Session 692

Unknown Reality, Session 692

The entity is aware of the experiences of all of its personalities.

To the entity, you own consciousness could be likened to one stream of consciousness, in your terms.  The greater part of your own identity, then, is completely aware of all of your conscious and unconscious living material.  It is also aware of the same kind of data from all of (its and your) parts.

Because you identify your experience with the regular line of consciousness with which you are familiar, you are rarely able to “bring in” any “other-self” material and hold it while retaining your own sense of identity.  Such material may at times bleed or intrude into your own thought, where it blends and is not recognized.  In such cases, it takes on the coloration of your own thought patterns.  It adds to the overall atmosphere of your being.  Without understanding or training, you would have to “lose” your own consciousness in order to perceive the “other-consciousness”.

There is a correlation here with something Ruburt said in [ESP] class last evening.  He said that writing can be, first, a method of standing apart from life to some extent – in order to capture life, and preserve the unutterable uniqueness of any given day.  But, he said, you can then discover that the writing itself becomes the day’s experience.  You are then “lost” in the writing as much as you feared being lost in normal living, with no way to step aside and view the experience.  My addition, now, to those remarks is this: You would need the creation then of another “self”, who stood aside from the writing self in order to preserve the original intent.

In the same way you could not, practically speaking, experience such other-consciousness unless you learned to stand somewhat aside, like the writer in Ruburt’s remarks.  But even if you did, the very experience of other-consciousness itself would supersede your living space.  You would need another self, able to hold both lines of consciousness at once, lost in neither but maintaining footing in each.  This would be a very difficult achievement in normal life in any sustained fashion.

In the dream state your specialized focus need not be as precise or time-oriented as in the waking state.

In your case, you did perform an excellent accomplishment.  You were aware of the simultaneous dreams; each being experienced in alternate realities.  You could not at this point remember both dreams, because the physical brain apparatus could not handle the simultaneous data.  This has reference to portions of the brain not used, as mentioned in this book.

At certain levels the brain can handle simultaneous material, of course, even though you may be conscious of only a smattering of it.  The body is aware of multitudinous simultaneous stimuli that consciously escape you, and is able to act on the information.  This includes all kinds of sense data that are not consciously present.  Because of the particular kind of ego-orientation that the race decided upon, however, many probabilities of development inherent in the species have been latent.  Inherently the physical brain is capable of dealing with more than one main line of consciousness.  This does not mean the development of dual personality, by the way.  It means the further expansion of the concept of identity: “You” would not only be aware of the you that you have always known, in the same way that you are now, but a deeper sense of identity would also arise.

That identity would contain the you that you have always known, and in no way threaten it.  The new you would simply be more than you are now.  You would just have another expansion of consciousness, another self-who-is-aware-of-being in the same way that – using an analogy, granted – the writer is aware of the self who lives, in those terms; is the self who lives while being in a position of some apartness, able to comment upon the life being lived.

Now in a very small way, admittedly, that analogy hints at the kind of deeper events that occur as selves are born out of selves to operate in various levels of activity.  In the case of entities, each self dwells entirely in its own dimension or a system of reality.

You are, in a rudimentary fashion, beginning to open up those unused areas of the brain, or you would not have even been aware of the fact of two simultaneous dreams.  Language and your verbal thought patterns make such translations highly difficult, however, even in the best of circumstances.  A multilingual individual, in that regard at least, might have some idea of how concepts are structured through verbal pattern, and hence possess some additional freedom in such translations – provided of course that he or she was aware of the possibilities to begin with.

(To Jane): One experience was a dream of your own, in usual terms.  The other “dream” experienced simultaneously was, instead, your muddled interpretation of vital experienced reality on the part of another portion of yourself, in another reality entirely; a dimensional bleed-through.  Once you are aware of such experience, most likely you will also have others in “your” dream state.

In the waking state you would find such an experience highly threatening without some suitable preparation – and I must be very cautious in my treatment of your concepts of the self and your ideas of one-personhood.

I am not speaking of you personally, Joseph, so much as I am emphasizing that the race at present identifies its individual being with highly limited concepts of the self.  Those ideas are vigorously protected, and indeed must be understood and given honor even while attempts are made to expand them.  Certainly the quality of consciousness has changed through the centuries in many different ways, and sometimes in what would appear to be contradictory ones; but in your present you have nothing against which to compare your current consciousness of experience.

To a very limited extent, the different civilizations and cultures with which you are historically familiar represent a dim glimmering of the various qualities of consciousness and their varieties of experience.  But as there are physical species, so there are what you may call species of consciousness also.

There are even now in your species a number of different kinds of consciousness; different in that the physical life-situation is qualitatively experienced in ways that are not native to you in your culture; different in that the entire fabric of meaning, interpretation, experience, and life itself is “alien” to the kind of experience with which you are familiar.  This does not mean that such differences occur as the result of cultural backgrounds or situations, for some such individuals exist within your own culture, and some with your kind of consciousness exist in cultures where they are a minority.  I am simply saying that on your earth now there are species of consciousness, though that is probably not the best term.  You have been so obsessed with exterior differences, especially color and nationality, that you have completely ignored these other far more important variations in the form that consciousness takes in relation to physical life within your race – the race of man.

In terms of your personal experience, the Sumari is a case in point.  The members of each “species” of consciousness relate to physical experience in their characteristic ways, even viewing time, space, and action differently.  They orient to their bodies in their own particular manners.  Each group does possess a different relationship with the body, with nature, and with the world in general.

Your stratified concepts of one-personhood overlook all such inherent differences, however, and you have a tendency to transpose your own concepts whenever you come in contact with those whose ideas you cannot understand.  Even now in some “tribal societies”, for example, the self is experienced far differently; so that, while so-called individuality as you understand it is maintained, each self is also experienced as a part of others in the tribe, and the natural environment.  To some, this seems to mean that individuality is stillborn or undeveloped.  You protect your ideas of selfhood at all costs – even against the evidence of nature, which shows you that all are related.

Uniqueness, private experience, and individuality attain their dimensions of being and their true grandeur only when the inherent relationships among all elements of being are understood.  You fight against your own greater individuality, and the spacious dimensions of your own being, when you overprotect your ideas of selfhood by limiting the experience of the self.

Note 5: “Species” of Consciousness

Seth’s first use of “species of consciousness” came in the last session.  He comes up with another evocative phrase, “civilizations of the psyche”, in the 715^th session in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.  Much of that session can be taken as an extension of his material here on the qualities of consciousness that have existed on the earth.  In the 715^th session, Seth also lets fall some rather humorous comments on Jane’s own mixed reactions when she first encountered such hints of the “multidimensionality of your beings”.