Mike's commentary · The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 20

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of 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 discusses the relationship between dreams and the physical world. The dream world is formed by group ideation, yet each dream experience is unique; in dreams, emotions and thoughts take shape instantly, becoming a preliminary stage for creation and problem-solving. A person can enter dreams with waking consciousness, opening a channel of communication between the waking state and the dream state, and making use of unconscious knowledge. The probabilities encountered in dreams, once selected, become actualized in the physical world; suggestions given before sleep can ask dreams for answers, and believing in and interpreting one's own dreams can increase their practical effectiveness.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The dream world is jointly formed by group ideas, but each dream experience is still unique.
• Thoughts and emotions in dreams take shape immediately; dreams are the preliminary stage for creation and problem-solving.
• Entering dreams with waking consciousness can open the communication channel between the waking state and the dream state, making use of unconscious knowledge.
• Events accepted as "facts" in the physical world come from the selection and concretization of possibilities in dreams.
• Asking dreams for answers before sleep, and trusting and interpreting your own dreams, can increase the practical effectiveness of dreams.

Main Text

The beginning of this chapter actually continues a small portion from the end of the last section of Chapter Nineteen. It is very short. Seth says:

Because you are physical creatures.

When he uses the word "creatures," he is referring to our physical side, the side of us that is flesh and blood. So you must understand this phrasing: when he says you are physical creatures, he simply means we have physical bodies. To put it simply, because you have physical bodies, even your dreams must be translated through the reality of the physical body. In other words, we also have physical bodies in dreams, which is quite interesting.

You collectively create physical reality through the methods I have described.

We collectively use the method he previously explained to jointly create our collective reality.

Each experience, however, is unique.

Each of us is jointly creating a collective reality, yet each person's experience is one of a kind. To put it simply, each of us created this cup, but the cup you see is not exactly the same cup as the one in someone else's world.

In the same way, each of you helps form the overall world of dreams.

Each of us jointly forms an overall dream world. We construct an overall physical world, and through group ideas we form a group reality, a group physical world; then through group ideas we also construct a world within dreams.

Within this dream world, there are some general agreements -- by agreements he means some rules, some standard, common rules. But every experience is also original, also one of a kind. Every experience in dreams is different, seemingly without any pattern at all, yet internally there is still a certain regularity among them; they follow a common procedure, an agreement.

The dream world has its own scope, just as the actual world does; our actual world also has a certain scope. In our waking world, the materialization of our beliefs -- that is, their manifestation -- requires a period of time before it becomes apparent, before it can be seen. The matter of dreams coming true, in the real world, requires time.

Of the endless probable actions, usually only one is physically experienced.

The one that comes true in our real life is only one among countless probabilities; you chose this one and let it manifest in real life, and so it became physical.

The dream world is used as a creative situation.

What is the world of our dreams for? It is also for creating. Just as in the three-dimensional world we create physical, material objects, in dreams we are also creating.

In it probable actions are instantly materialized, and presented in actual or symbolic form.

Manifestation in dreams is instantaneous, immediate. It is this kind of probability being instantly realized in the dream -- instant manifestation in the dream, instant realization, and it is either a symbol or it is real, actual, without needing to go through symbolism.

From it, however, you choose that portion which is most suitable for physical expression.

From this symbolic or actual form of presentation, you choose the portion that is most suitable, and for what? To manifest it again in the actual three-dimensional world.

There are many other important reasons for dreaming.

There are many other important reasons and purposes for dreaming -- as he mentioned earlier, for example, the function of healing, self-treatment, and so on, obtaining other information, all of these. We will not go into them for now.

Here, however, we will confine ourselves to this particular issue.

What issue? It is how manifestation occurs in dreams, and it is set upon the "dream landscape" -- landscape, just like our gardens, like our scenery; this is called landscape.

Again, because you seem to expect dream experience to be like daily life.

Because you expect the experiences in dreams to be the same as your life -- it is what you imagine; you expect them to be just like daily life.

Therefore you find so many dreams chaotic.

You find so many dreams chaotic. For example, normally a tree does not turn into a peacock. But if you remember such a dream world, then in the morning it will seem meaningless.

That is to say, in dreams you still follow some basic principles of the three-dimensional world. Although dreams appear bizarre and chaotic -- these plots, these stories -- most of the time in dreams they still follow some of the basic rules you have in the physical world. For example, a tree cannot suddenly turn into a peacock; that is the example he gives.

All right, this section is finished. Regarding Seth's earlier discussions of dreams, dream symbols, healing, dream therapy, and so on, please see Chapter Ten, Session 639 and Session 641, where he mentioned these as well.

The Fluidity of Emotion

Let us look at the next session in the book -- Session 670, Monday evening, June 13, 1973¹. He says both of them were expecting some personal material today, because Jane already knew Seth would give it to them tonight. But first she wanted some dictation for Chapter Twenty, so her delivery was quiet and steady.

Let us look at what he says.

Session 670

Your emotions and feelings have a much greater fluidity in the dream state.

These two parts, emotions and feelings, change very rapidly in dreams, because your scenes also change very rapidly -- the storylines in dreams shift quite quickly, so your feelings and emotions also change very fast in dreams. You might go from a terrifying dream straight into a joyful one, or something like that; or within a single dream, the changes in the plot can cause enormous swings in your feelings and emotions.

You may feel rooted like a tree at one moment, and in the next moment feel that you are a beautiful peacock.

When your emotions and feelings change that rapidly, under those circumstances your perception -- you will perceive that the tree has turned into a bird, into a peacock. In a dream, you can feel that the tree is about to become a bird.

Your feelings, divorced from their usual daily attraction to physical events, will often form their own landscapes, and utilize the dream as a medium of creation.

Your usual landscapes all revolve around your ordinary daily life -- your work, your career, your family, all aspects of it; your emotions all revolve around the affairs of this physical world, the material world. But when you dream, you leave behind your daily life and the events of the daytime, yet your emotions still want to form themselves into landscapes, and they use the dream as a medium of creation. The dream is a creative medium for your emotions.

I have explained the great relationship between your emotions and beliefs and physical circumstances such as the weather.

He explained earlier that your emotions and beliefs are just like the weather -- they all actually occur, they all carry their own electromagnetic reality, and they are also connected to the weather. In Chapter Eighteen he discussed this issue.

In much the same manner, in the creation of dream landscapes, you personally play a role. It is a result of your emotions and beliefs on different levels.

That is, a character in your dream is also a result of your emotions and beliefs on different levels -- detached from the level of everyday life -- on other levels.

Though it cannot be physically perceived, presented in the manner of mountains and land masses as your earth is, to be examined by your instruments, it exists in the same valid manner.

Whether it is this character or this dream, although it cannot be physically perceived -- we have no way of using an instrument to pull out a person's dream and see what they are dreaming. We can observe the fluctuations of their brainwaves, but we do not know what the actual content of their dream is; we do not yet have an instrument that can look inside and see a dream. Just as we can ordinarily observe the mountains and rivers on this earth, and examine them with instruments. But even so, in the dream it exists in a manner just as real as the mountains and rivers we see -- a valid manner, meaning a real manner.

This does not mean that dreams can be deciphered with any given (general) symbols.

He is saying that he does not mean that dreams can be decoded using some set of symbolic signs. That cannot be done, because dreams are intensely private in nature.

Just as you create and experience your daily life through your personal emotions and beliefs, the same applies to dream reality.

That is, in our waking life, we use our personal emotions and beliefs to create the world we live in, to create our reality. In dreams, you likewise create the images in your dream through your emotions and beliefs. But here beliefs do not play as large a role, because in dreams your conscious beliefs basically do not function as strongly -- at least not on the level you are aware of, although the beliefs are still operating. Remember, your conscious belief framework still functions while you are dreaming, it just escapes the level of your perception. So in dreams, it is still each person's individualized emotions that construct your dream. Therefore, those unified, general dream symbols do not apply to every person's dreams.

In dreams, however, your thoughts and feelings become "instantly" alive.

In dreams, your thoughts and feelings are instantly alive, springing up wildly like bamboo shoots after rain. Your emotions and thoughts dart around chaotically in dreams, and the result of that chaos is that your dreams are also all over the place.

And as soon as they emerge, they are already formed.

As soon as these thoughts and feelings emerge, they are already visualized, already formed; in dreams, no time is needed.

Of course, the dream world also exists in terms of energy, only within a range that is not very obvious in physical terms.

The dream itself is also a form of energy; dreams certainly exist in terms of energy. But it is not the kind of large energy changes that we can observe from the material world -- the amplitude of energy changes in dreams is very small, so our instruments have great difficulty measuring and capturing it. If it were as strong as a television signal, then we would be able to capture it with instruments and know what is being played out in the dream, right? No, it is extremely faint.

Most of your inner creative work and planning is done at this level.

Be sure to remember this. What level? The level of dreams. Most of our creative work, or our planning for the future, is accomplished at this level of dreams.

There must be some distinctions between the dream and waking experience, and this is only so that you can manipulate within the narrower focus of daily life.

There must be some distinctions between dream and waking, they must be separated. And the purpose of this distinction is simply to allow you to focus within our material world and live within it. "Manipulate" means to live. If there were no such distinction, if there were no separation between your dream and your waking world, then it would be very difficult for you to distinguish between dream and reality, because it would bring in a lot of information from other realities. Because the dream itself is not something belonging to the three-dimensional world, you would then confuse the three-dimensional world with worlds of more dimensions, and so your focus would no longer be concentrated on this three-dimensional world, which would cause you confusion.

There is no great reason, however, for the vast separation that now exists between your waking and sleeping lives.

Between your sleeping and waking, between waking and sleeping, this separation -- we treat these two worlds, after falling asleep and after waking up, as vastly separated, with not much connection between them. We only say, I had a dream last night, a nightmare, or some strange dream, and tell others about it -- that is the only relationship, nothing of practical consequence. But in fact their relationship is very great. Yet the reason this relationship is so great is precisely because it keeps our focus concentrated on our material world, preventing us from being influenced too much by other realities and thus unable to focus on the material world. There is no great reason for it -- what he means is that it is not necessarily the case that it has to be some particular way. It is simply because if there were no division, you would not be able to handle the distinction between dream and reality. That is all.

As I mentioned earlier, in (Chapter Twelve, Session 652), this separation is largely the result of your individual and collective beliefs about the nature of reality, and about the human habit of separating objective data from subjective data.

This is a result created jointly by our individual and collective beliefs. What result? That a dream is a dream and waking is waking -- sleeping is sleeping and waking is waking, and the two are very clearly divided, turned into two completely different worlds of reality. The main reason is our human habit of separating objective data from subjective data. We often do this: our subjective data are our thoughts, our ideas, our consciousness, and then we try to distinguish within them which parts are objectively existing and which are imagined. Whatever is imagined, we assign to the level of dreams, thoughts, imagination, brain activity; and we define the things of our three-dimensional world as a kind of objective data, not something arrived at through imagination, but something that objectively exists. This is a habit of us humans -- we are accustomed to distinguishing what is so-called objective existence, what is real, from what is illusory, and from childhood we stamp deep marks and labels on these things; from childhood we are taught that this is real, that is a dream, that is your imagination. Such a distinction creates a clear division between your dreaming and waking states.

Entering the Dream with Waking Consciousness

When you decide to manipulate the environment, you separate yourself from the environment.

What he says here is quite interesting. When you want to change the environment, when you have that thought of wanting to change my environment, change my current situation, then what are you doing? You have already separated yourself from the environment, and only then would you have such a thought -- that you are you, and the environment is the environment, and only then does it involve you manipulating the environment. If you regarded yourself as part of the environment, or regarded the environment as part of you, then you would not need to say things like "I am going to change the environment" or "manipulate the environment." Only when you separate yourself from the environment does such a thought arise.

Since you are part of it, this will also lead you to try to separate yourself from your subjective reality.

You separate yourself from your subjective reality, and bring your normal conscious "I" into the dream.

And it is quite possible that this is to your advantage.

That is, it is to your advantage, and it is quite possible that these are things that are part of you, brought into the dream.

When you do this, you will understand that the dreaming "I" and the waking "I" are the same one, yet operating in completely different environments.

What this passage means is this: when you want to change the environment, to manipulate the environment, you have already separated yourself from the environment. Only when you do this do you have the thought of wanting to manipulate the environment. In fact, you and the environment are originally one, but in your conscious cognition, you think that you are you and the environment is the environment -- these are two completely separate systems: you are subjective, and the environment is objective, objectively existing, while you have subjective consciousness. This is our ordinary cognition.

And when you are dreaming, he is saying: since you can separate yourself from the objective world you now live in, when you are dreaming you can also bring your present waking, daytime state of consciousness into the dream. In other words, to have that kind of lucid dream -- Seth calls this a lucid dream, or a clear dream, whatever you call it, it means that in the dream you are conscious, you know you are dreaming. You know you are having such a dream, and within the dream you are still awake; you are not like a character in the dream treating the dream as a real world -- you know this is only a dream. So the dream is also one of your environments -- that is what this passage is saying.

You then understand that you are operating in different environments: one is operating in the material world during the day, and at night when you sleep you are operating in a dream world. You are simply operating in different environments.

So you will become familiar with depths of experience and knowledge that you were not previously aware of.

Because if you dream passively, if you do not enter it consciously at all, then you are not very familiar with it. But if you are awake, if you enter the dream with the consciousness of knowing you are dreaming, then you are deeply getting to know knowledge and experience that are somewhat different from what you experience and deal with during the day -- because in the dream you are in another world, and that world is not the same as your daytime world, at least in the speed of manifestation: one manifests instantly, the other takes a period of time.

You gain a true flexibility, and a broadened awareness of your own existence.

In the dream, the flexibility is great -- whatever you want, it happens. You will discover: oh, so I can not only live in this material world during the day, I can also live in a dream world at night. So your range is expanding.

And you open the channels of communication between your waking and dreaming realities.

Because between our waking and sleeping states, for a normal person they are separated -- as he said earlier, this separation itself does not really have any practical meaning; it is just to prevent you from confusing reality and dreams. When you enter your dream consciously and with awareness, you will not confuse them; you will know you are dreaming -- this is reality, this is a dream, you are very clear. When you have such an awareness, you can bring the material from the dream into your real life, so it is equivalent to opening the channel of information between dream and reality.

This means that you can make better use of unconscious knowledge than before.

Before, you were always passive, using intuition or something on that subconscious level. But if you can dream with consciousness, then the unconscious knowledge obtained through dreams will be clearer than through your other methods.

So that the unconscious can also become aware of your present physical situation.

In that unconscious state within the dream, it can also perceive what your current situation is in this material world, so it will give you some more effective knowledge that you can use.

Such a process can bring you in contact with the wisdom that you have been denying yourself.

When you reach this state, you can come into contact with that deep, inner wisdom that you previously did not admit you had. That wisdom was inaccessible on your previous conscious level -- for example, the experience and abilities of all your past lives, which you previously thought you could not access, and you did not even think you had them. When you have this ability, you find that you are dealing with them.

And through such coordination, unify the whole situation of your life.

Use this underlying wisdom that you did not know before, that you thought you did not have, to enrich you, to coordinate and unify your present state of life.

And practical daily purposes will release your energy, and even the decision to attempt such an adventure is beneficial.

In practical life, it will release that energy of yours -- what energy? The energy you did not have before, obtained through the unconscious level. And then you also try to make some adventurous decisions. What adventurous decisions? The adventure of obtaining energy and experience from that unconscious database.

Because when you do this, you have already presupposed a flexible attitude on the part of the conscious self in this regard.

When you make such a decision, saying "I want to go and take things from the material of all my past lives," such a thought already demonstrates the attitude of your consciousness -- extremely flexible, completely no longer limited by the three-dimensional world.

If you are afraid of your dreams, then you are afraid of yourself.

Remember, many times we sometimes have frightening nightmares, or we do not dare to dream, or we are afraid of dreaming. He says you are afraid of yourself, because the dream is also yourself.

Dreams Are the Creative Garden

Just as your present situation, with all its challenges, joys, and problems, is contained in a condensed form within each of your days.

Each day of life is like a condensed version of your entire life. This also applies to your whole life.

He goes on to explain what this means. See what he says now:

Then each night's dreams provide you with a creatively rich garden, blooming before you in a profusion of flowers, in which you will find not only any problems, but also their answers.

What he means is this: your day is like a condensation of your whole life, and the things you experience in that day are like the concentrated essence of your life. In other words, let us take an example: if you were to choose one day in your life to represent you, the day that best represents you, how would you choose? You might choose the day you passed the imperial examination with flying colors, or the day of your wedding night, or the day you became indifferent to fame and fortune and attained spiritual awakening. However you choose, let us take that one day as a condensation of your entire life — it contains all the challenges, joys, and problems of your whole life. In other words, by looking at that one day of your life, we can get a rough understanding of your whole life.

The same is true of dreams at night. Nightly dreams provide you with a creative, rich garden and nursery, where many flowers, plants, and landscaped scenes are available for you to arrange and set up, and before you everything is blooming in profusion — many kinds of flowers are there for you to use and to arrange your own garden. So within this, in your dreams every night, you can not only find any problem — not only can you ask yourself why something is the way it is, why it has to be this way — you can also find the answers to these problems. Your dreams have just such a magical function.

How the Diagnosis in Dreams Reaches the Waking State

Now in physical terms, it may take some time before your conscious mind will accept or recognize this diagnosis given in the dream.

In terms of the physical world, this may take some time. Even if you have found the answer to the problem, it still takes some time before you can understand and recognize it, before your conscious mind can accept or recognize those diagnoses given in the dream -- that is, the judgments. What judgments? What kind of problem, what kind of solution -- these are all things you obtain in the dream.

It may come later in a different form, such as a hunch or a sudden intuition or the arrival of an impulsive moment.

But this diagnosis obtained in the dream cannot be immediately taken and acquired and used by your conscious mind; it needs some time. After this period of time has passed, in what way is it given to you? It is given to you in a different way -- for example, it is given to you in the form of a hunch. Suddenly you have a hunch, or there is a sudden intuition, or suddenly an impulse to go do something that you cannot hold back.

If you do not trust yourself, you may ignore this impetus, or fail to make good use of those answers.

He says if you trust yourself, you should make good use of and pay attention to those hunches, intuitions, and impulsive actions, because those are the answers to the problems you are currently facing. It gives you the answers in this way.

The enlightened conscious mind is always very alert to such information.

Once you are enlightened, your conscious mind will be very alert to these hunches, intuitions, impulsive thoughts, and impulsive actions transmitted from the dream. You will know at once that this is some inner information of mine arriving.

You can also bypass this and enter directly into the dream state itself, requesting a certain kind of dream or a solution, which can also be said to shorten the time that might otherwise have been needed.

You can also skip this and directly request to enter the dream itself again. You directly request: tonight I will have a dream, and in this dream I request an answer or a solution to a certain matter. You go to sleep carrying this intention -- you just think, I want to solve this problem, I will see in the dream how to solve it -- and you go to sleep. As a result, the dream may very well present such a matter, and the information in the dream may very well be the solution to this problem. In this way, you can shorten the time needed to solve the problem, without dragging it out too long. That is what he means.

We are now looking at Session 671 of the book, June 21, 1973, Thursday evening. The previous session may have been very short; after 9:53 it mainly dealt with some personal material they had requested. So this session is a regular one.

Since two regular sessions were missed this week -- neither Monday's nor Wednesday's session was held -- Jane decided to make up this session tonight. She wanted to maintain as much as possible the usual momentum she had on the book. It was another very hot evening, and her delivery was unhurried.

Seth said that if they wished, he could continue without interruption, for however many days, to complete the book. Because the deadline for the manuscript was approaching, he said I can hold a session every night. Jane and I had also discussed this matter earlier this evening, without taking it too seriously, because in practical terms they would not have any extra time to spare; it would be impossible to hold sessions every day. The book had to be finished by October, yet you could not keep writing until October, because in between there was still a great deal of typing, transcription, proofreading, and a whole series of other tasks to complete. It was already the end of June and the book was not yet finished, so the two of them were a little anxious. Seth's meaning was: you do not need to worry. If you want to finish this book, it is easy; I can keep writing every day, rather than only two days a week.

Session 671

Generally speaking, if you do not believe that you can become conscious in the dream state, then the corresponding event becomes impossible, because it will conflict with your ideas about reality, thereby preventing the necessary openness and acceptance.

This is what the previous session talked about: if you can bring your waking consciousness into the dream state while dreaming, that is very beneficial to you. But if you do not believe you can do it, this belief of non-acceptance will block it, and you will not realize the ability to dream lucidly. If you allow yourself to do this, you can bring consciousness in.

Your beliefs structure a large portion of your dream activity.

But this also involves other issues.

Only because the focus of your perception is not precise and oriented toward physical reality, but only vaguely concerned with it.

When you dream, the focus of your perception is not oriented toward physical reality, but it still retains a vague concern. In other words, if someone around you suddenly makes a lot of noise in your dream, or the door suddenly opens, you may be startled awake. Although your focus in the dream is on a nonphysical focus, you still maintain a thread of alertness toward physical reality, so you can sense what is happening in the outside world. For example, if your phone suddenly rings while you are dreaming, you know you are dreaming, yet you can still hear the phone ringing in the dream, ringing on and on, and that ringtone penetrates the boundary between dream and reality and drills into the dream. Quite amazing.

By the same logic, since things from reality can enter the dream, thoughts and ideas also have their own electromagnetic effects. In waking life, you test your ideas in the world of "facts" — in the physical world you test this ability that "beliefs create reality."

"Facts" are also only a kind of fiction that is accepted.

This sentence is very important. That thing we call a fact is only a kind of fiction that is accepted — we all consider it a fact, so it becomes a fact, but in essence it is a fiction. Moreover, these ideas must be reasonable, must fit the accepted story; you cannot be too wildly imaginative. So "fact" means exactly this: a story that is reasonable and acceptable to everyone — that is a fact.

The word "fiction" was deliberately used by Seth, because Rob interrupted the session specifically to ask whether this word should be used, and Seth said yes, use the word "fiction."

In the dream state you allow yourself greater freedom, within this plastic framework, to try out certain ideas and beliefs.

In dreams, many ideas and beliefs produce results directly, without the complex temporal process of the three-dimensional world. Therefore you may accept a new belief in the dream state, but your rational and emotional understanding of it only comes "later." In the dream you first try out the consequences produced by that belief — beliefs create reality not only in the physical world; the dream state is also created by your beliefs. It is just that the rational or emotional follow-up brought by this belief can only be perceived later.

In the dream state, the conscious mind itself is far more expansive and playful.

When dreaming, the conscious mind can accommodate greater freedom; its wild flights of imagination are simply incredible. We often say "ride the dream as a horse" — why ride the dream as a horse? Because dreams can gallop freely through the sky. Taking the dream as the direction of your striving, letting dreams come true — that is called riding the dream as a horse. Haizi's poem "Ride the dream as a horse, do not fail your youth²" — this poet was very spiritual; he understood this spiritual principle: dreams can guide your reality; dreams are the precursor of your real life, the rehearsal before the real physical world. You ride upon the dream and gallop, that is, you consciously and lucidly steer your dream within the dream; the dream gallops like a fine steed, and you are the rider. What a romantic image. Followed by "do not fail your youth" — when you go to realize the dream in your heart, when you run toward the world of your dreams, only then has your life not been wasted. Do not squander your time; go pursue your dreams.

Dreams have great freedom, because they do not need to test the theory in daily life. A new belief in daily life is subject to many restrictions, but in dreams there are no such restrictions. A simple example: in real life you cannot immediately break up with your husband and go live another kind of life, but in a dream you can realize this new belief and see what the consequences are afterward. In reality you face child custody, education issues, division of property and assets, how to face the eyes of relatives, friends, and society — none of these exist in the dream. The dream is your laboratory.

It is quite willing to look inward at the experiences of the inner self.

The dream is very willing to look inward. Within the inner self are the experiences of all your lifetimes, the experiences given to you by your probable selves — that is to say, all the experiences of your life are there. Then it sees what it can find for its own purposes — the conscious mind does have a purpose; riding the dream as a horse requires a goal; spurring the horse and raising the whip requires purpose. For this purpose, it goes rummaging through the inner self, picking out the experiences, abilities, wisdom, and energy that can be used. It is like an explorer searching for resources in an untamed virgin land — like Robinson Crusoe or those survival shows and movies, where you arrive in a completely unfamiliar world and must first find various resources, see whether there is drinking water, whether there is wood to build a house. Your conscious mind is like this, turning inward to search through the materials of the inner self, picking out what is useful.

The consciousness tuned in to earth must operate within the framework of time and space.

Consciousness oriented toward the physical world must accept time and space as the most basic condition; it cannot jump out of it. Only within such a framework of time and space, within the framework of the earth, can it clearly perceive events. Leaving this framework, consciousness perceives events differently. For example, in the dream state, consciousness largely ignores the relationships of time and space — largely ignores, not completely ignores. In dreams there is still a sequence of before and after; you do one thing first and another later; the time in a dream is still time. So it does not completely escape time and space, but basically it is not restricted by them.

Nevertheless, it is still firmly based upon the body's physical mechanism, so that dream events are experienced as physical.

Although dreams are nonphysical activities, they are built upon your physical body. A simple example will make this clear: if you drank a lot of beer before bed, ate barbecue skewers, and did not go to the bathroom, then in your dream you will very likely be looking for a toilet. If you find the toilet and do not wake up, then the problem is solved — and you will very likely wet the bed. Your dream and your body are not completely disconnected. In the dream you can perceive yourself running, speaking, eating, doing all sorts of things — quite physical activities. The erotic dreams of young men and women are even more vivid — these are all very physical activities, except that they are not performed by the body lying in bed. The body lying in bed did not eat, did not run, did not speak, but the you in the dream is doing these things, and it is certainly based on your body. In the dream you have a dream body, a body of the dream.

Its orientation is still toward a very vivid experience of sense data.

The feelings and conscious cognition in the dream are still a vivid experience of sensory data. In the dream you can also feel that the food is delicious and satisfying; the feeling in the dream is still oriented toward the physical senses of the three-dimensional world. Although the dream is nonphysical, it is primarily experienced through physical sensory experience.

Indeed, it is interpreted from an opaque perspective.

In most dreams, the data are still received and interpreted according to the viewpoint of bodily life, and these are also the dreams that are remembered most clearly.

In other words, although the body in the dream is in a nonphysical world, the you in the dream state is still subject to the laws of the physical world. For example, if you dream of falling off a cliff, you will truly feel that you have been killed by the fall — although in the dream you cannot die, you will truly feel it, and then wake up in fright. Or if you feel that in the dream you were stabbed, beaten up, or ran all night and are exhausted — these physical sensations will linger even after you wake up, extremely real. These dreams related to the physical senses are the ones you remember most clearly.

Beyond this level, there are experiences that are rarely recalled.

In those circumstances, your identification with the orientation of physical life has usually vanished.

The image that you think you are is built upon your own neurological structure, and upon an interpretation of it.

The self-image we think we have is built upon the neurological structure and upon the feedback and interpretation of that neurological structure. When you think of life after death, you imagine all the senses operating fully, although perhaps in a nonphysical body. You have never thought about whether after death you might be blind, deaf, unable to hear or see. Although physically speaking, after death the eyes do lose their function, when you imagine life after death, you naturally feel that you can still see, walk, hear, taste, and smell — is that not interesting?

In that regard, perception without images seems impossible.

In other words, it seems impossible for you to dream of a self without a body. But this is not absolute. Some people, during meditation or dreaming, really do dream that they have no body — that is not a kind of terror, but an extreme sense of voidness. You will dream that you are as if in outer space, with no reference points around you, pitch black, with perhaps some faint starlight in the distance. In this pitch-black cosmic space, there is only yourself, and no body, only consciousness dwelling within it. This happens occasionally. But most people in dreams do have a body; they cannot imagine how a person without a body could operate in a dream.

In certain dream situations, however, you enter a state of awareness in which you are quite divorced from that kind of sense data.

There is no such thing as being able to see or hear — you seem to become pure conscious perception, direct perception, without involving any so-called images. You have no physical image, nothing at all. Although later, for the purpose of translation, these physical images and sense data may be unconsciously created — as if you can feel, hear, and see — but all of these are created by you afterward. In the real dream you have nothing; you have lost all the sensory systems of the body.

In those circumstances, you seem to gain an understanding of your consciousness that is not at all body-oriented.

In that kind of dream, in a void of outer space, you are surrounded by vastness, not knowing where you are drifting. No body, no senses, no eyes, nose, or ears — only your consciousness there, aware. Your consciousness is very lucid, very aware, but no sensory data from the physical senses is given to you; only the consciousness itself is there. At this time, you will gain a true understanding of your pure-consciousness self. If you have not experienced this, and still experience dreams in a body-oriented way, then your understanding of your own consciousness is not yet complete enough.

In daily life, there are moments like this: you suddenly know certain things, but you do not know how you know them. You do not perceive any specific images or sensory impressions. Normally when we receive experiential data, there is always a source — someone told you, you looked up some material, or you had a dream, or you had an intuition or inspiration, and there was a picture in your brain. But occasionally there are those rare moments when you suddenly know something, without any sensory stimulation or images, and you just know — the knowledge is simply there.

This activity is akin to the knowing of your own consciousness.

What is that knowledge, what is that activity, what is that feeling — it is when you suddenly realize something, and you cannot explain or articulate how you knew it. You did not arrive at it through thinking, not through seeing with your eyes, not through calculating formulas — none of that; you just suddenly knew it. That knowledge just lay there, stood there, existed there, and with a thud it arrived in your brain.

This activity, this perception, this experience, is the way your consciousness knows. If you want to know how your consciousness understands things, how it cognizes this world — this is how your consciousness cognizes the world. It does not need to rely on the outer senses. You must remember this; it is meant to overturn you. Since childhood you have believed that consciousness exists because you can see, hear, and interact with the outside world — wrong. Think in reverse: you do not need these things; consciousness can still perceive. Many students have left messages in the group saying that they often have this kind of dream of drifting in void space — this kind of knowing is the true way our consciousness perceives things.

This was discussed in The "Unknown" Reality, also in Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, and in the early sessions as well. The way we currently receive knowledge and learn is a very rudimentary method. When we enter true pure-consciousness communication, it does not need to use the outer senses as a medium. Seth once gave an example, saying that this kind of consciousness communication is like blocks of knowledge — like memory chips or storage devices on a computer. Now a 512G storage chip on a computer, the size of a fingernail, "clunk" — it is embedded into your brain, and all the knowledge in it, all of humanity's knowledge, enters your brain. I use this vivid example so you can understand that pure-consciousness communication takes place on a higher and deeper level.

Right now we study the Seth material, do spiritual exploration and research, meditate, enter higher states, and see all kinds of things in the meditative world — if you think carefully, all of this still relies on the body's perceptual system to perceive. Although you have arrived at a world that does not require physical perception, you are still pretending to use the body's perceptual system to gain experience. But the true next step is that you do not even need this; through consciousness you communicate directly. That is the way your consciousness "knows" — your consciousness simply knows, without any sensory stimulation, without listening, speaking, reading, writing, seeing with eyes, or speaking with mouth. It refers to your consciousness; your consciousness just knows.

In certain kinds of dream states, then, you know in the same way.

In some dreams, you experience the existence of a self that is not united with the body — you still exist even when not united with your physical body; your existence is not based on the body. The knowledge you gain is gained instantaneously. This is why some people have a dream and wake up suddenly able to speak several foreign languages — these things are all learned at the level of consciousness with a "bang."

That kind of dream awareness truly refreshes your life.

You must underline this sentence. Lucid dreams, directing the dream self to do this or that in the dream — that is only the initial, elementary stage. Beyond that level, when there is no body, no perception, no physical sensory stimulation, and you can still perceive the existence of consciousness — only a dream like that can truly refresh your life, can truly recharge you.

But most of these dreams you cannot remember.

Although the initial impact will be forgotten.

What is the impact? It is the sudden loss of physical perception, no senses, no body, only conscious awareness, and consciousness communication is the most direct. The impact at that time is enormous — you will suddenly have a feeling of comprehending all things in the world, as if the knowledge of all things in the world suddenly entered your conscious level, as if you connected with the universe's knowledge base, like the WiFi password was correct and you connected to the universe's network, instantly understanding all the knowledge of the universe. But this initial impact is usually forgotten.

This kind of dream is very difficult to bring back to the waking world. Before waking, the entire event is usually translated into images — a picture, an experience, a story, a bodily sensation. Actually none of these existed, but without translating it, your waking consciousness cannot understand it. Although your consciousness can directly understand at that level, the conscious waking mind truly cannot comprehend that feeling, so it must translate it.

This kind of dream event can be called an experience of basic existence.

The most basic experience of existence is not needing the body, not needing images, not needing any sensory system — neither the outer senses nor the inner senses are needed; you simply know.

In these dreams, then, the self or consciousness literally travels to its own source of energy.

Your consciousness returns to its old home. At this time it goes back to its old home — the source of energy is the old home. When you have such dreams, you can obtain that recharging energy; the capacity for renewal of body, mind, and spirit is extremely strong.

At another level, atoms also possess such a kind of knowing.

The atom itself is also a kind of consciousness. According to Seth's theory, atoms are ultimately composed of EE units, and below EE units are units of consciousness. The atom has its own consciousness, and it also knows where its own source of energy is. You all share one old home; it is all that source of energy of consciousness.

This understanding may seem to have little to do with your daily life, especially because these dreams are rarely recalled, and even when recalled, only in translated form. But they can provide you with extra energy — you must remember this. When you truly encounter difficulties and problems in the three-dimensional world that cannot be solved and you need more energy, you enter this kind of dream state. It will give you extra energy, far beyond your imagination. Seth here is essentially opening a back door in the game for you — when you need extra energy, you can go here to look for it and recharge. This energy is far stronger than the self-healing methods he mentioned earlier.

Those truly enlightened monks and great masters, when they enter deep meditation, are often constantly in this state, which is why they can go days and nights without eating or drinking. The magnitude of this energy is beyond our imagination. Many practitioners, people who practice sitting meditation, and followers of various religions all want to enter this pure-consciousness state. Only when you arrive here can you understand what the Buddha said: all appearances are illusory; if you see that appearances are not appearances, you see the Tathagata³. All appearances are gone; even your own image, the images in dreams, the dharma appearances are all gone; only consciousness remains there, aware — only then do you see the Tathagata. This is exactly what Seth is saying in this passage.

In periods of stress, the consciousness tuned in to the body will often momentarily abandon its usual orientation and let itself fall back into its own existence — the source of existence, where it knows it will be refreshed, and can literally be reborn.

What does this mean? When a person is in extreme difficulty, danger, tremendous physical pain and torment, and cannot escape, when the pain reaches its peak, he will instead stop feeling pain. If you have asked all the people who have frozen to death, or people who died in extreme circumstances and were resuscitated, they will all tell you that in those extreme circumstances there was no pain at all. But the earlier part was very painful. Before freezing to death, the extreme cold and that pain are very hard to bear, and then it will feel extremely hot. After the pain reaches its peak, he begins to feel heat — this is consciousness helping you. When you cannot fight that kind of cold, it makes you feel hot all over. No matter how cold the outside is, even if the body has frozen into a block of ice, it makes the consciousness feel hot. So people who truly freeze to death have smiles on their faces; you will see this recorded in historical materials. They are not curled up and shivering as you might imagine; they are very calm, smiling, with their clothes open, in a very natural state, but their bodies have already died. When a person is in extreme danger, he will enter this state.

"Periods of stress" — it is not stated so directly. A typical example is that people can be scared to death — when encountering something especially terrifying, a person's first reaction is to faint directly from fright. Fainting from fright is entering this state. When fear cannot be processed, your consciousness is very clever; it directly makes you go into shock, finding a place to recharge itself. After recharging, after a while you recover on your own and can wake up, allowing yourself to be reborn and come back. You do not need to worry; you will not die.

At 9:40, Jane said that in the afternoon, while writing her own theoretical book The Psychology of the Inner Self, she had also used that sentence just now — that facts are only a kind of accepted fiction.

What Seth says next:

When you are connected with the physical body, you must interpret experience in sensory terms, even those experiences in the dream state.

Sometimes your consciousness can wander into other regions, but those events must afterward be translated into physical terms in some way.

In your waking life, you perceive only that portion of events that falls within the space-time continuum.

When we are awake, we can only perceive that portion of the complete reality that intrudes into the three-dimensional space-time continuum. The larger portion of reality, the part that has not entered the three-dimensional world, is unknown to us. Because we perceive with the physical senses. But in dreams, you may have a larger glimpse of events — you can see the existence of that portion of the nonphysical world.

In dreams you may see the past, present, and future of an object that in your time must occupy a certain space.

For example, a tree, from a small sapling growing into a towering tree, and finally aging, withering, falling, and dying — the whole process. In our world, it can only exist in one state at the same moment: either a small tree, or a towering tree, or fallen and withered. You cannot see all states existing simultaneously. But in a dream you can see it — when you see this tree, you see its entirety; the whole process from sapling to final death is perceived by you at this single point in the present. Many people, after opening the inner senses, use the first inner sense to observe a tree, and they really can perceive the tree's present, past, and future. This completely transcends our cognition of time and space.

Often such a dream will be considered meaningless.

Because you cannot see what it is trying to convey. For example, seeing an apple from its growth to its withering and rotting means nothing to you. At our so-called level of "facts" — do not forget the definition of fact given earlier; a fact is only a kind of accepted fiction — we believe that the past, present, and future appearances of an object cannot appear in the same space at the same time. Such dreams therefore seem meaningless to us.

Nevertheless, the space is not the same, nor is it identical; it only appears so to you.

What does this mean? For example, there is a space on your desk, and right now a computer is placed there. You think this space is this space; today it is like this, tomorrow it is still like this, and after several years it is still like this. Maybe the desk is gone and replaced by another desk, and the house may also be remodeled. But if we fix the coordinates, this space will always be this space to you. This is our cognition of space.

But when examined from a higher dimension, from a higher perspective, all spaces overlap. The space of this second and the space of the next second are already two spaces. Although you feel they are still one space and have not changed, from a higher perspective they are two different spaces overlapping. Only when you understand this can you understand why there are so many probable worlds in this world. Why the you in fifth grade of elementary school is still in fifth grade, getting up every morning and carrying a schoolbag to school — it has neither disappeared, nor been completed, nor is it the past; it is still there right now. Because in that space, it still exists effectively. You think that has already passed.

In other words, a tree from a small sapling growing into a towering tree and finally withering and falling may take a hundred years. During these hundred years, the spatial position occupied by this tree — you think it is a fixed space, and you simply see the tree in this fixed space going from small to large, from flourishing to declining. You think the space has not changed; only the tree is changing. This is our cognition. But from a higher dimension, space is changing — the space of the small tree is the space of the small tree; the space of the towering tree is the space of the towering tree; the space where the tree falls is the space where the tree falls. They are not one space; they are entirely two spaces. In the space of the small tree, the small tree is still thriving and growing. It does not cease to exist just because the big tree has died and another tree has been planted in that space. This tree will exist forever; every day and every moment of its existence will exist forever, and will not disappear with time and history.

If you think of time as photographs — take a picture of this tree every second, and after a hundred years there are thousands, hundreds of millions of photographs; when played back, each photograph is a frozen slice of time. In that frozen slice of time, the tree is still alive; it lives in that photograph. If this photograph is digital and stored in the great memory bank of the universe, then it exists forever; once produced, it is never erased. This is the problem that humanity cannot understand from the perspective of time and space, and it is also the fundamental reason we have been unable to study the truth of the world. Our cognition of time and space is too self-assured, too dominated by what our eyes see and what we perceive, and we dare not consider it from another angle. Seth has been telling us what the truth of the world looks like.

Regarding time, if you find it hard to understand, I suggest you look at Bashar's explanation of time. Bashar's explanation is more like physics, more like a science and engineering guy explaining time to you, very straightforward; Seth goes further and is more thorough. But you need to understand that they are saying the same thing.

Now that you have thought about this, you can understand what Chapter 14 began to say -- which world, which you, your past has not disappeared, it still exists, and you can still go back and change your history, change your past. Precisely because it has always been there. But if it exists like a photograph, how do I change it? Do not forget, what I said is only the most basic situation, and the actual situation is even more complex than this. Because at every point in time and space, there are still many kinds of possibilities existing. This point in time and space is not just one photograph, but photographs of many kinds of possibilities all exist. For example, in this photograph the tree has a bird's nest, and in another one it does not. The one with the bird's nest is a fact, and the one without the bird's nest is also a fact. If you want to choose the one with the bird's nest, then every photograph after it has a bird's nest; if you choose the one without the bird's nest, then the whole series after it does not. This becomes two sets of photographs, and in fact there are many sets.

What is meant by changing the past, changing history, is this: from those versions of historical possibility in the past, choose one that you hope for, one that you want, and bring it into your memory. You use your present beliefs to perceive a new version of history. It will directly cause reactions in your body, reactions in your cells, and the physical body's perception changes directly. Such a change in memory has already caused a change in the physical body, which is equivalent to the fact itself changing. If a bodily event causes a change in the physical body, can we then determine that event to be a fact? If through a change in belief you choose a different version of the past, causing the body to produce correspondingly different changes, can we equivalently say that you have changed history? And in truth, it is not that you changed history; you merely chose one version you wanted to manifest from among the different possibilities of history. The one you did not choose is still there continuing to exist; you did not change it, you only chose one possibility.

Let us return to the question of space. The explanation and cognition of space makes it very easy for us to understand this matter from another angle. Every space is different. Since spaces are different, every space is not the same, so when you open the inner senses and look at a tree, look at this space, what you see is not the tree of the present moment, but an overlapping of all the spaces of this tree. You think the tree's life from birth to death is completed within this time and space, but actually it is different times and spaces overlapping together.

The world we live in now is a multiverse. This term is well chosen -- multiverse, where "multi" means overlapping. If you have seen that American TV series Devs, in it he could not achieve the ability to predict at first, and later used an algorithmic theoretical framework of multi-wars, and once he plugged it in, he completely realized accurate prediction and the process of reproducing history. All right, let us not go too far afield.

We now perceive only this one space of the present, but actually our spaces are overlapping together -- all the things that happen in this space of ours are still happening at the same time. For example, the house you now live in may have been an old residence from the Qing dynasty; that residence is no longer there, but the place is still there, perhaps turned into high-rise buildings, yet that old Qing dynasty residence still exists, and the people inside are still living inside it. He shares this space with you -- you think it is sharing, but actually you live in different times and spaces, different worlds. From the perspective of the three-dimensional world, they occupy a three-dimensional space, but actually they overlap. It is easier to understand with television channels: a thin television set hangs on the wall, just this much space, but inside it can show stories from several hundred channels, several hundred lives, several hundred plots, all on the same screen. You only need to switch the channel, because their frequencies are different, their times and spaces are different, their stories are different, their characters are different, but they all happen on this area of your wall. If you understand time and space from this angle, you can better understand many of Seth's theories.

Space itself accelerates in ways you do not understand.

Space is not static; it is in motion. If space is layered one upon another, and space is in motion, that is why you have the feeling of time. And you are merely aligned with those frequencies -- you are aligned only with this time-space world of yours, and you cannot perceive the other spaces at all; to you they do not exist at all. Space itself is accelerating in motion, in ways you do not understand. He did not expand on this sentence, because at this level of understanding, some people may already have reached the limit of their wisdom. You cannot imagine what the motion of space looks like -- what concept is it for the space of your three-dimensional world to move as a whole? He said you have not aligned with those frequencies, meaning you have aligned with only one frequency and cannot align with the frequencies of those other spaces.

At any point in space is also a point in what you think of as time.

That is the door you have not yet learned to open.

What does this mean? Let us use the example of the tree again. The place where this tree is, the story of these one hundred years -- from seed to growth to withering -- let us imagine it as one hundred photographs overlapping here, or one hundred spaces overlapping here. But for you in the present, it is just one space. Within this one space is contained one hundred years of time, contained the entire process of the tree from seed to towering great tree to final crashing fall. Therefore, at any point in the space as we know it, there is actually infinite time contained within it. If we had the ability to separate this overlapping space like turning the pages of a book -- this page is this slice of space -- then we could directly choose one space to enter, and enter the space of that point in time. So the relationship between space and time goes far beyond what we can understand.

Seth mentioned one sentence here: any point in our space, if you enter it, it is a point in time. Is the space before you now the sum of the overlapping spaces of everything that has happened in this small patch of ground since the birth of the earth? It is all before you, but not chaotically mixed together, rather each slice separate and independent. What Seth meant by the acceleration of space refers to the motion among these spaces. We do not need to expand on this; today is not a physics lecture, nor a lecture on a brief history of time; we are only doing popular science on Seth's books.

I just want you to understand: the space before you can be imagined as being like a book, from the ancient beginning of heaven and earth to today, all happening within this one patch of space. Every page is a historical period. You think it has ended, died, vanished, passed -- no. It is in your space, right before you, only you do not have the ability to enter and open it. You do not know how to open it. If you knew how to open it, it would spread open before you like a book, and if you wanted to return to any year, return to the age of dinosaurs, you could directly enter it -- right in the space before you. Is that not what traveling through time and space is? With a snap, you enter it.

So he says, right in this space before us is the overlapping of everything that has happened in all past time upon this space. Any point in space -- if you enter any page of this overlapping -- entering it represents a time. With this description, I hope you understand that the relationship between time and space is so different from what we imagine. After understanding it, you will suddenly realize: so this is what Seth meant when he said time is simultaneous; so this is what he meant when he said past, present, and future are all in this present moment. That is how it is. And if you have not yet become enlightened, have not entered a higher degree of spiritual wisdom, and have not learned the method to open it, what you see is only the present appearance.

In much the same way, your brain is a portal.

After discussing time and space, he comes back to talk about your brain. Your brain is also something similar.

It can trigger mental activity.

The brain can trigger your thinking, thoughts, and mental activity.

Your beliefs must then take a large part of the responsibility for the areas of the brain that you activate, and for the resulting nonphysical activity of the mind.

Your brain is a portal, an open thing, and it triggers your mental activity. Your beliefs must take responsibility for the areas of the brain that you activate -- the brain has many areas, and when you use the physical, material areas of the brain, they cause mental activity, and mental activity is nonphysical, nonmaterial activity. If you think of the brain as a space, this brain space is also overlapping. The mental activity produced by a certain area of the brain is endlessly varied, but to you it seems as though after this area produces one mental activity, you think of something new, and the old thought disappears; you think it has disappeared -- because on the material level a new thought has arisen.

But Seth tells you here: no. Your brain is like this space, like this principle of time and space. The thought you think has disappeared merely exists in another of your material realities in another nonmaterial time-space manner. This is what he said earlier: your every thought is a world, every thought is a reality. Can you understand it now? Why it is said that every thought is a reality, every thought is a world of possibility -- this is what it means.

Your beliefs must take a large part of the responsibility for the mental activity that a particular area of your brain initiates.

What does it mean to take responsibility? It means you have to manage it. Once that thought arises, it must continue along the line of that thought, and it will continue to develop in that world of possibility. For example, in your thoughts you think, "Should I get back together with my first love" -- this is just a thought. After thinking it, you feel, "What nonsense am I thinking, how could that be possible," and the matter passes. But in another space of possibility within your brain, it continues to play out according to the matter of you getting back together with him.

How does this playing out proceed? It still proceeds according to the manner of your belief system -- that is, according to your ordinary values, worldview, and outlook on life. So you must take responsibility for that thought, and what takes responsibility is your belief system. Now you know how important your belief system is. Why change your belief system? It is not only about changing the past; it has an influence on all your future matters. When in the future you want to look back and choose from the possibilities of the past the ones you want, and manifest them, it is selected from those possibilities by the thought you had at that time and the direction in which that thought developed according to the structure of your thought at that time. If you simply never had that kind of thought, never had that kind of belief system, then it would be impossible to choose it.

Let me give a simple example. You want to get back together with your ex -- you just think about it once, but you do not manage it, and you continue developing things with your current partner, and the matter passes with just that casual thought. All right, let us branch the story into two paths and tell each separately. In that possibility of getting back together with your ex, you go to him to reconcile, and the ex says, "How could that be possible, I already have a girlfriend now," and so on and so forth -- is the development and unfolding of this storyline proceeding according to your present belief system? Yes.

Suppose this matter of wanting to get back together with him ultimately succeeds, and the two of you really do get back together. But the life the two of you live is built upon your beliefs about him. If your belief about him is: this ex is a very bad person, often two-timing, cheating -- then I think even if you get back together, before long you will probably break up again for the same reason as when you broke up back then. In that possibility, you only get back together briefly, and ultimately break up again, and do not end up together.

One day when you are old, you want to go back and change history, change this possibility of getting back together with him, and you will discover: there is no possibility of the two of you growing old together. There is only a brief period of getting back together, and in the end you part ways again. In that storyline, the screenwriter's ending has no plot of growing old together. When you are old and want to manifest that plot, it cannot be manifested, because it simply does not exist. This is the importance of the belief system. Why is it said that your present beliefs can change the past and also change the future? It is right here. It influences both forward and backward. If your present belief system feels that the ex is very good, that losing him was your mistake, and then you get back together with him -- after getting back together you will discover that actually all his cheating...

The Meeting of Dream Reality and the Physical World

Let's continue with what Seth says.

The physical focus is the material focus. Our focus on the three-dimensional world provides us with a spectacular, concentrated, and specialized reality -- a physical reality. Yet without dream activity, you would be relatively shut up inside it.

We are shut up inside a physical reality, shut up inside our three-dimensional world. But dreams are different. When faced with a physical reality that seems so solid -- that is, our three-dimensional world -- dreams are what bring us out of the three-dimensional world, so that we do not have to focus only on this physical world within such a narrow range of conscious focus. It allows you to appreciate that, beyond the physical world (the physical world itself is of course vast and spectacular), there is an even vaster, more open world -- the existence of a nonphysical world, giving you more new attempts and realizations.

Dreams provide you with a preliminary stage in which a basic hypothesis can be creatively formed, and then tested in a playful manner to see whether it holds up or not.

This basic hypothesis means that in dreams there can be new basic hypotheses, and then you test in a playful manner whether they hold up or not.

The dreams you have recalled, and the solutions to many problems they have triggered, still represent only the surface of the surface activity of dreams.

That is, the dreams you can remember, and the solutions to problems in your waking life, are still only at the surface level.

Following yourself into your dreams is a fascinating thing.

"Following yourself" means that you try as much as possible to enter your dreams consciously. In this session he is having you enter a kind of conscious dream, to dream consciously. Only within the scope of dreams, within the dream world, can you become aware of the workings of your own consciousness. What does that mean? It means that in dreams you can discover that belief creates reality so simply -- in dreams it is realized instantly. In this way, you gain a deeper understanding of how belief creates reality in the three-dimensional world.

Before doing so, you must believe in the soundness of your own existence.

What does "doing so" mean? It means that when you consciously enter your own dreams -- when you do that kind of conscious dream, a lucid dream -- you must make this preparation: you must believe in the soundness of your own existence. You must have a complete recognition of the soundness of your present existence. If you do not trust your waking self -- that is, if you do not even believe in yourself when you are awake -- then you will not believe in or trust the self that dreams.

Is your recognition of yourself sound and complete enough? What kind of recognition do you have of your waking self in the present moment? If your recognition of yourself is somewhat vague, somewhat uncertain, then in dreams you will be even less clear about who you are, and you will not believe in yourself.

And your dream landscape will also appear threatening to you.

Be sure to remember this. So when you want to consciously bring your awareness into the dream state, you must make a mental preparation. What preparation? Your recognition of yourself must be very clear and complete. In other words, your spiritual level must be sufficiently prepared. If you do not have the preparation of relevant spiritual knowledge, when you rashly bring your awareness into dreams, you will feel afraid, and the dream scenes will be threatening to you.

What does that mean? Because in the dream state, your beliefs create reality, and everything in the dream is realized instantly, immediately. The moment your belief shifts, your dream environment shifts along with it. And at this time, if you do not have a complete grasp of yourself and your beliefs, if you do not know why these things appear -- which is to say, if you do not recognize your own beliefs, if you do not understand your own consciousness and beliefs -- if you do not understand why these symbolic things appear, if you do not understand how the environment around you (I mean the dream environment) is created according to your own beliefs, you will be very afraid. Because that scene is completely unfamiliar to you, and you do not know where it came from.

It is not like the three-dimensional world, which has a very slow process of change for you. The changes in your three-dimensional environment are not that fast, not that rapid, and not that sudden. Even if your beliefs in the three-dimensional world change, the changes in your surrounding environment still take a process of time, and you have a process of adaptation. But in dreams there is almost no process of adaptation -- the moment your belief changes, the environment changes. And in the dream, you still have intense feelings about the dream environment, and those feelings are not only psychic but also physical.

For example, if in the dream you yourself have fear, or if your fear itself is still very strong, this deep fear of yours will create content in the dream -- scenes and events that frighten you, or demons, animals, or scenes, and it may even conjure up placing you on a towering building, placing you at the edge of the building. In that situation, it would be utterly horrifying and terrifying for you. Why? Because the fear in your heart has not been eliminated. In your unaware dream, this underlying fear will directly conjure up frightening environments and scenes. So at this time you need to have a very good spiritual preparation and foundation before you enter this lucid dream, before you enter it with awareness; otherwise it will be threatening to you.

Your belief that dreams are unpleasant will also make them so.

That is, it really will be so -- if you think dreams are all nightmares, that nothing good ever comes of them, then dreams will really be like that.

Or at best you will only remember the frightening dream world.

At best you will only remember how terrifying, how terrifying the dream was, and it will be of no help to you at all. What does "no help" mean? You did not use it as a preliminary stage, and then take some of the things you want to practice in waking life and rehearse them first in dreams, forming a basic hypothesis to see whether it works or not. This function did not serve you at all; you just got scared in the dream and came back.

If, however, you believe you do not dream, you will suppress the memory of them.

Sometimes people say, "I believe I never dream." You will suppress the memory of dreams. But you still dream; you just do not remember. Those rich experiences will, because of your belief -- your belief that you do not dream -- not be remembered, and will not become part of your conscious life. Because they are not brought into your memory, they cannot possibly have any influence on your conscious life. Because you did not remember them. This is the key -- belief. If you think you cannot remember them, you cannot remember them; if you think there are no dreams, there are no dreams.

Your dreams are as private as your waking life.

Be sure to remember this: they are all personal. Each person is independent, entirely personal, and very private.

There is also a mass waking experience, and a mass dreaming experience.

That is, when we are awake there is a group experience, and when we dream there is also a group experience. Within this group experience, each person finds his or her own role, and accepts and rejects events -- one can accept or reject an event, and this is a collective decision. So in dreams you will encounter other people; other people and events are all the same, and this is all accomplished through the group dream experience.

In your terms, at any given "time," humanity is simultaneously solving problems in the dream state, and only afterward are those solutions physically materialized.

For us in the three-dimensional world, at any given time, we are simultaneously solving some problems in the dream state. When he says "simultaneously," it means instantly -- in dreams these problems are solved in an instant -- not all of them, but a portion of them are solved. The answers to these problems take a period of time before they can manifest in waking life, in the physical process. In dreams we have an experience of solving problems, but this experience requires time to manifest in waking life.

In the dream state, because you are relatively free of the limitations of time and space, you have a larger overall perspective.

You are not bound by time and space; you can fly around, you can travel through different time periods, stories from different historical times can be enacted together, and you have a larger overall perspective.

Many solutions that appear quite poor when activated at close range will be seen as highly creative at a greater distance.

This "close range" refers not only to physical distance in the material sense, but also to distance in time. From your present physical life, what you can see is only the present, perhaps the next few weeks, at most the next few months; anything farther than that you may not be able to see clearly. But in dreams you can view a broader span of time from a higher vantage point -- you can see what happens across a span of three years, five years, ten years. So it is not limited by this kind of distance, and therefore has a larger overall perspective.

That is, in the present you make some decisions and do some things; if viewed from the perspective of the present, these decisions may seem foolish, stupid, even baffling. But when you view them from a longer span of time, these decisions are very wise, very meaningful, and even highly creative. So it depends on the breadth and height of your perspective. If you stand at a higher vantage point, you can know what the present decision means from that higher perspective, rather than judging it from the short-sighted view of the immediate moment.

In both private and mass terms, then, humanity uses the dream world as a preliminary arena of activity. And the "facts" that are physically accepted in your world of true and false all come from these "imaginary" realities and probable dream events.

What he means is very simple: whether it is our real world, or the world we consider to be real, it is actually a kind of fictional world. His wording is rather convoluted -- whether it is the real, the truly real, or the fictional real, no matter which kind of real, they all come from these dream fantasies, from these dream fantasies and the dream world.

So if you want to realize something, you can first construct it in dreams. This is why he has you do this kind of lucid dreaming, why he has you dream with awareness. The dreams you have now are passive; you cannot control the events and characters in the dream, and you have no control over what happens. A so-called lucid dream means that before sleep you consciously say: "Today I want to solve a certain problem in my waking life." You enter the dreamland with this kind of suggestion. Once in the dreamland you say: "I am in, I am conscious, I know I am dreaming." At this point the background and scenes of your story begin to unfold. Then you consciously direct the dream you: "Now let me go and try reconciling with him and see what happens. I will go find him." At this point you walk up to your ex and say: "What do you think about us getting back together?" But all of this is under your direction, under your suggestion; you direct the characters in your dream to do these things, so you can see how the other party reacts, how the other party responds.

As he said earlier, the other party's reaction is jointly determined by a group dream consciousness. In other words, the group consciousness determines how the other party responds, just as the group consciousness determines how other people respond to what you do in the three-dimensional world -- it is all determined by a shared collective consciousness, the same principle. It is the same in dreams. So in dreams you can test whether this possibility works or not. I give this example precisely to show you such a thing.

So, whether individual or mass, it is the same.

Not only for individuals -- an organization, a team, a group can all make use of this.

Probable events experienced in dreams are quite "legitimate" in other areas of reality.

Those probable events we experience in dreams are, for us in waking life, events that did not happen. He says that in other realities, in other times and spaces, they are quite legitimate, very effective, and actually happen.

But in your world they become invalid.

Because they did not happen in our world; they are only a kind of dream event, a dream experience. And when similar events physically materialize in your world, they become real. When they are valid in other worlds, for us they are invalid and illusory; but when these events do not materialize in other times and spaces, and materialize in our world instead, then they become dreams come true. This is also the purpose of our manifestation.

A new paragraph.

First of all, your wars are fought and won or lost in the world of dreams.

He puts forward another startling theory: your wars have their outcomes decided in dreams.

And the actual physical enactment of your history only follows one particular thin line of probabilities.

"Thin line" means that if war is a very grand situation, the war we experience in actual life, in reality, is only one branch of it, only one branch of the entire grand war. And the outcome of the war has already been decided in dreams.

For you, a certain war was won or lost by one side or the other.

For us personally, a certain war was won or lost by one side or the other. And your "stinginess" with events -- that is, we have only one possible understanding of events. For example, a battle can only have one definite result: one side won, or the other side lost.

There will also be certain hard facts.

Of course. On that day, for example, a battle took place in a certain location, a certain number of people participated, in the end who won, how many died, how many were wounded, and afterward there would be the signing of various historical treaties, all kinds of photographs and materials, and even graveyards, historical relics, and war museums, all proving that this event happened.

But in a broader terms, it has a much larger event that quite transcends your concepts of the time and place involved, and you only perceive a small portion or a corner of it.

He says that from a higher perspective, the war you are now experiencing is only one corner, or a small portion, of an even grander event, or an event whose involved time and place are far broader than what you now understand. But for you it may just seem like a very large war.

So the war we experience is only a small part of our dream war; the larger war has already been fully played out in our dreams. That war is larger, but in waking life we have only chosen a very small possibility, a very small direction, to actualize and manifest it. The other vast wars in other times and spaces are even grander, and we have only chosen a part, a very small part.

It can be said that the initial battles take place on the dream level, and then through private and mass levels, humanity decides which portions of events will be actualized in physical terms.

The earliest wars all take place in dreams; through individual and collective levels, humanity then decides which events will become real in waking life and manifest them.

Yet even among those accepted results that are actualized, the obvious winner is often the loser.

Be sure to remember this; his words here are deeply meaningful and full of hidden implications. In the results we all accept, we think this person won, and so on; this is what we think -- that this person is the winner. But he says that perhaps on the other side of this reality -- that is, the dream side -- this person may have only won a local war, or a victory in a certain battle. But in the entire battlefield, in the entire campaign, he actually lost. He won one battle, but he did not win in the end. But in our three-dimensional world, we only see a local part of this war; we do not know how it played out afterward.

This is very interesting. It is equivalent to saying that the entire campaign in our dreams is very grand, and in reality we have only taken a small part of it and manifested it.

The entire event transcends any judgment of true and false.

Do not tell me what is true and what is false; it has already transcended that. He said at the very beginning that facts are fictional, and the fiction you can accept is fact. If this fact can be accepted by everyone -- we made up a story, and this story can be accepted by everyone -- then it is fact. So this event itself has already transcended any judgment of true and false.

Because at this point many people will ask: "Which one is real and which one is fake? For example, did Japan actually attack Pearl Harbor? Was it bombed by the Americans themselves, or was it really bombed by the Japanese?" And so on. This is a judgment of true and false; it has already transcended this question. Do not ask this kind of question anymore.

An entire event with all of its probabilities obviously cannot fit into your present frame of reference.

What does he mean? From the beginning of this war, the course of the war had thousands upon thousands of possibilities. This is most obvious. Because in our life experience, the possibilities are not that numerous; we may have only a few key nodes in life -- such as what school to attend, what job to take, and so on, just a few points. But on the battlefield the changes are far too many; every battle has winning and losing, or a stalemate of neither winning nor losing. Every change in the battlefield situation brings about a possible result and a possible unfolding. It is like a game of Go; if you were to unfold every possibility of the Go game, it would be endless.

But he says these possibilities are the entirety of the war. From a higher dimension, what is seen is the results of all possibilities, while we only see one local part of one possibility. And from a higher dimension, it is a war in which all possibilities exist. That is, this person has both the result of winning and the result of losing. So winning and losing from his perspective is meaningless, because he both lost and won -- in some possibilities he won, and in some possibilities he lost. It is that kind of process.

So, again, in dreams you deal with probabilities and decide which ones will become your physical "true events."

In dreams you deal with various possibilities, and you decide which one to make into a true event.

In dreams, individually and as a whole species, you have great freedom.

In dreams, both you as an individual and all of humanity have great freedom.

In dreams, each person decides his or her own destiny, and using this dream material, quite consciously chooses which episodes he or she will physically materialize and experience.

The possibilities in dreams are all there, very rich. But based on what you want to choose, using this dream material, you choose quite consciously -- remember, quite consciously; it is deliberate, you are conscious, you want to choose which one to manifest in waking life and make into a true event. This is the episode you want to experience. There may be many kinds of episodes, many kinds of possibilities, many kinds of endings, many versions of the story, and you choose only one of them.

You will accept from dreams those data that largely conform to your conscious waking beliefs, as mentioned earlier; there is an interaction between the dream and waking states.

Between the dream state and the waking state, previously they were separated; now let them interact. How do they interact? When you bring your waking awareness into the dream, do they not interact? If you cannot do this, they remain separate.

So within it, within the dream state, new beliefs can be tried out.

Trying things out in dreams carries no great risk; just give it a try.

In that respect, you are not at all at the mercy of your dreams.

You are not controlled by dreams; rather, you manipulate your dreams in the dream state. You must manipulate your dreams. Here, on the one hand, you must understand that in dreams you are to try out your new experiments, so you are manipulating your dreams, not being controlled by them. Most of us think that dreams control us, that we cannot control dreams.

You have not understood the great interaction that exists between waking and dreaming experience.

He is saying that we have not yet understood the great interaction that exists between the waking state and the sleeping state, the dream state. We do not know what effect it has when the waking state and the dream state communicate with each other, when they interact.

Because you have been taught to believe that there is an artificial barrier between the two that does not in fact exist.

You think that dreams and waking cannot communicate, that they are two worlds with an artificial barrier between them. When you no longer believe this, when you tear down this barrier, you enter.

Through suggestions given before sleep, dreams give you answers to problems.

That is, before sleep you can suggest that dreams give you answers. You automatically begin to make greater use of dream knowledge. When before sleep you suggest: today I encountered a difficult matter, for example something at work, and you do not know how to solve it -- whether to change jobs or not, and so on -- when you do not know how to solve it, at that time you can say to the dream, say to yourself: "When I dream, give me an answer, tell me what I should do." At this point the dream will give you some hints.

And open the doors of your own greater creativity.

What does "greater creativity" mean? In dreams you can create some new beliefs, and try them out to see how they work.

You may take a break. This is a small note for you, and then I may continue with the dictation.

Rob said: "Then give the note. Seth makes it difficult for me to decide; on the one hand I want the book dictation to continue, but I am also sure he has some unexpected oddity that will be very interesting to me. It is indeed very interesting."

In several pages of material, Seth discussed Rob's mother's recent experience in her advanced years (the word "mao die zhi nian," meaning very old age) of dealing with probabilities. This involved the complex family background of Rob's mother, which is omitted here as it is too complicated. But Jane and Rob decided to include the more general portions of the Seth material here, as Rob thought it would be helpful to others in their relationships with the elderly. So that is what this is about.

So below Session 650 of Chapter 13, what is to be discussed is this "acceleration of the psyche" -- he is referring to the acceleration of the psyche in the elderly. In that session Seth also discussed the hemispheres of the brain. Then the following paragraphs are all compiled by Rob; Seth is discussing his analysis of Rob's mother's dealings with the world of probabilities in her old age.

He said your mother is experiencing an acceleration of thought and intuition, and a whole barrage of stimuli that had been repressed up to now.

That is, Rob's mother is experiencing this in her old age.

She is quite clearly perceiving probabilities, but confusing them with the physical world, though this only happened after her physical work was completed.

What does "physical work completed" mean? It means that this only happened after she had given birth to three children and completed her work and retired. She confused the physical world with the world of probabilities and could not tell them apart.

Not, for example, when a confusion of directions would have disrupted any necessary important physical events of her own occurring at the same time.

What do his words mean? It means that when she was raising three children and was also the source of the family income, the main breadwinner of the family, she would not do this. When all of this was completed, when she had fulfilled this life mission, these worldly tasks -- the three children all raised to adulthood, grown up and working independently -- at that point she was old, and only then did she begin to try out these probable things.

She had a definite physical change.

Not only a psychic change. In the very concentrated physical life, the part of the brain that had not been used was activated -- the part of her brain that had not been used in her ordinary waking life, the part that had been idle all along, was activated.

Just as they are activated in infancy and in certain stages of adolescence as well.

In infancy, the brain is at first a complete blank, and then certain parts of the brain are activated one part at a time -- for example, the language area, the cognitive area, the motor area, and so on. And during adolescence, during puberty, our brain also activates some areas that had never been activated before, such as the area related to relationships between the sexes, to sexuality -- which she did not have before -- including social cognition, the social area, the expression of a sense of self-worth, and also this kind of social ability, all of which begin to be activated in puberty. These changes are also activated individually in each person, and it is the same for everyone.

I said that probabilities are actualized. In Chapter Fourteen he talked about probabilities, that is, which world, which you.

Rob's mother suddenly opened up to those probable events. And when she was a fact -- she took that probable event as a fact. After that event opened up to her, she felt it was a fact.

Because you are time-space oriented, and her actualization of that probability was temporarily accepted as physical reality.

So she accepted that probability as physical reality. Therefore this created a gap in what you consider everyday experience -- that is, she would jump back and forth between real life and the world of probabilities. In the process of this jumping there were gaps, and at one moment she took the probability as real, as something belonging to our three-dimensional world. That was only for her; for our three-dimensional world, that was only a probability.

She had to experience such events within the sequence of time.

She had to experience such events that transcend time and space within our time and space, within the flow of three-dimensional time. Because the time of probabilities is beyond time and space, it is timeless, but she insisted on experiencing this kind of non-spatiotemporal event, this kind of event not limited by time and space, within our time.

So it was not appropriate for others.

Others saw her as mentally ill. And she had indeed become mentally ill -- she was introducing that kind of probable time into real life. That is to say, she would often be within time and space, living at one moment here and at another moment there, at one moment living in 1982, at another moment living in 2045, jumping back and forth.

I am giving you this material not for you personally, but also because it can be applied generally.

That is, this can be applied generally.

The struggle with probabilities enabled your mother to judge the condition of her physical life in this lifetime.

Why did this happen to her? Because in the process of struggling with probabilities, she judged this life of hers, making a summary of her life, a judgment of her life.

It can be said that she was making preparations in advance for her next exploration.

Her actions themselves can be seen as a learning model for the whole family.

Her strange actions, these actions of taking probabilities as reality, can serve as a learning model for the whole family.

However she may appear, she did not have a dulling of sensory impressions in that respect.

However dull and foolish she may seem, however much she may seem to be muttering about spirits and gods, within that reality of probabilities, within her manipulation of the reality of probabilities, her senses had not degenerated in any way.

But rather a "pouring into."

Not only had they not degenerated, but she poured her senses into it.

Her difficulty in concentrating indeed came from this.

Why? Because she poured all her spirit into those times and spaces of probabilities. In fact, at that time she was concentrated elsewhere -- concentrated in those places of probabilities, not concentrated in this time and space, but concentrated in other times and spaces. So in this time and space she gave people the impression that she could not concentrate, that her spirit was scattered, that she could not focus her attention. Why? Her energy was all concentrated there. In real life you occasionally see this too -- some elderly people or some people with mental problems seem unable to concentrate and are very unstable.

Her sense of independence was aroused again.

She once again had a sense of independence.

This will eventually make her want to leave her family.

She wanted to run away from home -- it was not running away, she wanted to leave home and live independently.

Not to cling to her "boys."

She had three sons, his two brothers and himself.

And they were also used as an aid to growth that she had not achieved before.

And what was the purpose of her running away from home, of wanting to live independently? She had never before had the experience of living independently, that is, the experience of independent growth. So now she wanted to make up for this -- she wanted to practice it, to make up anew for this process of independent living, of independent growth and development. And every adolescent has such a process; adolescents are the most likely to run away from home, precisely because they want an environment in which to grow independently.

She will eventually want to leave her body.

Do you understand now? She was leaving her body, preparing for the next life.

But she was not leaving out of cowardice, but struggling to set herself free.

She was not leaving because she was afraid of death, but struggling to set herself free. She was setting herself free; she wanted freedom.

There are more reasons. In one respect the family treated her like a child, and this was accepted by her.

The present family -- that is, her three sons -- treated her like a child, like an old child, an old child, an old lady all muddled, often unable to distinguish reality from the past. This was accepted by her, that is, she could accept their treating her as a child, and she accepted it.

Because this provided what?

The impetus for her to want independence. Why was she willing to accept being treated as a child? Because a child will grow up, because it is normal for a child to want to grow up and leave home. If her three children treated her as a child, she accepted it -- I will be a child then, but as a child I have grown up, should I not leave home? I am going through puberty, after all.

So Rob's mother's independence was aroused. In some respects, she wanted to leave this "house of life" that she had actually formed -- he used quotation marks here -- that is, to leave home. The place where she had lived her whole life, the place where she had raised three children to adulthood, she wanted to leave it; she wanted to leave her house of life. What did she want to do? She wanted freedom.

This house of life, her three children, her past life experiences -- for her, for a mother, these were a limitation. Because she had always been raising three children, raising them until they all became adults, and she herself did not have much sense of value fulfillment of her own. So she wanted freedom; she wanted to find a new direction of effort and start over.

If she were an adolescent -- if she were a teenager -- then what she said would seem very reasonable. But she also wanted to start a new life, and now she was no longer an adolescent, yet she still wanted a new life. You cannot say that if she raised this at fifteen it would be reasonable, but if she raises it now at sixty-five it is unreasonable. But people generally think fifteen is normal, and raising it again at sixty-five is a bit much, but in fact she was like this.

He said now I have finished, and I hope you are somewhat reassured.

Because they had been worried about his mother all along.

You may end the session or begin a rest.

Because the content of his next session is very brief, we will quickly go through the content of his next session, and then the whole of Chapter Twenty will be completed in one continuous stretch.

Session 672: Dreams and the Multiple Dimensions of Consciousness

Session 672, June 25, 1973⁴, a Monday evening session. June 23, 1973, Saturday, was the one-year anniversary of the flood caused by Hurricane Agnes. The flood had occurred on June 23, 1972. If you look back at the very beginning of this book, you should be able to see that their area was still in the process of recovery and rebuilding. Of course, Jane and Rob understood very well how their experience in that flood had interrupted the progress of the first chapter of this book. We can also look at the note for Session 613, where, incidentally, we mentioned the matter of the Delaware Avenue bridge in Elmira being washed out. That old bridge spanned the Chemung River half a block from their apartment, and repair work was now underway, and it was very noisy—because it was only half a block away, the construction noise could still affect them—and it would go on for another year.

In Chapter Eighteen, Seth explained the emotional source of Agnes as a whole—that is, why this flood came about, and in Chapter Eighteen he specifically introduced this—as well as the behavior of each of us within it, that is, why Jane and Rob did not retreat. This is what he said.

He said: "For now, let him make a note about the date."

At present, mankind has little knowledge of the inner world of dreams, of its role within it, and of its influence upon daily, conscious life.

It is a blank. We humans have almost no understanding of this area.

As you enter the sleep state that seems quite unconscious of physical reality, many of the most powerful aspects of consciousness are nevertheless at work.

What does he mean? When you enter the sleep state that seems quite unconscious of physical reality—when you enter the sleep state, he uses so many modifiers that it is a bit convoluted—it means when you are asleep, many of the most powerful aspects of your consciousness are nevertheless at work. You think you are just sleeping, unable to do anything, that sleep is useless, that it is just rest. That is not so. Many of the most powerful places, the most powerful aspects of your consciousness, are at work.

Within the time context of your present experience, you would be unable to handle so large a body of knowledge.

To operate properly within your very specific field, an almost infinite amount of information must be instantly digested and its possibilities calculated, while maintaining a certain balance that you do not even perceive.

He says that when you are asleep, within our time context, you are incapable of handling that kind of possibility, that great body of knowledge occurring simultaneously and in parallel, all that information given to you at once. To operate within our specific area, within the framework of our lives, you must instantly digest an almost infinite amount of information—and calculate its possibilities—calculate all the possibilities within all that infinite information—and still maintain a certain balance that you do not even perceive, still maintain your balance in everyday life. In your conscious world you cannot do this. Within our human conscious world, we cannot process it.

So I often joke that your inner self is a quantum computer. Your inner self is a quantum computer, and your little self—your consciousness—is actually equivalent to an ordinary PC. How many times greater is the computing power of an ordinary PC compared to a quantum computer? Probably about 700 billion times—I am just giving a random example, 700 billion—the comparison of their computing power, their computational capacity, I can only give this kind of rough example. So you think your brain is already very smart, that it can handle many, many things, but compared to the computing power of your inner self's quantum computer, it is simply not worth mentioning, there is no comparison. So your consciousness cannot handle these matters, and therefore these things can only be handed over to your subconscious to process.

Potentially your consciousness is capable of these great feats, but the work cannot be done with the consciousness that is so intensely focused upon time-space relationships.

That cannot do it. Our consciousness is focused only on our physical world, and with this consciousness you cannot process all those possibilities. Why? Because all those possibilities are trans-temporal, they exist without time and space, while your consciousness is focused on time and space. You cannot use your time-space-focused consciousness to process matters and possibilities that have no time-space limitations.

The thing you think of as the "conscious mind," then, is given the task of assessing daily "facts."

Your conscious mind is assigned only the important task of attending to your present life in the physical world. It is not there to process matters of the nonphysical world. That is, your consciousness only cares about your eating, drinking, and daily routines, so that this body of yours, this flesh of yours, can survive reasonably well in the present moment.

Beliefs about reality are formed, however, and these beliefs are used in the dream state as one of the main yardsticks, so to speak, to activate certain probable events rather than others.

Your conscious mind, your belief system—your consciousness is your belief system—it makes assessments in your everyday life, processing all the information from the visible and invisible worlds around you, the physical world—including dreams, including your inner self within. After processing, it makes an assessment. Then, that is to say, through the assessment of the conscious mind, or the belief system, it decides in the dream state—your conscious mind or your belief system is its yardstick—it decides which events become possibilities and which events are ignored. If all possible events surged forth at once, you would collapse; you could not handle it.

In your dreams, you search like a searchlight for other events that suit your ideas of reality.

In dreams, within all the possibilities, you search everywhere for events that match your present reality, your present beliefs.

Your convictions help you filter out probable actions from those actions you are not concerned with, appearing of course in the guise of dreams.

Your convictions allow you to filter out those probable actions from actions that seem to be of no concern to you at all—that is, to search for possibilities, to search for all kinds of possibilities.

Since you are not simply a physically focused creature, however, all other issues also come into play.

Besides focusing on the physical world, we also focus on other nonphysical worlds, and all those other nonphysical issues also come into play.

Within yourself is condensed knowledge of your entire existence.

Within yourself there is condensed knowledge of your entire existence—that is, within you are all your lifetimes, all this information condensed together.

This information cannot appear in any complete form in the consciousness connected with the physical brain.

Although you have all the information and data of all your reincarnational lifetimes, including all the probable data of this lifetime, this information cannot appear in any complete form, because you cannot process it. It cannot appear in any complete form in the consciousness connected with your physical brain—your flesh brain, your material brain. If your consciousness is still connected to the brain, it cannot process this information.

Because multidimensional reality simply cannot be expressed.

He has made it very clear: this kind of multidimensional reality, this kind of multiverse reality, cannot be expressed with your present brain, let alone processed.

In the dream state, when consciousness is dimmed as far as physical concerns are concerned, this multidimensional self can flash into view in dream images and fantasies.

In your dreams, when your consciousness's focus on the physical—on the physical world—is blurred. When you are dreaming, you are certainly no longer so concerned with the external environment of your three-dimensional world. At that time, this multidimensional self of yours can flash into view in dream images and fantasies—that is, your true self, and your true self is a multidimensional being.

This multidimensional self of yours can only flash into view when your concern with the three-dimensional world begins to dim, when you are no longer so focused on the three-dimensional world, flashing forth in the form of fantasies or images. So sometimes when you dream of things in your dreams and you do not know what they are, they may be your multidimensional self, a symbolic expression of your greater existence. Sometimes you dream of special things—I will not give examples here, everyone is different—which may represent the existence of your entity or your higher self.

If conscious beliefs cause you great pain, then relatively beneficial beliefs can be received from this source.

If your conscious beliefs themselves cause you great pain, then from that pain you can also find beliefs that are helpful to you.

Your existence intersects with time and space, and the larger consciousness that is "yourself" generates physical form simultaneously at many "points" of moments.

This was already discussed in Chapter Nineteen, about your simultaneous reincarnations. Your simultaneous reincarnations, these reincarnations occur simultaneously.

You will call each such "immersion" into three-dimensional existence a life, with its own "self." And you are one of these.

This has been said many times before, so we will not elaborate.

Each self must experience itself in worldly terms.

Remember this: each self must experience itself in worldly terms, otherwise why would you need to come here? Yet each self is also a part of its greater existence—it needs to experience itself in worldly terms, but it is also a part of your entity.

It is a part of the energy source from which it constantly comes.

It is a part of the source from which that energy continuously flows.

In dreams, your energy "pulses" back to the being that you are.

In dreams, your entity automatically pulses, automatically returns to its source. It is an instinctive action. When your soul is asleep, it automatically returns to its energy source, and thus departs from the three-dimensional world.

There is a saying that each night you travel back and forth through the atmosphere and through entry points you do not perceive. In your sleep, you do indeed journey across the vast distances between life and death.

What does this mean? It means that every day, when you fall asleep and wake up, it is as if you have experienced a life and a death. Your soul crosses the chasm between life and death; it has already returned to the place it should go when you die, and then it comes back. That is what he means.

The consciousness you think you are transcends these leaps.

The consciousness you think you are is limited only to the three-dimensional world—no. Your consciousness can leap across these lives and deaths. In dreams and in waking, it leaps back and forth, leaping across life and death. But in the process of leaping, it still maintains its own sense of continuity; this sense of continuity is not lost. It always feels that it has been alive all along.

These are all connected with the pulsations of energy and consciousness.

And in one respect, from another perspective:

The life you think you live is an apparent "length" of light.

Is this sentence also very hard to understand? Seth does not use this kind of thing very often in these few books, so you may feel that the overall difficulty of this book is not that great. But in some of his other books, sentences like this appear very, very often. From his perspective, this sentence is easy to understand, but from our human perspective, there are many times when it is really not easy to understand what he is trying to say.

First of all, an apparent length of light. If you have studied physics, you will know that light has no length. When you shoot out a beam of light, it goes infinitely far—it travels at the speed of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, toward the farthest distance it can reach. If something blocks it, then it is blocked. But the light itself has no length. So why does he speak of a length of light? Can light advance for a stretch and then stop? We think that is impossible in the three-dimensional world. From their perspective, it is possible.

So what exactly does it mean? How do you understand the phrase "an apparent length of light"? You can understand it this way: suppose your consciousness is a light. Your consciousness jumps back and forth between waking and sleeping. Let us suppose that when you fall asleep, your consciousness returns to its energy source and origin—which is equivalent to returning to the energy source you go to when you die—and when you wake up, it jumps back. If you imagine your consciousness as a light, then half of it is in that world, and half of it is in this world. But the consciousness itself is continuous. The consciousness itself maintains this sense of continuity; it is continuous—you do not feel that your consciousness has any gaps or anything like that. It maintains its own sense of identity very well.

But during the time you are alive, if consciousness is a continuum, it is only a part of this continuum of consciousness. The life you think you live—the life you think you live in the physical world, on this earth in the three-dimensional world—is only one segment of this overall light of consciousness. Its other part is still in that higher dimension. In this three-dimensional world, on this earth, you only see one segment of it. That is how you should understand what he means by "a segment of light"—an apparent length.

Beneath the dreams you remember are conscious experiences, and these only occasionally appear in distorted form.

Beneath the dreams you can recall, the dreams you can remember, at the bottom layer of dreams are those conscious experiences. They appear only occasionally in distorted form.

These express in nonphysical terms your relationship with your own existence.

A dream is a very typical way of expressing, in nonphysical terms, that you have a nonphysical existence, an entity—it expresses it in just this way. A dream is a very good way of expressing this.

Your consciousness is the same: beneath the level of dream experience, it also experiences its own affairs in its own way.

Here you are refreshed. Here, completely free of conscious beliefs.

Within dreams, conscious beliefs are gone.

And from this level, personal and collective ideals are formed.

Remember: ideals are formed within your dreams. Beneath the level where you are free of your unconscious beliefs, your ideals, or the collective ideals of your group, are formed. Goals are all accomplished in dreams. So now you can understand what Haizi meant by "Riding dreams as a horse, living up to the glory of youth²."

This activity often takes place beneath ordinary dream levels.

This activity is always taking place beneath ordinary dream levels. What kind of direct activity is this? It is the activity of being free of conscious beliefs, and then forming personal and collective ideals at that level—that is, your goals, the blueprint and plan for your future development, all realized in dreams.

But to a much lesser degree.

In ordinary dream levels, the degree of this is much smaller.

Because it represents the foundation upon which your present consciousness rides.

Why? Because your present consciousness is still riding on top of this. In your present ordinary dream levels—in those dreams you remember very clearly—your beliefs, the conscious beliefs controlled by your consciousness, are still controlling your dreams. I have already explained this before, so I will not repeat it here. Therefore, at this level, the degree to which ideals are formed is much smaller. Why? Because in ordinary dreams it is still being controlled by your conscious beliefs. In other words, in your deeper dreams, is it no longer controlled by them?

The physical reality into which you are born does not appear as solid as it seems, nor is it entirely predetermined, or fixed and unchanging. Instead, there is a rich "field of interaction" that exists.

Instead, there is a rich field—just like the scenes in your dreams. In dreams there is an interaction field, an interaction field between your beliefs and your dream environment—when your beliefs shift, your dream environment changes accordingly. It is the same in our three-dimensional world, except that the manifestation is slower.

Your consciousness must focus and select a range before it can even perceive objects, let alone solidity.

He says: what must your consciousness do? It must focus within a specific range of frequencies. Before it can perceive objects, your consciousness must set that specific frequency, focus on the designated frequency. So at this point your consciousness has not yet perceived objects, let alone solidity.

In sleep, your consciousness fluctuates between different ranges of intensity, literally flowing into and out of the physical conglomerate.

You move back and forth between the physical world and the dream world, flowing in and flowing out.

And from the more plastic "pre-matter" stages, matter is formed into the final shapes it will take in your world. This applies equally to events. Some will crystallize into physical form; others will not.

What does this passage mean? It means that our physical world is an interaction field. It is not as you think—that the physical world is all set, all dead, that things are fixed, dead, and cannot be changed. No. The physical world around you is produced through interaction. What does it interact with? On a large scale, it interacts with group beliefs; on a personal level, it interacts with your personal beliefs.

He says: how does this interaction come about? If you want it to manifest, your consciousness must focus on a specific frequency in order to manifest these things. And focusing on that frequency means—his point is—it is not that the object exists first and then you perceive it; rather, you set the frequency first and then the object can be manifested. The object comes after your consciousness—this physical world comes into being only after your consciousness arises. It is that kind of interaction: belief comes first, and matter comes after.

Then he goes on to say that it is similar when you are asleep. In your dreams, when you are forming that nonphysical world, you can use the dream method to realize that plastic pre-matter state in dreams. So the things in dreams are all lifelike, just like real, but you know they are not real. So those are all called "pre-matter states." Those pre-matter states are already constructed under the interaction of your dream environment. Then you decide which ones to realize in everyday life—"crystallize" means crystallize into physical form; just understand it as "manifest"—which ones will manifest, and which ones will not.

The deeper portions of your own being are aware of your unique purposes and intents.

That is, the part of your inner self, the underlying part, knows your life blueprint and your life goals and intents.

So for the particular kind of physical reality you want to materialize, there is an unconscious blueprint within, and you are the designer.

This resolves a point that many people struggle with—they say: "If I already have an inner blueprint, then what initiative or free will do I have?" He says: there is a blueprint, but you are the designer of that blueprint. What he means is that at the level of your inner self, you are aware of a rough blueprint for this lifetime, but it is not fixed—you are the designer, and you can freely modify and adjust this blueprint. But when your dreams construct your physical reality, they will refer to this blueprint. Although it is at the unconscious level, it will choose which events are helpful for realizing your blueprint, or your life goals, or your life value, and it will manifest those events in your everyday life; while those events and possibilities that are not helpful for realizing your life goals or life ideals will no longer be manifested—there is no point.

There is a system of checks and balances, however.

There is also a system of checks and balances.

So certain dreams can make you aware of these blueprints, and they may recur throughout your life as dreams of a particular nature.

What he means is, first, the blueprint is not laid out in your dreams as clearly as you might think—telling you what your life goal is, what you must do, and so on—no. This is a balancing function, that is, it does not let the blueprint be fully revealed to you. It is a way of making you aware, or it is a kind of dream of a particular nature that you often have throughout your life—you keep having a similar kind of dream. Some people keep dreaming that they are walking along and suddenly fall into a river, or someone dreams that they are walking and fall off a bridge, or they often have similar dreams. These are revelatory dreams. This is a kind of revelation; it comes to tell you, to give you hints.

And even if you do not remember them, when you wake up, your purpose may be more resolute or suddenly become clear.

You say: I do not remember, I have not had such a dream. But when you wake up, you do not remember what dream you had, and you do not remember what relation that dream has to your life goals, but one day after you wake up, you suddenly decide: "I am going to do this thing. I have decided. I am going to do this." It becomes more resolute.

When you deal with beliefs, find out what you really think about the dream situation.

When you are dealing with beliefs, you must find out what you really think about the dream situation.

If you trust dreams, then through your conscious cooperation, they can even become your most important allies.

Because you consciously trust dreams, they will cooperate with you, and they can even become your most important allies. But if you do not trust dreams—you think dreams are just dreams, of no use at all—then if you think that way, they really will be of no use to you. So remember this: when you are dealing with your own personal beliefs, when you come to dreams, you must consider how you understand dreams, what you really feel about them. Do you trust your dreams, or do you think they have no meaning at all?

If you want to resolve an argument, then tell yourself you will do so in a dream, and try it there. There you can speak freely to people who might otherwise avoid you.

What does he mean? His wording is very convoluted. What he means is that in dreams, when you have a dispute with someone, but in reality that person will not speak to you, and you cannot even see them—they are already very angry with you and will not see you again—but the great estrangement, conflict, and misunderstanding between you remain unresolved. But in dreams you can speak to them; they cannot escape. He says many reconciliations are accomplished at that level. In many major misunderstandings, or difficulties, or disputes, when you cannot resolve them, you can try to help resolve them in dreams. In dreams, go and speak to them.

If you ask for the solution to any problem in a dream, it will be given to you. Your dreams will give you the answer, but you must trust yourself.

You must trust that it will give you the answer, and trust the answer your dream gives you.

And learn to interpret your own dreams.

You must learn to do it yourself—do not rely on others. Do not go around asking: "Oh teacher, what does my dream mean?" How would anyone else know what your own dream means? How would anyone else know what your life experiences and these hints and symbols really mean? So you must learn to interpret them yourself. No one else has the right to interpret your dreams; they cannot interpret your dreams. It is your own private matter.

There is no other way to do this except to begin working with your own dreams yourself.

You can only work with your own dreams yourself; there is no better way. As you do this, as you interpret your own dreams, as you seek answers for the three-dimensional world from your dreams:

For this will awaken your intuitive abilities and give you the knowledge you need.

It will awaken your intuitive ability and give you the knowledge you need. What knowledge? It is how to judge, from the clues your dreams give you, which ones are the answers you want and which ones are the ways to solve problems. This is something only you can seek out and learn for yourself; no one else can help you with it.

Therefore your belief in the value of dreams can increase their practical effectiveness.

What he means is that if you believe dreams have value, you can increase their effectiveness in practical terms. In other words, if you do not believe dreams have value, then they will have no effect at all on your life. It is that simple. So whether you believe the dream itself has value or not can determine how much help the dream actually gives you in your real life.

So at this point, this chapter has come to an end, and all twenty chapters have now been completed. What follows are some appendices and annotations. I will not go over these explanatory annotations, since there is really not much content in them; they just repeat the earlier material once more.

All right, this chapter is relatively long, but it has now been fully covered, and it is also very important. The core of this chapter, to sum it up in one simple sentence, is this: learn to dream consciously, and in conscious dreaming solve the problems of your everyday life, and also make some preparations for the events you will later actualize. It is an early stage, a preliminary rehearsal ground, for those things that will later be actualized in your life. You must learn to use dreams to bring substantial help to your life.

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注释与核实

1. This claim could not be verified. ↩

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩²

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. Source: Jane Roberts (Seth), The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 672 (https://nowdictation.com/q/book:nopr+session:672+affirm/) ↩