many "conditions," and this is called dependent origination. All things come about when the "conditions" are gathered together. For example, the table in front of you exists because a lumberjack cut down the wood, and then a furniture factory made that wood into the wooden table you see before you, and in between it went through many processes, interspersed with you going to the furniture store and buying it. Then if you keep tracing back to that big tree, how did the big tree come to be? There may have been soil, seeds, wind, some bird that brought the tree's seeds, and so on — this whole series of processes. But when you trace the source of all of this all the way back to the very beginning, this world is nothing, there is nothing at all. When you use the theory of dependent origination to explain this matter, you say that things happen only on the premise that all causes and conditions are complete, that the causes and conditions are in place. But these conditions, these prerequisites — when you go looking for the source of these conditions, you find that there is no such source at all. So the source is meaningless, and sources are interconnected with one another, and therefore events are very difficult to define precisely.

You can explore your own experience of an event, yet the exploration itself changes the nature of what seem to be separate events.

You might say, I refuse to accept this — I will study an event, explore an event, and explore every part of it from its inner edge to its outer edge. He says that in the process of your studying and exploring, the nature of that event changes because of your exploration and study. I do not know whether you can understand what I mean. For example, a child goes to school, sees that his deskmate's eraser is very pretty, picks it up and uses it, and after school does not return it, but puts it in his own pencil case and takes it away — that is an event. If you do more interpretation and analysis of this matter, its nature will change. Because you can never know what this event was like at its very origin, but after your interpretation, the nature of the event has already changed.

You share a group dream experience, and from this perspective, events cannot be precisely defined and separated; events are connected to one another and extend into one another. You share a dream experience, just as you share a group waking world. When we are awake, is this world shared? It is shared. Things that happen to you also affect others, and things that happen to others also affect you. Then is your experience in dreams shared? It is shared as well. By the same reasoning, you can understand it just by thinking with your brain — the waking world is shared, so how could the experience in dreams not possibly be shared too? It is shared in the same way.

Your ordinary experiences are all private, unique to you, seemingly unique to you, but they do occur within a shared environmental context. For example, you fall in love with so-and-so — this is a very private matter, as if it belongs only to the two of you and has nothing to do with anyone else. But this matter occurs within a shared context — the person you are in love with necessarily has parents, a family, his or her own social relationships, a job, and so on; he or she is a product of the shared world. So although this is a private matter between the two of you alone, it also occurs within the context of a shared environment. The same principle applies to the dream state. In dreams, the things that happen to you all seem to have you as the theme, you as the protagonist, but if you think about it carefully — the dream world revolving around you necessarily exists within a larger dream environment, and that experience is shared by everyone.

Your dream is unique to you — this is not denied — but it occurs within a larger shared dream context. The world in your dream occurs within an environment in which a world dream exists.

Your own existence is forever assured.

In a shared world or a shared dream, will your individual existence no longer be "you" because events and experiences are shared with others? No, your existence is forever assured. Your uniqueness and one-of-a-kind nature, your personal experience of this experience, of this event, is forever unique.

You are the physical reality in your own time and space.

You yourself, as a person, are a material, real existence within your own time and space. And because that framework requires conditions — that is, the framework of the earth, the framework of the three-dimensional world, it requires conditions — within it you automatically exclude your other experiences of yourself. You still have many nonphysical experiences; besides this physical body you also have your soul, and your nonphysical existence. But in your physical world, you can only experience this one portion, and the other portions you automatically set aside for the time being.

A larger event of your own exists beyond the scope of your ordinary perception of events, and yet that larger portion of you forms the self that you know.

Your three-dimensional world is only one portion, only a process of manifestation of your whole self within the three-dimensional world, conforming to the conditions of the three-dimensional world. There is also a larger you, and that portion of the larger you exists within a larger scope of consciousness and perception beyond your ordinary understanding. The you that you now think you are is formed by that portion of you within that larger scope of perception.

In the dream state, to some degree you step into a very large scope. For that reason, you also lose the specific, precise sense of direction that you are familiar with. If you want to enter this larger domain and scope, you must lose the special perception of space and time in the three-dimensional world that you are ordinarily familiar with — without losing it, you cannot gain an understanding of a larger scope.

Sometimes, however, you begin to sense the larger shape of events, and the timeless nature of your own existence.

Within the larger scope of dreams, you can gain a basic understanding of the timeless nature of your own existence, and you can also sense that within it, events have a larger shape.

The personal and the group, your own and the collective — in the dream state you alter the orientation of your consciousness. In dreams you experience some things, your consciousness changes, your thoughts change, and then you also handle the birth of events. Events are selected from among probable events — you are responsible for the birth of events, and then those events can later be structured using time as a structure, and then they can be physically experienced. This has already been said many, many times before, so I will not repeat it.

The Laws of Event Formation

Our physical world, this real world, is a product of nonphysical attributes. We think that events in the material world or the three-dimensional world are actually a product of events in the non-three-dimensional world. The formation of an event is initially an emotional, spiritual, and psychological interaction—it is not material; it is produced by the combined action of emotion, spirit, and psyche. The occurrence of an event in real life is a physical translation, a secularized version of the inner perceptual world of experience, and then it is incorporated into our space and time.

Events are organized according to laws that involve love, belief, intent, and the intensity with which they are held.

How are events produced and how are they organized? They are organized according to laws that involve love, belief, intent, and the intensity with which they are held. In previous sessions we gave examples, namely that they are determined by those fields—one is the vitality field, and the other is the spiritual sympathetic field. What is the vitality field? It is the field of the electromagnetic energy units, the EE units. The intensity within that vitality field determines whether the thing manifests, and it also determines whether on the spiritual level you have an inner connection with the event itself—whether you can attract it, whether you like it, whether you long for it to happen. That process is called the sympathetic field, the interactive sympathetic field, that is, the field of interactive sympathy between you and the event. The intensity of these two fields follows certain laws, and manifestation is organized according to these laws. According to your love, belief, intent, and purpose, you attract or repel events. If you want to do something, you automatically attract events that are compatible with that thing, and events that are contrary to it are all repelled by you. When another person wants to do something contrary to what you want, then the events you repel are exactly the events that person attracts.

Your events provide a theater in which certain events can or cannot occur. War, violence, plague, disaster—these are clearly felt by many people together, and they are part of a psychological and physical environment you share. These real wars, violence, disasters, and plagues are all felt by all of us together, not felt by one person alone. We have two shared environments: one is on the psychological level, sharing a psychological world with the entire world; the other is in the physical environment, sharing our earth with the entire world.

Some people directly encounter war, for example in hand-to-hand combat or by experiencing bombing on the battlefield; while others may only feel the many inconveniences brought by war. In a very intense war, the soldiers who actually come into contact with the battlefield are after all a minority; most people do not go directly to the battlefield, but they can still feel the inconveniences brought by war. Their perception of war is completely different from that of the soldiers.

The environment shared by the group is encountered as a physical reality according to individual beliefs, love, and intent.

Suppose war is a shared environment, then what kind of physical reality you want to experience is entirely determined by your beliefs, love, and intent. If you want to go to the battlefield, you experience the reality of a soldier; if you strongly reject going to the battlefield and cannot accept that scene of flesh and blood flying everywhere, then you become a person far away from war. Although you will still be affected and influenced, and your life will suffer many inconveniences, after all you did not go to the battlefield.

No Victims

In the deepest sense, there is no such thing as a victim.

Whether it is because of war, poverty, or plague, there are no victims. Some people say, "I am a victim of war," some say, "I am a victim of poverty," some say, "I am a victim of plague or disease." Then Seth says, no matter from what angle you look at it, from a deeper perspective, there are no victims in this world.

Why are there no victims? He first says, this does not mean that those negative qualities should not be fought against. What he means is: I am not saying that because there are no victims in this world, you should not fight against these negative things. What does it mean that there are no victims? What he means is, this is a drama. You must remember, your world provides a theater, and these events that happen are all like scenes in a play.

War is a large background that we experience together, a large worldwide environment. But within this war, what role you want to play is entirely up to you. You can play a military doctor who saves the dying and heals the wounded, or you can play a brave warrior who goes to the battlefield to kill the enemy -- it all depends on how you choose to play it.

I think there is an American film called Hacksaw Ridge⁴², do you all remember it? That soldier, because of his own religious beliefs, was unwilling to kill people, so he resolutely refused to fire a gun or kill anyone, and instead he saved people on the battlefield. This was adapted from a true story. On a battlefield where survival seemed impossible, in such a brutal war, he carried no weapons and went up with his bare hands to save people, and in the end he accomplished what seemed like an impossible task. War is a large social background, a social environment, so whatever you want to experience from it, you will experience. If you say, "I want to play a victim," fine, then you play a victim.

From the traditional understanding, undoubtedly men or women in many such cases appear -- you see, the word he uses is "appear" -- they look like victims. Therefore they behave more like, they behave just like victims. And their beliefs further reinforce this experience of being a victim -- they firmly believe that they are a victim.

This viewpoint is something many people do not understand. We feel that in war there are too many victims: those who directly sacrificed their lives in battle, those who died, and also their family members, wives, parents, underage children -- all of these are victims. How can you say they are not victims? If you still understand the problem this way, then you actually have not understood at all what the nature of the psyche is. The environment of this world is like a stage, it is a drama, and war is a real scene that takes place in our three-dimensional world.

Seth says, I am not saying that you should not fight, but you must understand that within this great backdrop of the age, what you choose to become, what you want to become, what you want to experience, and what you want to go through -- that is what is important. If you are willing to go through the experience of a victim, then go ahead and experience it, and fully experience the experience of a victim. But what Seth wants to tell you is, this is only what you think or what you feel -- because such beliefs will make you feel even more like a victim, but in essence you are not one. It is you yourself who chose to play that victim.

Think about the many games you played when you were little, like cops and robbers, police catching thieves. In the war games that boys played, often someone had to play all kinds of bad guys, even a spy. Those who played the bad guys did so voluntarily. He had to act very convincingly, getting grabbed by several kids and brought before a pretend officer for interrogation: Are you the enemy's spy? We have all done this. You say that was just a children's game, it does not count. But you know that children are very immersed in their games. So in this war, why do you not think that you are also playing a game? Why do you think it is a real war? Is that war really so meaningful? Is it really so noble and sacred?

Speaking of this, I recommend that everyone watch an animated short called See Through⁴³. And who made this animated short? It was made by the director of last year's hottest animated film, Ne Zha, the director called Jiaozi. At that time, Enlight Media established an animation department called Coloroom, and the person in charge of Coloroom had the surname Yi -- I forget what his full name was -- and through Jiaozi's animated short he discovered Jiaozi's talent and dug him out. Then they spent several years, probably about three or four years, four or five years, polishing the animated film Ne Zha, which later became an instant hit. Ne Zha created a miracle in Chinese film history, with a total box office exceeding 5 billion RMB⁴⁴, the highest record achieved by any Chinese film to date. And this year's Jiang Ziya is its sequel -- well, it cannot really be considered a sequel; it was also released by Coloroom, but it was not Jiaozi's team, it was another team. This team is said to have been led by two Chinese-American young people from DreamWorks, who were recruited by Enlight Media to take charge and make the animated film Jiang Ziya. Jiang Ziya has received mixed reviews, and we will not discuss its deeper meaning here. If you can understand it, you will smile knowingly; if you cannot understand it, just watch it for entertainment.

Take a look at that animated short See Through⁴³, it is about a dozen minutes long, and you will understand once you watch it. In it, the animated short uses its own way to tell you what a real world war actually means.

The Vicious Cycle of Beliefs Creating Reality

He said that he has said no fewer than a hundred times that your beliefs form your reality.

And this means that your beliefs construct the reality you know, and this experience then more thoroughly convinces you to believe in the reality you perceive, until a vicious cycle is formed, in which all of reality reflects your beliefs so perfectly that there is no room for any activity between the two.

When you recognize that your beliefs do indeed construct your reality, it will thoroughly convince you that the reality you perceive is created by your own beliefs. By all reasoning, there is nothing wrong with this, right? Beliefs create reality. But if you hold this conviction so firmly, without the slightest room for anything else, so firmly that you believe every event in your life is created by your beliefs, Seth comes to remind you -- he says this is not a good thing.

Suppose you reached such a state, where you executed beliefs-create-reality one hundred percent, where everything in your life was the result of your beliefs creating it, without the slightest deviation, where everything you thought and felt was realized in your actual life. You would say this is a good thing, but at this point Seth says this is not a good thing, this is a vicious cycle. Because it means you have no room for any activity -- between your beliefs and the events you manifest, there is a kind of direct correspondence, a mapping out, so what room is left?

What is so bad about it? For example, suppose the environment you are currently in is a bad environment. You would think: this bad environment of mine is entirely caused by my own beliefs, and I firmly believe that beliefs create reality, and that is just how it is. Why do I have such bad beliefs? It is precisely because I wanted to experience these bad things, so these bad things happened. Because I wanted to experience, I wanted to feel, this was created by my beliefs. So you would forever go on experiencing this thing, with no room for anything else.

Of course you could say, well, if I change to a good belief, then good things will happen, right? Suppose I am in a very good state, everything goes smoothly, whatever I think of comes to me, whatever I wish for comes true. Would you say that is not good? Think carefully, is such a life good? You think it is good, you think you want such a life. But before too long, you would get bored. Why? There would be no surprises, no accidents, life would simply have no enjoyment at all. Because whatever you want, you get. Within a few years, you yourself would break down.

You say, would it really be like that? Take another look at the problem of Universe 25 that I talked about earlier in the book -- that is, those little mice, in an environment where they had no worries about food or drink, completely in accord with a paradise-like treatment, how did that mouse society develop? Search for it online, whether on YouTube or anywhere else, you can find it. I have talked about it before too, though I cannot remember exactly where. In such a mouse paradise, where all food, drink, and shelter were arranged, no labor needed, no work, no natural enemies, very well protected, what would the mice do? In the end, the mice all died out.

At the very beginning, they may have put in two or three hundred mice, and that environment could have accommodated what seemed like several thousand mice without any problem -- five thousand or eight thousand, I forget. At the start they put in 100 males and 100 females, 200 mice. As a result, after the mouse population reached a peak of about 1,400 or 1,300 -- a mouse society of one or two thousand -- it began to decline sharply. The male mice started engaging in homosexuality, grooming themselves every day until they were sleek and shiny, gathering together, even better at grooming than the female mice, and they did not go after the female mice, had no interest in the female mice, only liked the mutual appreciation of other male mice. The female mice lived on the very high floors and did not come down, only coming out to eat a little when it was time to eat, then going right back, becoming the typical image of the shut-in girl who stays at home nowadays, not socializing, not interacting, not interested in the opposite sex. The male mice came out to hang out in groups and play, but when they played they did not seek out the female mice, nor did they reproduce. I will not go into the specifics; go see for yourself. The final result was that after about a year or two, these mice died off batch after batch, and in the end all the mice died out.

In an environment where there was no worry about food or drink, where everything was a paradise, the mice not only did not multiply to an unbearable degree as people imagined, but instead, in this best of all possible states, brought about their own extinction.

So you will understand that Seth is deliberately emphasizing this to us here. He did not spell it out so thoroughly, not so severely, but he did point it out -- this is a vicious cycle. If the matter of beliefs creating reality were to come true one hundred percent, without any discount, then a vicious cycle would form, and that is not a good thing at all. You must not think: that cannot be right, does not Seth tell us that studying the Seth material is precisely about forming this core concept of beliefs creating reality? Then you have only learned half of it correctly. If you think the Seth material is just telling you that beliefs create reality, you have only learned half of it correctly -- I cannot say what you have learned is wrong, I can only say there is another half of the knowledge that you simply have not seen, and have not grasped.

Dreams Provide Alternative Experience

He then begins to explain why this is so.

If that were truly the case, your human history would never have any real change.

Human history would undergo no change at all. The pathways of alternative experience -- the pathways of all possibilities, new possibilities and intuitive solutions -- often appear in dreams, so that people's learning does not depend solely on a feedback system that does not allow creative information to be entered.

Dreaming, then, provides learning experience that humanity could not otherwise obtain.

In dreams, behavior and events can be judged with a higher understanding that is more developed than that of conventional daily reality.

If that were truly so -- if you could really carry out "belief creates reality" one hundred percent -- human history would have no real change, there would be no development, and not only no development, but in the end the whole of humanity might perish. Because all alternative experience, all pathways of possibility, new possibilities and intuitive solutions, all appear in dreams. If you do not allow new information to come in, and rely only on a feedback system -- the reality your beliefs create reinforces the beliefs, and the beliefs create reality again -- with nothing new entering this cycle, how can you develop? All your possibilities are offered to you in dreams. Those possibilities in your dreams, those new inspirations, those intuitive solutions, are the breach that breaks that vicious cycle.

The Limitations of a Closed-Loop Feedback System

That is to say, if human beings develop only according to the pattern of "beliefs create reality," then you only get the experiences that beliefs can bring, and those other possible experiences have no chance to arise. Thus new possibilities cannot enter a feedback system—what is called a feedback system is this: my beliefs create reality, reality produces new beliefs in me, new beliefs then create new reality, and this is a feedback system, which can also be called a feedback loop.

I just gave two examples: if your starting environment is already good, you will enter a kind of paradise-like world similar to Universe 25, and in that world humanity will also perish; if your starting environment is bad, you will fall into an environment that gets worse and worse, and that environment, needless to say, will not have any good outcome either. So within this closed-loop circuit system of "beliefs create reality," if we do not allow any new accidents, alternative possibilities, or intuitive things to be inserted, then we cannot achieve any improvement.

Therefore, human learning must transcend this single closed-loop circuit; it must leap outside this circuit and allow accidents to occur and possibilities to arise.

Do you remember that in The Magical Approach, Seth discussed this issue: in the course of human development, if everything develops correctly all the way through, that is not a good thing—this goes beyond all the limits of human cognition. We humans think that if every decision we make from now on is correct, with no erroneous decisions at all, then humanity will develop better, faster, people will be happier, and civilization will reach a higher level. Will it be so? No.

Seth specifically discussed this issue in The Magical Approach: he said that human error is precisely one of the most fundamental core points of human development. This kind of unintentional mistake, this kind of accident, this kind of error, is an indispensable part of our correct path of development. If it is forever bright, great, and correct, forever "bright, great, and righteous," the result can only be a dead end.

This is also one of the main points why our artificial intelligence computers can never compare with human intelligence—of course there are many, many reasons, and I will not mention all of them; I will only say this one point: computers do not make mistakes, artificial intelligence does not make mistakes, and this is its biggest bug. So this theory, you must think about it repeatedly and dialectically, and never plunge headlong into it.

Seth here once again raises this viewpoint to alert us: never fall into the false slogan of "bright, great, and righteous" that is "beliefs create reality." Let me say something unpleasant—this may offend some people—it is just like those who only chant Amitabha every day and think they can practice Buddhism that way, thinking that merely shouting one slogan can get you the truth you want. Impossible.

To put it simply: we need more accidents, more experiences, more intuition, more possibilities, and we cannot develop only according to a closed-loop pattern.

Desire and Entanglement

He gives an example: from a person's intent, love, and desire, certain entanglements can arise, causing that person to experience and to seek out some kind of event that his own beliefs make impossible. Present experience will provide a dilemma in which a desired goal seems impossible.

He gives an example: a person has his own intent, his own love and desire, and from these he may generate certain entanglements. By entanglements, I mean some ideas, some things he wants to realize but cannot realize. This will cause that person to seek out some kind of event that his original beliefs make impossible. What this means is that, driven by his desires and intent, a person will want some reality that his existing beliefs are insufficient to actualize. He is very clear about his existing beliefs, but he knows that according to his existing beliefs he cannot manifest the thing he wants, so he goes looking for something beyond his beliefs -- he needs something different, something that can break through the original framework of beliefs, before he can reach that possible reality. And this new belief is something his own beliefs make impossible to attain.

So his present experience provides a dilemma: there is a desired goal, and relying on his existing beliefs, it is impossible to realize. The reality created by his current existing beliefs is not what he wants; he wants another one, and that one his existing beliefs cannot construct. So what does he do at this point? Does he follow his existing beliefs to create the reality that his existing beliefs can realize, or does he reject the reality formed by his existing beliefs and pursue the reality that he wants? This is the dilemma he now faces, and he must become entangled -- the entanglement lies right here.

Dreams and Inspiration Change Beliefs

In such a case, a dream or a series of dreams, then, over a long period, will in certain ways change his beliefs by providing new information. He wants to obtain a new reality, so he needs new beliefs, but he has no way to obtain new beliefs directly. At this time, he will obtain some new information and data in his dreams, and through this new information his beliefs are changed. And this kind of change in belief, otherwise, without the stimulation of these dream events, would not be possible.

In the same way, information may also be obtained in a state of sudden inspiration. That is to say, besides obtaining such information in dreams that leads to a change in belief, belief may also be changed through a sudden burst of inspiration. This kind of thing is quite normal — certain people will suddenly have an inspiration to go do something. But in any case, they are all the result of having obtained knowledge, and that knowledge would otherwise be inaccessible.

Whether it is this kind of inspiration or the information brought to him by a series of dreams, both are the result of knowledge he has obtained, and the source of that knowledge is inaccessible. How does inspiration come? How do dreams come? You have no way of knowing. But you know the results produced by this knowledge — the result is that your beliefs are changed — and it is helpful to you.

Love, Intention, Belief, and the Body

Love, purpose, confidence, intention — these form your physical body, influence your physical body, and also work together with everything else. Even on other levels, the physical body is formed by the consciousness of the cells. Our physical body is formed by the consciousness of the cells — he has already talked about this many times.

Love is a biological characteristic, and also a spiritual characteristic. Basically, love and creativity are the same word. You think love is love and creativity is creativity, but from a spiritual perspective, they mean the same thing. Love exists even without an object; it is a driving force. Right? Yes, of course this is how it is. When you were a teenager, where was your object of love? You only had a vague, hazy love. Love came first, and only then did the object of love appear. So love comes first; it is a driving force.

Where does it come from, exactly? No one knows. As Tang Xianzu also said: love arises without one knowing why⁴⁵. When you love someone, you actually cannot give many more reasons — it arises without knowing why, yet the feeling grows ever deeper, to the point of pledging life and death. But how it came about, it seems we do not quite know either. Yet this does not prevent you from loving; you do not need to know in order to love. Knowing that you love him is enough. As for why you love and how love came about, you do not need to know. If you did it like scientific research and wrote a paper, arguing how your love was produced and why you love so-and-so, making a thesis report and analyzing it — would that be meaningful? It would be useless.

So through love, all existence is made manifest. Love is the driving force behind it all. And you must understand that this love is love in the broad sense, not just love between men and women. Be sure to remember: each person is male or female in themselves, but from the psyche's perspective one is androgynous, and from the spiritual perspective one is neither male nor female, beyond male and female. So do not immediately think of things between men and women whenever love is mentioned. Of course, in our three-dimensional world, love between men and women is the most obvious, but love far transcends it. And love itself means the same thing as creativity.

He says desire, love, intention, belief, and purpose — these things form your body's experience, and all the time it perceives. You cannot change your beliefs without changing your body's experience. Why? Because your body is formed by your beliefs, love, intention, and purpose. Your physical body is formed by the consciousness of your cells — this is all spirit determining matter. So when your beliefs change, your physical experience, your bodily experience, changes accordingly.

You say, what does this mean, I do not understand? Then let me give a simple example: there is a girl who, from childhood, was taught by her parents and by society that sex itself is shameful, that men are all no good, and various other misconceptions about sex, forming an incorrect belief of her own — but this belief was imposed on her by others. In her life, what kind of bodily experience will she have? She is repelled by and averse to all physical contact with the opposite sex. But when she gains a correct understanding of belief, when she knows that the body's normal physiological needs are nothing shameful and nothing to be embarrassed about, that these are all very natural things, when she begins to truly change her beliefs, then her bodily sensations and her feelings toward the opposite sex become different — from the beginning, when any boy touched her she felt nauseated all over and got goosebumps, it changes into a natural, enjoyable feeling.

I only give this small example to tell you. There are others as well. For example, when you feel that your body is healthy and that you can heal yourself, the feeling in your body is completely different from when you feel that you are beyond cure. So a change in your beliefs will definitely change your bodily experience; it is impossible that your beliefs change but your bodily experience does not.

Biologically and psychologically, these two form an integrity, and great mutual give-and-take between the two is constantly occurring. Physiological things will affect the psyche — when your physical body has some truly uncomfortable sensations, psychologically you will also have some uncomfortable feelings. This is very normal.

Your thoughts are as active as your cells, and are equally important in maintaining your physical existence. Your thoughts, just like your cells, are equally important in maintaining your physical existence, and they are equally active. Your thoughts are also as much a part of nature as your cells — do not think of thoughts as something terribly complicated; thoughts are just as natural as your cells. Your thoughts also push you toward survival and growth, in the same way your cells do — cells make you survive and grow, and thoughts do the same.

If you find that your body has developed difficulties in health, you cannot say: why does my body not stop me from getting sick, and instead affirm my own wisdom? Because in the most practical terms, there is no distinction between your thoughts and your body. That is to say, when you are sick you cannot blame your body, saying, "Why did you not stop yourself from getting sick, why did you not affirm the wisdom of your body's good functioning?" The reason your body got sick is that there is a problem in your thoughts. There is no distinction between your thoughts and your body. The reason your body shows symptoms is that there is a problem in your thoughts. You have the ability to think, so do not blame your body; if you must blame something, blame where the problem lies in your own thoughts.

Your thoughts multiply just as your cells do — the original text uses the word "multiply," meaning to reproduce, to proliferate, to become more and more. Your thoughts, like your cells, constantly reproduce and constantly derive; the word "proliferate" is more appropriate here. In this sense, from this perspective, your thoughts are meant to ensure your survival, just as your body's mechanisms are as well.

This mutual give-and-take between thoughts and the body is mostly accomplished in the dream state. That is to say, your thoughts and your body's cells react to each other and communicate with each other on the dream level, where a constant transfer of information takes place.

Exercise: Creative Play

He is about to begin suggesting some exercises -- not in this session, but later on; for now he is only giving a preview. He says these exercises should be regarded as creative, energetic play. Rather than calling them exercises, it would be better to call them a kind of creative and energetic play. These games can shift your attention to those levels of experience you normally do not notice, making you familiar with your own psyche, or your own broader experience.

However, if you approach these exercises, these games, with too serious an attitude, or with deliberate intent, they will not produce the effects they are meant to produce. You should do these exercises with a playful frame of mind, and by no means do them in a rigorous, scientific, serious manner. Do not keep asking as you do them: "Oh, Mike, am I doing this right? Am I doing this exercise correctly? Fifteen minutes or twenty minutes -- does that five-minute difference matter? Is half an hour too long, or is half an hour too short?" There are no essential differences of that kind.

What he means is, do not do these exercises too earnestly or too seriously; just treat them as a game to play. They should be regarded as creative play -- you must note that he stresses this again and again: it is a game. Although they are essentially psychic in nature, they actually involve the same wholehearted, experimental mental effort that children put into their play. Although these creative games, these exercises, take place on the psychic level, they are the same as the mental creativity and effort, the concentration and improvisation, that children have when they play -- improvisation means making it up on the spot; children always improvise when they play, there is no rehearsed version in advance.

Therefore, they should not be regarded as some kind of occult achievement. Do not treat this as "Seth's exercises must be very important, must be very subtle, must be practiced diligently" -- no. You should rather see them as children's games, except that you are playing these games on the psychic level, rather than playing marbles, cops and robbers, or horse-riding battles the way children do. It is better for you to think of them that way.

They represent an attempt to rediscover the truly transparent mind. This "rediscover" refers to returning to your childhood, to discovering the truly transparent mind the way a child does. What does "truly transparent" mean? It means not carrying any of the worldly viewpoints we know from the three-dimensional world, just as the delight a child feels in play arises naturally, genuinely from within, without any utilitarian element mixed in.

Many people meditate with a very strong utilitarian motive, and the results they get are poor -- they meditate for some purpose, they meditate in order to gain something, they meditate for the sake of meditating, they cultivate for the sake of cultivating, they pursue spirituality for the sake of spirituality; the sense of purpose is too strong, and that is not good. That is not true transparency. What is truly transparent information? I simply like it; I play for the sake of playing; I do the game for the sake of doing the game; I simply enjoy the process of the game. I have no purpose at all -- happiness is my only purpose, joy is my only purpose, delight is my only purpose. Only that is called the truly transparent mind.

This is exactly what Seth means. Many people do not understand this principle; they have been practicing for a long time and remain stuck there, and the reason is that they are too serious.

And when you begin to manipulate your own consciousness, you should treat your consciousness the way a child treats a jump rope -- rolling it up, unrolling it, changing it into all kinds of patterns. Use your consciousness this way for a while, that way for a while; roll it up and use it, spread it out and use it; focus it on a certain point for a while, let it radiate outward and use it; use it on this level for a while, go use it on that level for a while. In this process, feel that truly transparent mind. Because you are playing with your own consciousness like a game, truly playing with it, that kind of attitude is the better one to have.

Dreams and the Formation of Events

Be sure to remember, he says that dreams are one source of all physical events. He emphasizes again: dreams are the source of everything that happens in your three-dimensional world. Because they provide that great creative framework—within which all possibilities can be enacted and rehearsed, and it can communicate with all inner information, and can even exchange awareness with the consciousness of other species. And from within it you select your daily reality; you choose from the dream state the reality you want and then actualize it.

Children very quickly learn from their parents that experience must be structured according to certain conventional patterns. What does "conventional patterns" mean? It means summarizing your experience according to our normal mainstream ways of thinking, and fitting it into certain artificial frameworks. What are artificial frameworks? They are the insistence on dividing things into good and evil, good and bad, right and wrong—these are all conventional patterns. A child's experience actually does not understand good and evil, does not understand right and wrong, but parents will tell the child that this thing is good, this is right, this thing is wrong, don't do it again in the future. So the child gets from the parents the idea that his life experience must be structured according to certain conventional patterns. Because parents are heaven—when you are small, parents are heaven and earth; what parents say is like what God says, absolutely true. So our framework of experience comes from our parents, and it follows conventional patterns.

Yet in their own imaginative play, during playtime, children make use of dream time. Children do not use the framework of the three-dimensional world; they use the world of dreams, or the world perceived in dreams, and at the same time they can also understand—these dream events will not be considered truly real in the actual world. They understand this themselves.

Physical play, that is, play in our real material world, is enjoyable and accompanied by a high degree of imaginative activity. Play in our three-dimensional world must involve imagination; without imagination the play is no fun. You see children playing the simplest games, like playing house: you be the nurse and I'll be the patient, you be the doctor and give me a shot, I'll pretend to be the patient; he even imagines the doll as the patient, imagines himself as the doctor, gives the doll a checkup, and will even prepare a whole set of things for seeing patients. What is this child doing? He is imagining. He takes some of his own past experiences of seeing a doctor and re-imagines them once more in the world of imagination. Both his muscles and his mind—both the body and the mind—get exercise.

It is not only the mind; the body is also being exercised. When he plays house, when he plays horse-riding and battle games, he is also running and moving. When playing cops and robbers, the running is the same as in real life—the cop chases that way, the thief runs that way, there is no essential difference. It is just that in reality, once caught you cannot run anymore and you get locked up; in a game, after it ends the next round begins, and you switch roles—I can't always be the thief; next round you be the thief and I'll be the cop. That is how games are played; you can't always play the villain while I always play the hero.

The same kind of activity takes place in children's dreams. In children's dreams it is the same; we are also exercising mentally and muscularly. So before a child physically encounters events, he is able to learn in advance how to handle them—and this involves intense dream activity. In dreams the child learns to walk, learns to run, and also learns other things—all learned in dreams.

For children, these dream events are even more real than waking events. Not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he is still so close to the emotional basis behind the events. It is not that the child does not know what is real and what is not, but that the child's experience in dreams—his emotions with the events in dreams—is very close, much closer than for us adults. When something happens in an adult's dream, we wake up and forget it; you would not grieve deeply over someone's passing in a dream—you just get up in the morning and think for a moment, "Oh, I dreamed that so-and-so passed away," and then it is gone. But a child's emotions about what happens in dreams are much more intense. Sometimes a child dreams that his pet has died, or dreams that something he loves is gone, that his doll is lost, and he cries many, many times more bitterly than an adult would.

Games, Creativity, and Dreams

The exercises I am suggesting are meant to put you in touch with the way events are formed, to let you know how events come into being. Children's games, creativity, and dreams all involve you, in the most direct way, in the birth of events. They let you actually experience how events are produced, how they take shape -- he has already laid out the theory very clearly, and now he is letting you actually experience it.

Why can you experience it? Because children's games, or exercises similar to children's games, creativity, and dreams -- these three -- can all draw you into the process by which events are born. Of course, the games you have played or observed can let you understand the kind of organization that occurs within your own experience. What organization? The organization out of which events arise.

Generally speaking, you organize events around certain emotions. Why do certain events happen in your life? Because your emotions are strong enough. These events may be combative -- what does combative mean? It means there is always a good guy and a bad guy, always a rescue and a destruction, always a winner and a loser. Watch a child playing a game, and it is always like this: first they split into two sides, sometimes deliberately dividing into good guys and bad guys -- I will play the police and you play the thief, I will play the soldiers and you play the bandits. There are also many games of capturing pieces, and later video games were the same way -- in CS you also have to capture, to rescue, and there is the prince going to rescue the princess, and so on. This whole series is always about rescuing, or about destroying -- one side has to destroy the other side before the game is over. And there is another kind, the rescue game: one person on one side voluntarily acts as a hostage for the other side and is taken away, and the other side tries every possible way to rescue that person. I think everyone has played this game too, and in the middle there is also winning and losing, which is all normal.

When we organize events, we must also put them together in this same way -- adding certain traditional patterns to structure them. Look back at the world of this lifetime, and you have been following a similar structure all along: are you standing on the side of justice or on the other side, are you going to rescue others or destroy something, do you want to be on the winning side or the losing side. All the events of your life have been structured by you in this way, and if you look at your whole life as a child's game, that is exactly what it is.

What is the biggest difference between it and a child's game? It has conditions -- that is, conditioning. Games do not have these limiting conditions, but in real life there are these conditions. Yet their essence is no different. If you add some preconditions to a child's game, it becomes more real; as the conditions become more and more complex, more and more detailed, the child's game becomes more and more real; and when the conditions reach a certain level of multiplicity, it turns into a real world.

For example, the simplest thing, doing business -- children can all do it: trade a pencil for an eraser, then trade the eraser for something else they like, trading back and forth like that, and children can do it. You could say this is the most primitive form of trade, and that is exactly how it began. But later trade had many more conditions added to it; it was no longer barter, it became trade based on currency, and now trade based on the monetary system, the financial system, and the international trade system -- these are just more conditions being added. From the most primitive exchange between two children, to adding a whole series of conditions one after another, it finally became real international trade. That is how it is.

So this is what "condition" means: before these conditions are added, it is a child's game; after they are added, it is our real life. Does that make it simpler? Yes, there is no essential difference -- the only difference is one condition, one constraint.

Children's games follow the love of play, of the body, of the imagination, playing only for the sake of playing. His translation here as "performance" is not very good; it should be "play" -- the original word is "play." But it does not matter much, because actually this is also a kind of role-playing -- the roles children play in games are also a kind of role. But his original meaning is: children play only for the sake of playing, and you could also say they perform only for the sake of performing, love only for the sake of loving, for joy, without any purpose. That is why they are willing to play the bad guy or the good guy -- I am just enjoying the process of playing the game, enjoying the role I am playing.

Why is there not so much utilitarianism? Because in the next round the two of you will switch, and I will be the police and you will be the thief -- so what does it matter. It is just like our human reincarnation: in this lifetime you are the enforcer of the law, and in the next lifetime you may be the one the law is enforced upon -- it does not matter. So before children have these limiting conditions, they love only for the sake of loving, perform only for the sake of performing, and play only for the sake of playing.

It is an activity that expands mental and physical abilities. Seeing this, parents will finally understand something: when you do not let your child play, think about what you are doing. You are stopping them from expanding their mental and physical abilities. Many parents wish that from the moment their child is even slightly aware, they could spend every day on studying, afraid the child will lose at the starting line. I want to ask you: if you are afraid they will lose at the starting line, then where is the finish line? What kind of race are you taking part in? What is the goal? You have not even figured out the finish line or the goal, yet every day you keep shouting, frightened by others, fooled by others, saying do not lose at the starting line. May I ask what race you are taking part in? You have not figured out the race, yet you are already all prepared at the starting line, not letting the child play, not letting the child be happy, not letting the child grow normally, pushing them every day to study this and study that, signing them up for all kinds of tutoring classes, as if you were so clever and so wise.

You should let your child play, let them be happy, let them go and play -- this is the most important thing. If you do not let them play, they lose an opportunity to expand their mental and physical abilities -- this is absolutely true, do not joke about it!

A study was done abroad -- not an experiment, a study. The study discovered something especially frightening: children who never played with other children when they were young -- for example, children from single-child families who also did not play much with other children -- grow up lacking a certain ability. What ability? They do not know when it is appropriate to have intimate physical contact with another person. In ordinary conversation, communication, and joking around, we know when to liven up the atmosphere, and we also know when to pat the other person on the shoulder, using simple physical contact to draw closer and make the interaction smoother -- this all comes naturally, we know it without learning it. But children who never played do not know this. They do not know when to say what, they do not know when to tell a joke and when not to tell a joke, they do not know to what extent a joke should go, how deep or how shallow; they also do not know when they can touch the other person and when they cannot, when the other person will turn hostile. They cannot grasp this measure and this timing, and you cannot teach it to them either, and they cannot learn it. So when they grow up, they will be much worse off in their contact with people and in social situations.

Therefore, not letting children play is the most foolish, the most idiotic kind of behavior.

The most satisfying events will all involve those characteristics: the expansion of mental and physical abilities. A satisfying event is always simple, always that kind of transparent joy, always without utilitarianism -- it is doing the thing for the love of doing it, not because of what you can get from doing it. Utilitarianism is something we humans added later; we imposed a whole series of conditions on the game. So a satisfying thing should be like a child's game -- do not add those conditions, do not add those limitations. Do not say, I work hard in order to earn money, and I earn money in order to support my family; you should say, I do this work because I love it, because I enjoy doing it -- that is the state of a child playing a game.

So the exercises I will suggest are a kind of game that anyone can play. This term is more fitting than "exercise": it lets you practice manipulating your imagination naturally and joyfully, just like a child playing a game -- something children are especially good at.

Ending: Jane's Inspiration

The dictation for this session ends here. The title of the next chapter will be: "Games That Anybody Can Play -- Dreams and the Formation of Events." You see, starting from Chapter Nine -- actually, starting as early as Chapter Eight -- he has been trying to tell you: How are events formed? The importance of dreams in the formation of events, the importance of creativity in the formation of events. He has been trying to make clear to us: What exactly produces the events that occur in our three-dimensional world, and how are they produced? He has already laid out the theory very clearly in the preceding sections, and now he wants to elaborate on it once more from the perspective of games, through "Games That Anybody Can Play."

There is also a little tail to this session's content. As usual, after Jane -- and I, Seth -- gave her some personal material, at 11:55, close to midnight, the session ended.

The next morning when Jane woke up, she had in her mind the title of a book, and the title was "The Journal of an American Philosopher After Death⁴⁶." She knew that this title referred to the dream about William James⁴⁷'s worldview design -- that is, the one she had previously written about in The World View of Paul Cezanne⁴⁸. At this point she wanted to write the posthumous diary of an American philosopher, writing about William James⁴⁷ after his death, and through Jane's contact with his worldview, she obtained his views on American society and politics of that time and afterward -- because he himself was also a psychologist and a philosopher, and he had his own views on various aspects of American philosophy and psychology. Although she had forgotten what the dream was, she remembered the book title.

As mentioned earlier in this manuscript, Jane had received several pages of material on James, which she included in The Politics of the Psyche. Last year Seth gave a session explaining his subjective connection with James, but did not mention that there would be a future book about James. But now Jane had already thought of the title. That morning Jane suddenly felt confident and assured. She put new printing paper into the typewriter and immediately began what was very likely to be a new book.

As she began working, Rob watched from the side, finding it very interesting, and indeed was quite pleased. Just like the Cezanne manuscript, the information this morning came especially fast -- so fast that she had to type as quickly as possible to keep up with the speed of the incoming information. The book The World View of Paul Cezanne⁴⁸ was also written this way -- just like automatic writing. She just typed and typed and typed, and the sentences formed naturally on their own.

Rob waited to see how this matter would develop, and he felt it would certainly be very interesting.

---

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia "Zhou Gong's Dream Interpretation" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%91%A8%E5%85%AC%E8%A7%A3%E6%A2%A6) ↩

2. Source: Jizang, "Dasheng Xuanlun" (https://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/zh/T1853) ↩

3. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "E = mc²" (https://www.britannica.com/science/E-mc2-equation) ↩

4. Source: "The Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Huayan Sutra)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddh%C4%81vata%E1%B9%83saka_S%C5%ABtra) ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia "Great Chiliocosm" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%A4%A7%E5%8D%83%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C) ↩

6. Source: Wikipedia "Diamond Sutra" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%87%91%E5%89%9B%E7%B6%93) ↩

7. This claim could not be verified. ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. According to Mike's original words, "the Planck length is 10 to the negative 36th power meters"; upon verification, it should be "the Planck length is approximately 1.616×10⁻³⁵ meters, that is, on the order of 10 to the negative 35th power meters, not 10 to the negative 36th power meters." (Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), "CODATA Value: Planck length," https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?plkl=) ↩

10. Source: Wikipedia "Classic of Mountains and Seas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas) ↩

11. Source: Wikipedia "The Pacific (miniseries)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pacific_(miniseries)) ↩

12. According to Mike's original words, "in the Vimana records, it can record an anti-gravity flying ship"; upon verification, it should be "the 'Vimanas' in ancient Indian epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata) are mythological flying palaces/chariots of the gods, with no technical records of anti-gravity spacecraft; the specific descriptions of such 'flying vehicles' come from the Vaimānika Śāstra, dictated by Subbaraya Shastry between 1918 and 1923, a text verified to be no earlier than 1904, and in 1974 research by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) determined that the flying vehicles described therein are aeronautically infeasible and are 'a shabby fabrication.'" (Source: H.S. Mukunda et al. (Indian Institute of Science), "A Critical Study of the Work 'Vymanika Shastra'" (Scientific Opinion, 1974), https://cgpl.iisc.ac.in/oldwebcontent/site/Portals/0/Publications/ReferedJournal/ACriticalStudyOfTheWorkVaimanikaShastra.pdf) ↩

13. This claim could not be verified. ↩

14. According to Mike's original words, "he brought alternating current into human society, and also invented radar, X-ray machines, and other things"; upon verification, it should be "Tesla's core contribution was the promotion of the alternating current (polyphase) system, but X-rays were not his invention—they were discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, for which he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901; radar was not his invention either, as practical radar was demonstrated by Robert Watson-Watt in 1935 (an earlier detection patent belonged to Hülsmeyer in 1904)." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen," https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wilhelm-Rontgen) ↩

15. According to Mike's original words, "the strings of the electron, the left string, right string, up string, down string, humans still do not know why it is like this, why these two strings must be different, why one electron in a pair must be left-string and the other must be right-string"; upon verification, it should be "the requirement that the spins of an electron pair must be opposite is not an unsolved mystery: the spins of two electrons in the same orbital must be opposite is explained by the Pauli exclusion principle, whose root is the spin-statistics theorem proved by Pauli in 1940 (the total wave function of fermions must be antisymmetric under particle exchange); and the spin anti-correlation (singlet state) exhibited by a pair of entangled electrons is a consequence of total angular momentum conservation." (Source: Wikipedia "Pauli exclusion principle," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle) ↩

16. Source: Wikipedia "Wave function collapse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse) ↩

17. According to Mike's original words, "the lifespan of a star is at least one or two hundred billion years"; upon verification, it should be "the lifespan of a star is determined by its mass and spans an enormous range: the most massive stars live only a few million years, stars like the Sun have a main-sequence lifetime of about 10 billion years, and low-mass small stars can last up to trillions of years; it is not universally 'at least one or two hundred billion years.'" (Source: Swinburne University of Technology, "COSMOS Astronomy Encyclopedia · Main Sequence Lifetime," https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/m/main+sequence+lifetime) ↩

18. Source: Wikipedia "Conversations with God" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E8%88%87%E7%A5%9E%E5%B0%8D%E8%A9%B1) ↩

19. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "anicca" (https://britannica.com/topic/anicca) ↩

20. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩²

21. This claim could not be verified. ↩

22. According to Mike's original words, "50 trillion cells"; upon verification, it should be "the total number of cells in the human body is approximately 37 trillion (3.72×10^13), not 50 trillion; another revised estimate gives about 30 trillion human cells." (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

23. Source: Wikipedia "Bibliography of Jane Roberts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Jane_Roberts) ↩ ↩²

24. Source: Jane Roberts, "Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Volume One" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/601895/dreams-evolution-and-value-fulfillment-volume-one-by-jane-roberts-notes-and-cover-art-by-robert-f-butts/) ↩

25. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book" (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nature_of_Personal_Reality.html?id=_uSztdbBToAC) ↩ ↩²

26. According to Mike's original words, "the most basic should be 13 kinds of particles"; upon verification, it should be "there are 17 kinds of elementary particles in the Standard Model: 12 fermions (6 quarks + 6 leptons) and 5 bosons (gluon, photon, W boson, Z boson, Higgs boson)." (Source: Wikipedia "Standard Model," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model) ↩

27. This claim could not be verified. ↩

28. According to Mike's original words, "the proportions of oxygen and nitrogen in the air are 72% and 78%"; upon verification, it should be "dry air by volume contains about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen (more precisely, nitrogen 78.08%, oxygen 20.95%), not oxygen 72%, nitrogen 78%." (Source: NASA, "The Atmosphere: Getting a Handle on Carbon Dioxide," https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/greenhouse-gases/the-atmosphere-getting-a-handle-on-carbon-dioxide/) ↩

29. Source: California Department of Water Resources, "Events Calendar" (https://water.ca.gov/News/Events/Events-Calendar?month=1&year=1977) ↩

30. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression" (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Jane%20Roberts%20-%20Seth%20-%20Nature%20of%20Psyche%20-%20It%27s%20Human%20Expression%20%5BOCR%5D.pdf) ↩

31. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Unknown Reality, Volume One" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/601894/the-unknown-reality-volume-one-by-jane-roberts-notes-and-cover-art-by-robert-f-butts/) ↩

32. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩²

33. According to Mike's original words, "small animals in the United States are generally adopted, with very little buying and selling. Some states, such as California, do not allow the buying and selling of small animals"; upon verification, it should be "California does not comprehensively ban pet sales; the law only prohibits pet brokers from selling or offering for adoption dogs, cats, or rabbits under one year of age, and provides exceptions for small-scale transfers by original owners, shelters, and rescue organizations." (Source: California State Legislature, "AB-519 Pet broker sales" 2025, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB519) ↩

34. Source: William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" (https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/Hamlet/read/) ↩

35. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Think Sphinx" (https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/Files/Learn/Family%20Map%20and%20Guides/Think%20Sphinx.pdf) ↩

36. Source: NASA, "Our Milky Way Galaxy: How Big is Space?" (https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/our-milky-way-galaxy-how-big-is-space/) ↩

37. According to Mike's original words, "they went extinct millions of years ago, in human terms"; upon verification, it should be "non-avian dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago, not millions of years ago." (Source: Sam Rae, Lisa Hendry, "What killed the dinosaurs?", https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dinosaur-extinction.html) ↩

38. This claim could not be verified. ↩

39. Source: Beijing Normal University, Institute of Chinese Yi Studies Culture, "A Brief Introduction to the Zhouyi" (https://yixue.bnu.edu.cn/kxyj/xzdt/51529.html) ↩

40. This claim could not be verified. ↩

41. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "Ivan Pavlov | Biography, Theory, Conditioning, Dog, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ivan-Pavlov) ↩

42. Source: Eliza Berman, "The True Story Behind Hacksaw Ridge" 2016 (https://time.com/4539373/hacksaw-ridge-movie-true-story/) ↩

43. Source: Wikipedia "Jiaozi (director)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaozi_(director)) ↩ ↩²

44. Source: CCTV News Client, "Ne Zha's total box office breaks 20 billion! Director Jiaozi creates a new record" 2025 (https://www3.xinhuanet.com/fortune/20250323/7e3fbadce296451b8f3cd0c20053ebe9/c.html) ↩

45. According to Mike's original words, "love does not know why it arises"; upon verification, it should be "the original sentence in Tang Xianzu's 'Preface to The Peony Pavilion' is 'Love does not know where it arises, but once it arises it grows ever deeper,' not 'love does not know why it arises.'" (Source: Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission website, "One Character a Day | Wang: Though there be a thousand opponents, I will go," https://m.ccdi.gov.cn/content/be/9b/24972.html) ↩

46. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James" (1978) (https://archive.org/details/afterdeathjourna0000robe) ↩

47. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "William James | Life, Books, Psychology, Contribution, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-James) ↩ ↩²

48. Source: Jane Roberts, "The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation" (1977) (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4541307M/The_world_view_of_Paul_Cezanne) ↩ ↩²