Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 10

The "Introduction" and "Key Points of This Chapter" below were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text; 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 explains that the brain is the psychological mechanism that forms events, and that children rehearse events and coordinate their senses in dreams and play. Seth offers game-like exercises such as changing time, changing eras, changing locations, traveling in dreams, and swapping genders, in order to loosen the fixed focus on space-time and gender and to train the imagination. The latter half explains the relationship between dreams, the brain, and the mind: events have an electromagnetic reality, and the brain adjusts the speed of perception; double dreams and body dreams show that consciousness can create along multiple lines, and this involves memory, hormones, healing, and learning.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The brain is the psychological mechanism that forms events; events are rehearsed, selected, and arranged in dreams.
• Children practice through dreams and play abilities their bodies do not yet possess; the spatiotemporal focus of the senses is learned after birth.
• Exercises such as changing time, changing era, changing place, and gender swapping are used to loosen fixed perceptions of time, space, and gender and to train the imagination.
• Dreams are formed by the projection of the mind onto the brain; double dreams and triple dreams show that consciousness can carry out multiple lines of creation simultaneously without losing its identity.
• Dreams process events, form memories, and activate hormones, cell growth, and healing; sleeping pills or chronic insomnia suppress these mechanisms and cause harm.

Main Text

The Psychological World of Children

The title of Chapter 10 is "Games That Anyone Can Play, Dreams, and the Formation of Events." This title comes from the last section of Chapter 9 -- where he said he would tell us some exercises, but these exercises are meant to be practiced in the manner of games.

This section is Session 793, held on Monday, February 14, 1977, beginning at 9:28 p.m. He began with no extra words, going straight into the subject.

Your brain is primarily a psychological mechanism for forming events.

When he says "brain," he means our physical brain. Our consciousness operates through this brain, and the brain has a tendency to form events, a tendency to want to make something happen.

This tendency is evident even in young children. I am speaking of the activity -- when a child's fantasy occurs, the activity involved far exceeds the physical abilities he has developed at that time.

When an infant fantasizes, the activities he engages in are abilities his body does not yet possess at that time. For example, he fantasizes that he can run, can jump, can do this or that -- children all have this characteristic. The activities involved in his fantasies may not yet be within the physical capacity of his body at that age, but he has already carried them out in fantasy. This is a kind of activity, a kind of liveliness, a kind of tendency. We adults are actually the same way.

Session 793

Children's dreams are more intense than those of adults, because the brain is practicing its activity of forming events.

The brain is practicing its own activity of forming events, so children's dreams are more intense and more vivid than adults'. Before certain physical abilities can be activated, these abilities must first be developed in dreams. Infants play in dreams, making movements that exceed their current physical abilities.

Although outer stimuli are important, the inner stimuli of dream play are even more important.

A child's physical development requires outer stimuli; he needs to practice walking and running in real life, he needs to practice these things. But relative to the outer stimuli on a person's muscles, senses, and bodily motor coordination, the inner stimuli in dreams are even more important.

In their play dreams, children practice using all of their senses.

In these play-like dreams, children practice all of their senses -- the inner senses and the outer senses. And the dreams themselves in turn stimulate the senses, helping to ensure coordination among the various senses.

In your terms, events are plastic to children.

The word he used is "plastic," and here it does not only refer to the material; it means "moldable." Events, to children, are things that can be further developed and have not been fully fixed. Why? Because they have not yet learned to apply your rigid structures.

What are rigid structures? They are the conditions and limitations of our three-dimensional world. For example, in the three-dimensional world, when we think of something, the first thing we think is that it is not feasible -- that is one kind of limitation. We think that this thing seems never to have happened before, or that this thing is something from the past, so it has temporal limitations and spatial limitations, and all sorts of other limitations. These limitations are all rigid structures. And children have not yet learned to apply these rigid structures that we adults accept, so to them the world is more malleable.

That is connected with the demands of coordinating the various senses. Before this process occurs, events are not rigidly arranged.

Before the various sensory demands are coordinated, before the various senses are coordinated, events do not have rigid arrangements. Those arrangements are all acquired later in life; we form these rigid limitations and harsh conditions after birth.

For example, the uncoordinated senses of a child, when he sees today the person who will tomorrow speak certain words, may actually hear the words that will be spoken tomorrow. He places it in today's present.

That is to say, a child in a dream or in the dream state dreams that a person may say certain things tomorrow, but he sees this person today, and then he hears this person say the words that should only be spoken tomorrow. This is something we ordinary people do not have -- we do not have this sense of temporal and spatial dislocation, while children often do.

Focusing the senses in space and time, to a certain degree, is an art that is learned after birth.

This is an art we learn after birth: how to take the things in dreams and, through the senses, focus them in the present space and time, and arrange them very well. We know that events in dreams occur without any concept of time, but how can we place them within the space-time categories of the three-dimensional world -- what happens at what time, what happens at what place -- this kind of placement is an art that can only be learned after birth.

In terms of precise physical manipulation, it is of course a necessary art.

In our real lives, when we manipulate the body and carry out daily activities, this is an art that must be learned. But before that focusing occurs, children, especially in the dream state, enjoy a full-scale version of events.

Before learning this limitation, before learning this acquired art of "manipulating the body," the world in a child's dreams is the full version -- all possibilities exist, not just one. Then it gradually becomes clearer, but its scope narrows. This world becomes clearer and clearer in real life, but its scope becomes narrower and narrower -- this event can only happen in this time period, can only happen to this person, can only happen under such preconditions. Such constraints make the scope of events smaller and smaller, but also clearer.

In terms of both space and time, there is still some latitude of activity left.

He did not restrict it completely; there is still some latitude left. Because even biologically, children are born with a certain forward-looking ability -- this is a very peculiar ability that children possess.

Many children have this ability: it allows them to have some unconscious knowledge of events in the immediate future, giving them a warning of danger. Many children can sense impending danger; they seem to have a kind of precognitive ability, able to see and feel that a very great danger may be about to happen right before their eyes or to them. They have a kind of image, as if they suddenly see this danger. This is an ability unique to children.

From this more plastic, relaxed experience, children begin in dreams to choose more specific times.

Children begin in dreams to choose those events that can be actualized or practiced in real life. In doing so, they are training the senses themselves toward a narrower perception. When they do this, they choose those events that are more likely to happen or be realized in reality, while those possible events that are less likely to be realized they do not choose. They no longer feel the existence of more possibilities, but focus on certain specific events.

In their play, children are actually often beginning games quite naturally created in dreams.

When children play games, the things they play with are all things they have thought about in dreams, things they have played with in dreams. These games include role-playing -- children often love role-playing: I'll play the mother, you play the father; I'll play the doctor, you play the patient; or I'll play the soldier, you play the bandit. There are also simple games involving physical muscle activity -- playing marbles, playing with mud, playing with sand, and the game we played as children called "bumping knees," where you fold one leg up and stand on one foot like a golden rooster, and two people bump each other with their knees back and forth -- all of these train muscle balance and ability.

Children's games basically fall into two broad categories: one is role-playing, and the other is muscle activity. All of these are a clarification of learning -- that is, learning some specific things, a kind of teaching in learning particularity.

In dreams, the mind can freely play with events and their formation.

In dreams, we need to constantly play with this event, turning it over and around, and in this process of play it is formed. What is called play is constant practice among various possibilities. Just like when we play games, children often play games repeatedly; the rules of the game are roughly the same, but they play it over and over -- is each time not a possibility? Each round of the game is a possible version of that game.

It is the same in dreams: he plays this event over and over, experiences this event, repeats this event. But each experience has different variations, which is a possible version of this event. It is in this process of play that the event is formed.

The actualization of those events, however, requires some practical circumstances.

Although this is so, the actualization of events still requires some conditions; you cannot set aside practical conditions when discussing it. For example, a child dreams of being a pilot, flying a plane into battle, but in reality this cannot be realized -- no matter how many times he plays it in dreams, it cannot be realized in reality. Only when he grows up, enlists in the military, and becomes an air force pilot can it possibly be realized.

In play, children attempt to initiate in dreams what they then test against actual conditions.

In this way, children toy with possibilities, and bring their physical structure into a situation where it corresponds to an appropriate possibility.

Basically speaking, in dreams the brain is not limited by physical encounters.

In dreams, the brain is not limited by these physical conditions, so it constantly tries out various possibilities. Then in play, he takes the things from dreams and puts them into practice, seeing which of these dream games are fun and which are not, which can be played and which cannot. For example, throwing rocks at someone's window -- he knows the consequences; some practical conditions limit him.

Children can psychologically form countless events, and consciousness can play an unlimited number of roles.

So children can easily dream of their own father, mother, brothers and sisters, or the family dog, or a fly, or a soldier. And in waking play, children will then act out those roles -- they say "I'll be the mother, you be the child," "I'll be the father," "I'll be the soldier." But very quickly they discover that these roles do not fit practical conditions.

Before a child ever sees a mountain, he can dream of mountains.

We often say, "The things we dream of are all things we have seen before" -- this view is wrong. Our dreams transcend space and time, so we can dream of mountains before ever seeing them. Where does the knowledge of the earth's environment come from? It is our natural heritage.

You possess an unconscious environment, a particular psychological world that is attuned to this physical world.

This psychological world itself is unconscious, and the things we ordinarily learn occur subjectively within it. We learn within it, just as objective learning and outer manipulation are the same -- we all need to practice and learn, to exercise our senses, exercise our muscles, exercise the coordination of our bodies and events.

Dreams are generally very much connected with imagination and the formation of events.

Children's imagination keeps them from being too limited by their parents' world. Children's imagination is very rich, and this is what allows children to surpass their parents -- otherwise they would be limited by their parents' world, and there would be no new innovation.

Children, whether waking or dreaming, often pretend. Children will often say to you: "Can you pretend to be the big bad wolf? I'll pretend to be the little white rabbit." This kind of pretend play happens not only when awake, but also in dreams.

In their pretending, they are practicing their consciousness in a particularly advantageous way.

In this process of pretend play, they are practicing their consciousness. Although because of their physical existence they accept one particular reality, they still retain the right to experiment with other secondary conditions of existence -- that is, those pretend life situations. If you buy him a toy gun, he will pretend to be a soldier and play for a very long time.

To some degree, they become what they pretend to be.

When the pretending becomes real enough, to a certain degree, he becomes what he pretends to be. For example, if he pretends to be an obedient child, pretends to be a good little boy, pretends to be a good student -- after pretending for a long time, he really becomes that way. In this, they also increase their own knowledge and experience.

When left alone, children learn how to deal with animals by pretending to be animals. Through experiencing the animals' reactions, they learn how they themselves will react when facing animals.

Especially in play, children try on any imaginable situation to see whether it fits. In the dream state, adults and children alike are doing the same thing.

Many dreams are indeed a kind of play. The brain itself is never satisfied with one version of an event, but is always very active, like play, using imagination to form other versions into an activity.

Your brain is naturally inclined this way: it is never satisfied with one version of an event, but always thinks that there are more possibilities, more possible versions that exist. The brain is also practicing the formation of events, just as our muscles practice movements -- just as learning physical skills like riding a bicycle requires training the muscles, the process of the brain forming events also requires training and practice, practice again and again. So the brain constantly pretends, playing with itself in its own dreams.

The brain seeks the richest formation of events.

Here I specifically refer to "the brain," as distinct from your mind. He deliberately emphasizes that this ability is biological -- this genius ability of the brain comes from the mind.

Your brain can be called a physical counterpart of the mind in biophysical terms.

Our brain can be seen as a copy of the mind in the three-dimensional world.

You have inner senses that roughly correspond to your physical senses.

In addition to outer senses, you also have inner senses -- the inner senses roughly correspond to your physical senses. You can regard the outer senses as extensions of the inner senses.

These need not be trained toward a particular space-time orientation.

Your inner senses themselves have not been trained toward a particular space-time orientation. In other words, the inner senses do not face only our three-dimensional world; their cognition has no limitations or perceptions of space and time.

When children dream, they use the inner senses just as adults do.

We acknowledge that dreaming also uses the inner senses -- the things you see in dreams are not seen with your eyes, and running in dreams is not done with your muscles; it is all the inner senses. And then through dreaming, children learn to translate this information into the precise framework of the outer senses.

What is "the precise framework of the outer senses"? It is taking the inner senses and, through the outer senses, determining their precise position and time within a definite space-time range. This process is called determination; it is a precise framework, and it requires practice. Very young children have no concept of time and no concept of space; these are all gradually established and completed after birth.

Children's play is always play in the present; play is immediately experienced. Although the events involved may concern the future and the past.

Children experience play always in the present, immediately experienced. But this present contains the past and the future -- it is only with the precise framework limitations we humans add that we consider the present to be only now. But in a child's present, it includes the past and the future. Children often say "once upon a time, long long ago" -- when they say this, they are transcending space and time.

It is the same even for adults: when we adults tell a story and say "long ago," we have already set up a non-temporal framework; you do not need to care about what time it happened or what dynasty it was; the specific time becomes unimportant.

Children play with time in a way that adults have forgotten.

The way children play with time is different from adults. But when we grow up and have precise cognition of space and time, we have already forgotten how we perceived time when we were children.

If you want to sense the motion of your psyche, perhaps the easiest way is to imagine a situation, either in the past or in the future. For this automatically moves your psychic sense perception in a new way.

Before children enter this world, they try to imagine what the world is like. You are doing the same thing -- for things that have not happened, future things, you also try to guess and imagine what they are like.

The manner in which you follow these directions can be instructive in this way. For the range of activities you choose will tell you something about the unique qualities of your own consciousness.

The reason you choose this thing and not that thing is determined by the unique qualities of your consciousness that are different from others'. Another person might choose a different possible event to happen. But you choose this particular version to happen -- this is related to the qualities of your consciousness.

The adult world deals largely with manipulation in space.

Our adult games basically all involve manipulation on the spatial level; we rarely play with time. For example, after dinner if you want to find somewhere to have fun, you definitely have to change locations -- you might go to a bar, a KTV, a nightclub, or go bowling or play golf. No matter what you play, you are making changes in space. All ball games are changes in space: hitting a ball from here to there, from there to there.

But children's games often involve changes in time. Why don't adults play games in time? Because adults think playing games in time is impossible -- how can time change? So you do not play. But children do not have this limitation.

The First Exercise

Now look at a natural thing -- this is the first exercise. For example, look at a tree. If it is spring now, then imagine that you are seeing this tree in autumn.

In the last session of Chapter Nine, Seth said that in the next chapter he would give us many exercises, but these exercises should not be done in a serious, scientific exercise manner -- they should be done like playing games. And here the first exercise appears: find a natural object, find something alive, something living -- animals or plants are both fine. You are looking at it in the present moment -- for example, it is spring now. Close your eyes and imagine that you have now arrived in autumn. You are now in autumn, and only then do you see it. This is the first exercise to do, and then you look at it and see what you feel.

This exercise can be practiced not only with trees, but also with other things. Whenever you have nothing to do, you can practice with anything you see -- walking along the roadside, you can practice anytime, anywhere. This exercise is very easy.

This kind of exercise will automatically allow you to break free from a too-narrow focus on time.

The purpose of this exercise is to change the singularity of your orientation toward time, so that your orientation toward time can become diverse, so that you can wander and slide within time, and not focus your attention on time only at this one present point.

To some extent, it will break the rigid connection between your perception and reality.

When you practice this exercise to a certain degree, it will break the rigid, fixed connection between your perceptual system and reality. We know how to perceive reality: you are standing here in the present moment, you look at the surrounding scenery, and you have a feeling and perception of it. Now let yourself perceive it at a different time -- you say, "How can I change it? I am in spring right now, how can I change to autumn?" Then just imagine what autumn looks like. This is practicing the time focus of your perception, making it more flexible and less restricted.

For example, children can play so vividly that they can imagine themselves under the blazing desert sun, even though they are in the coolest air-conditioned room. While they are completely absorbed in their own activity, they are at the same time quite aware of their normal environment.

Yet adults often fear that any such playful, non-normal alteration of consciousness is dangerous, and worry that the imagined situation will overwhelm the real one. This is impossible.

We are always afraid that what we imagine is too real, worried that the imagined thing will overwhelm the real thing -- this is something we cannot accept, and we feel it is a dangerous thing. Go ahead and do it with confidence; it will not happen. Just like children, they know which is real and which is play -- you are the same. Practice boldly and without fear.

Many adults have been taught that imagination itself is suspect.

We are always told by others that imagination itself is suspect, not so reliable. This attitude not only strongly hinders any artistic creativity, but also hinders the imaginative creativity needed to deal with the very nature of physical events.

When you cannot use imagination to solve problems, your way of handling problems is always extremely rigid, and you cannot solve problems creatively. Let me give an example here, which will be easier to understand.

In a factory, they produce bottled beverages. The beverage filling machine automatically fills beverages into plastic bottles, but this filling machine is not one hundred percent reliable. There is always a probability of a few thousandths or even a few ten-thousandths -- a bottle comes through and it is not filled, it is missed, and the empty bottle passes on through. The next process is to pack the filled beverages into boxes for shipping. If an empty bottle gets packed in, consumers will complain, and distributors will not accept it either.

The factory raised the requirement to solve this problem: how to find these empty bottles on the assembly line and keep them from being packed into boxes? After receiving the task, the engineering department began inventing and creating all kinds of machines -- using robots, using light detection, inventing mechanical arms to identify empty bottles on the moving assembly line and grab them out. It was estimated to cost a lot of money, and the accuracy of this automated system was still not one hundred percent reliable.

After the proposal was submitted, the factory director could not say exactly why, but he just felt something was off -- how could such a problem require such a complicated solution? At this point, a worker on the shop floor proposed a solution. He was neither an engineer nor a scientist. He said, why make it so complicated -- just set up a big ventilation fan next to the assembly line, adjust the wind speed to a reasonable level, and it will automatically blow the empty bottles over and off the assembly line; the full bottles will not be blown over. That simple -- a problem that one electric fan can solve, why does it need to be so complicated?

What I want to say is this: when you possess the ability to see through to the essence of things, solving problems will have this effect of moving a thousand pounds with four ounces, and you will not fall into rigid, inflexible ways of solving problems. This approach applies not only in science and on production lines, but also in your life, your career, your work, your emotional relationships, and your family relationships -- you can always find better solutions, and this requires your imagination and creativity. If you do not have this, you will often end up using the clumsiest method to solve things.

Imagination and Creativity

Humanity's creative alertness, its precise sensory focus in time and space, and its ability to respond quickly to things are, of course, all extremely important characteristics.

This is correct -- the accurate perception of time and space, precise sensing, knowing where you are right now and in what time frame, as well as the ability to respond quickly to events and perceive them, these are all essential and extremely important abilities for surviving in this world.

The human imagination allows it to develop the use of tools, and gives birth to its power of invention.

The human imagination allows him to develop the use of tools, and gives birth to his power of invention. Imagination allows him to plan in the present for things that may happen in the future -- he can transcend the existence of time and space, and this is the source from which his power of invention is born.

There are especially many examples of this. For instance, Elon Musk invented SpaceX, the rocket launching thing¹. He has been doing rocket launches for a very short time, maybe only a few years, but everyone has already seen how outstanding he is. His small company, with only a few short years of development in rocket carrying capacity, has already surpassed the most advanced, highest-capacity rockets on the mainland, even reaching more than twice their capability. And he only has a fairly small team.

How did he increase the rocket's carrying capacity? It was very simple -- he strapped many engines under the rocket. Normally a first-stage rocket uses at most four engines for propulsion; beyond that people stopped doing it, because scientists found that with each additional engine, the probability of failure increases. Suppose the failure probability of one engine is 1%; with four linked together, the probability for the whole system is no longer 1%, but greater than 1% -- the more engines, the greater the probability. If one engine stops working, the whole rocket may come crashing down, and the launch fails. So traditional science was limited at this point.

But Musk did the opposite -- if one engine's thrust is not enough, then strap on six, eight, nine, ten, twelve. This way the cost is lowest, far lower than designing a more powerful engine, because he is bundling existing engines. Everyone said this design is unreasonable, the launch success rate will drop. So he solved the problem with an even simpler method: suppose launching the rocket requires 9 engines, then I will strap on 11 or 12, adding one or two extra. In case one or two engines fail, the thrust from the remaining engines is still enough, and the rocket can still fly up. Besides, the failure probability of these engines is not that high -- you would only encounter it once in 100 launches, so what is the big deal?

He solved the problem very easily this way, and it also made the rocket manufacturing cost very low -- the first-stage launch unit can even be recovered², and the engines can be reused; you only need to add fuel. The launch cost is less than one third of a normal launch³. A person who had never built rockets before became a dark horse in the aerospace industry in one stroke. Now NASA, the American space agency, has been hiring its spacecraft to launch many things⁴, and it is also launching the Starlink system itself⁵, so that in the future no one will need WiFi or cell phone networks -- they can communicate directly with satellites.

The same was true when he invented the battery-electric Tesla. At the time he wanted to make electric cars, but the production volume was small and the scale was small, and no manufacturer was willing to mass-produce cheap lithium batteries for him -- if you custom-made a single integrated lithium battery according to the shape of his car, the cost would be extremely high. So he thought of a very simple solution: use the rechargeable AA batteries available on the market, namely Panasonic's 18650⁶, the simplest rechargeable battery. He connected all these batteries together -- if one is not enough, then ten thousand; if ten thousand are not enough, then twenty thousand; if twenty thousand are not enough, then thirty thousand. Tens of thousands of AA batteries linked together became Tesla's battery power system.

This was actually a move out of desperation, because at the time no large battery company was willing to produce custom batteries for him. But he turned misfortune into a blessing; this approach instead became his unique feature: it allowed each battery to reach maximum efficiency, and through the battery management system, charge and discharge in an orderly way, effectively improving battery life and cycle count. If it were one large integrated battery, it would degrade easily. But Tesla's batteries plus the management system, as far as we can see now, after about 100,000 or 120,000 kilometers, the entire battery has degraded less than 10%, around 8%⁷ -- this is extremely, extremely good.

Its lowest battery now, a tiny AA battery's energy storage, has already reached 4,800 milliamp-hours⁸, and the entire car's battery power has already reached 140 watt-hours per kilogram⁹. If an electric car carries one ton of batteries, the total energy is 140 kilowatts -- very powerful. The power configured for ordinary electric cars is around 80, 90, or 100 kilowatts¹⁰, and that is already enough for a range of five or six hundred kilometers.

What I want to tell everyone is this: this kind of imagination and creativity can truly change our lives and change our world. For an individual, it creates wealth for you. For Musk, Tesla has now surpassed all the automobile companies in the world¹¹, surpassing Toyota, surpassing Ford, surpassing those companies that have been developing for over a hundred years, and became number one in one stroke. He only sells a few hundred thousand cars a year, far behind others' sales of six million¹², but because of his vision and his grasp of the future -- he was certain that the future is the world of electric vehicles, and that autonomous driving will be realized sooner or later -- investors all over the world recognized his vision. Just like Bill Gates back then, who believed that every person should have a computer on their desk¹³; he worked toward it, and it came true.

If we now move time forward 20 years, suppose today is 2040, will the cars running on the streets all be electric? Will there still be gasoline cars? There may be, but they will have become antiques, only for racing, games, or for fun in the park. If you have driven an electric car or used one, you can feel this sensation.

This session's lesson is very important; it puts the theory of Chapter Nine into the practical operational part. Chapter Nine is very theoretical, while this chapter is mainly about exercises, about operating in practice. So its importance is reflected here -- I hope you can practice these few exercises often in your daily life; the feeling of gain and attainment is impossible to describe in words. Just as Seth said, he cannot describe it in words; each person knows it through their own experience.

The First Exercise: Looking from a Different Time

The first exercise is like this: you see a tree right now, it is spring, and you imagine that you are seeing it in autumn — what kind of feeling do you have? Just think about that.

You are living in 2020 right now, and you imagine pushing forward ten years, to 2030, and you are still standing in the same place, still standing in the same position, and you look up at the world again — what will that world look like? You say, I don't know — use your imagination. Imagine what the world will look like in 2030: what kind of phones we will be using then, what kind of software, what kind of internet, what kind of cars we will drive, what kind of food we will eat, what kind of houses we will live in. What will the relationships between people be like? What changes will have happened in society? Imagine it — you have to imagine it.

It is just that simple, just treat it like playing a game. You write down "My 2030," and ten years later you open it up and see whether you were right. You are just practicing — play with it.

You say this is too complicated, who can say for sure what will happen ten years from now? Then imagine what will happen one year from now, imagine what will happen next week, or even imagine what will happen tomorrow. You say you can predict tomorrow's events with 80 percent accuracy, so then say it, and see which parts you did not get right, and correct them. Keep training this ability of your imagination. After practicing for a period of time, once you can describe tomorrow's events pretty accurately, then talk about the day after tomorrow, and then train yourself to talk about what might happen next week. If you keep practicing, one day your ability will become stronger and stronger. Even if you cannot predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy, your predictive ability will already be far, far stronger than that of the average person.

At the same time, do not forget that you also have the tool of dreams. In everyday life, you do not have the ability to foresee the future, but in dreams you do. The events in dreams are all mixed together, they have no time restrictions — whether something happens in the present, the past, or the future is not certain. There is no concept of time there. If you still have this ability, and you connect it with dreams, then regarding future events, you can imagine — and then you will be really something.

Imagination Must Operate Beyond the Precise Orientation of the Senses

This means that, to a certain degree, imagination must operate beyond the precise orientation of the senses. That is to say, you must learn to let your imagination go beyond your limitations of time and space, beyond your current perception of the present. The precise orientation of your senses is this three-dimensional world of ours, it is your present perception. You have to operate beyond that, and only then will imagination be effective.

Therefore, imagination is freely employed in the dream state. In dreams there is no precise orientation of your senses; in dreams what is used is the inner senses, which are an entirely different sensory system.

Fundamentally speaking, in essence, imagination cannot be bound to reality. Because if it were, then people would only have physical, material feedback, and we as humans would only be able to receive material feedback from the three-dimensional world. If that were all there was to imagination, then there would be no invention or creation. Beyond the information within the physical environment, there is always additional information that can be obtained. If you bind imagination to reality, then you cannot obtain anything, and there will be no invention or creation. You must learn to think freely and boundlessly.

Where does this information that lies beyond reality come from? It is the result of the brain's active play. The brain dares to play games. When the brain employs the inner senses that operate beyond the structures of time and space to experiment with the formation of events, it obtains this information. This information that lies beyond the three-dimensional world is obtained in dreams, in the process of your experimenting and practicing, allowing an event to take form. As you continually rehearse, acting out all possible events one by one — just like a child playing a game, playing through all the possibilities of that game, just like a child playing a video game, playing through all the levels, all the possibilities, all the branches — it is the same principle. He is experiencing, learning, and feeling from within it. So play is very necessary.

Second Exercise: Putting On Another Time

The second exercise, before you go to sleep, you put on another time.

See yourself living in a past or future century. For example, suppose you are now living in 1920, how would you feel? Suppose you are now living in 2120, that is, you jump forward one century and backward one century, one hundred years before and one hundred years after. You try to put on the outer garment of such a time.

Suppose before sleep you let yourself imagine: I am going to sleep now, but my time has returned to 1920, and when I enter the dream, I will be in 1920, I will be there, and I want to go experience it.

Or just simply pretend. If you say that imagining things from one hundred years ago and one hundred years from now is too difficult, then you can lower the difficulty a bit. You can pretend that you were born ten years earlier or ten years later, born twenty years earlier or twenty years later, any of these will do. Shorten a century a little, and place yourself in a different time. Suppose you were born twenty years earlier, then you would be twenty years older than you are now; if you were born twenty years later, then you would be twenty years younger than you are now.

So you might ask, what difference does it make? It does make a difference. If you were born twenty years later, your life experience would not be the same as it is now. You would feel that the you born twenty years later experienced different events from the you born twenty years earlier. Suppose you were born twenty years earlier, then your experience would again be different from your present one.

For example. Suppose you were born in 1978. Born twenty years later, you would be a person born in 1998, so this year you would only be twenty-two years old, simple, right? Born twenty years earlier, you would be a person born in 1958, and now you would be sixty-two. You see, many national leaders, many governors, deputy governors, and cadres are of this age -- all born in the years around fifty-eight, fifty-nine, including sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two. So you might possibly be a governor now, or if things went well, you might have gone to the central government and become some leading cadre, all of it possible. Just think about it: born twenty years earlier or born twenty years later, what thoughts would you have.

You can do this exercise every night before sleep, just treat it like playing a game, and there is no loss in it. Playing a game still costs electricity; this costs no electricity, no memory, and you do not need to buy the latest Sony PS5 game console, nothing is needed at all. And playing this is even more interesting than that Sony game console, it is just a single thought. All right, just carry such a thought with you, this is the second exercise.

Learning to Play It

I hope everyone, just like when we studied Section 3 of Chapter 3, will get a pen and paper and list out all the exercises in this section, in case you forget them later. List them out, practice them when you have nothing to do, it is a lot of fun. Just treat it like a game. Absolutely, absolutely, Seth said, treat it like a game, do not take it too seriously. It is play, so what is there to be afraid of? Play.

Look, he says right below:

You should do it playfully, you should play, learn to play it. Play with these worlds, bring yourself out to play too, bring your own consciousness out to play too.

Do not let your own consciousness be limited only to "I was born in 1978," do not. Remove the limits you have set for yourself, tell yourself you were born in 1958, you are now 62 years old, in a few years or perhaps already retired, what should you be doing? What are you doing? What things have you experienced that you had never experienced before? Think about it. Then think again, suppose you were born in 1998. Do not think about them all at once, think about one each night, you cannot put two together or it will get all tangled up.

He asks you to practice in this way, which allows you to separate the category of time, to take yourself out of the fixed axis of time, out of that mosaic of space and time. Your present picture is like a mosaic of space and time, you are embedded in it, and you are extremely approving of this. Now he asks you to take this mosaic out. You are still you, your consciousness is still your consciousness, only the time you are in has changed, it is no longer this present time. Then the you at this moment should change — suppose time has not changed, but your age has changed, your life experience has changed, what would you be like?

This is an existence within your own inner self. You have a very good subjective feeling, which is to separate yourself from time and focus only on your inner existence and inner feelings. Because your inner self is originally separate from time, it is just that we forcibly impose a temporal environment on it, and at the time you incarnated, you chose a starting point in time for yourself. But that inner soul of yours can exist at any time, it is not limited by time. It is not that you must be born at that time, that is not how it was set up in the first place.

The point in the middle is the exercise, to strip yourself out of the limitations of time, to let you imagine beyond space and time, to bring your greatest imagination into play. In this way, the restrictions your three-dimensional world places on you will all cease to exist. It will give you a feeling of openness, a feeling of sudden and complete difference. That feeling is your own feeling, I cannot describe it for you, because everyone has experienced different things, and everyone has lived in a different era. You have to feel for yourself what your own subjective feeling is like.

Third Exercise: Waking Up in a Different Era

After the break he continued:

You should encourage your creativity, and use your imagination to break away from your usual focus on time and space.

When you are about to fall asleep, imagine that you are in the same place -- sleeping right in this room where you are now -- but at some moment in the distant past or the distant future. Then see or hear what is there, what exists there. Go to sleep carrying this kind of imagination with you.

There is a slight difference between this exercise and the one just now; these are not the same exercise. The first exercise is, before going to sleep, setting the year of your birth one hundred years earlier or one hundred years later, and then feeling what changes have occurred -- it is time that has changed. But this one is assuming that you are already living one hundred years later or one hundred years earlier, and the moment you wake up, the time has already changed. There is a subtle distinction between the two.

To put it simply, one hundred years may involve life and death; it may cross over that boundary. For example, suppose you go back twenty years. Suppose you were born in 1958, and you imagine that you were born in 1958, but you are still in 2020 now, only you were born in 1958, so you have lived twenty more years of life. Then what happened during those twenty years -- you fill that in yourself, using your imagination. And after you have filled it in, you imagine that you are now a person born in 1958, that you are already sixty-two years old, that you are in 2020 now -- what should you be doing?

The reverse is the same. You were born in 1998; the next day you can practice that. You were born in 1998, so your life has twenty fewer years, but from childhood onward, your experiences as a child and as a teenager were different from before, because this person was born twenty years later. Such a you born in 1998 would inevitably have experienced a life different from the you originally born in 1978, and even more different from the one born in 1958. Yet you still wake up in 2020, you live in 2020, and then what will happen to you?

That is, suppose you are an old grandpa born in 1958, or a handsome young man or a beautiful young woman born in 1998 -- either is fine. Use these two different ways to imagine it.

Now the exercise below can be called the third exercise, or it can be called a variation of the second exercise. That is, crossing time and space -- before going to sleep, suggest to yourself: I am falling asleep now, about to fall asleep, and now I imagine that when I wake up it will be 1974, or 1989, or 1997 -- any year is fine, you can set any year you like. Then go to sleep carrying that year with you, and suppose you tell yourself that the moment you enter the dream, it will be that era.

Or go backward in the other direction: suppose you now tell yourself that it is already 2078, already fifty-eight years later. Imagine that fifty-eight years later, you are still your current age. In the second exercise, your age does not change; you are still your current age, only the time you live in has changed, the era you live in has changed.

These two exercises are both training you to move yourself away from your current focus on time and space, so that you no longer pay attention to this present moment, so that you remove yourself from it. Then what will you see? What will you hear? What is there? Carry your imagination with you and experience it.

Isn't this game fun? Just play it, and you will play it with great delight. This is more fun than a video game console. The more vivid your imagination, the better; the more real, the better.

The Fourth Exercise: Change the Location

The fourth exercise, he says, imagine that you are in a completely different part of the world, but at this present moment. This fourth exercise keeps the time unchanged, but the place changes.

Before you go to sleep, tell yourself: I am falling asleep now, about to go to sleep, but I assume that the place I am sleeping is not the place I am in now -- assume that I am sleeping in a small town in the south of France. As for the time, it is not now either, but two days ago. For example, say you were still in the south of France the day before yesterday, and you returned home today; or you push the time back, saying that a week from now I am going to the south of France on a business trip. It is the same thing.

Why does he not let you use the present moment? Because the present moment is too fake. You are right here, right now, so the story you imagine is too fake, too forced. So he lets you place it on the previous day or a week later. What is good about the previous day? Those things have all been experienced. Now you just imagine all the things that happened to you the day before yesterday, but the place where they happened is a small town in the south of France, not the space you are in right now. Just think through again what happened the day before yesterday -- what you did in the morning -- and then switch the scene to another city, another location.

Let your imagination run free. I was just giving an example. You can think of anywhere you like. You can think of yourself in Africa, or in Northern Europe, or even in a certain city within the country, or in some place you like. Why does he not use your present moment? Because in the present you are right here, and he is afraid you will break character, afraid that as you play this game you will suddenly break character, and then it would not be fun anymore, would it? He lets you set it at a time before or after, and by the way, this also practices the exercise above -- this is a simplified version of the third exercise. The third exercise asks you to place it farther away, things several years, several decades, or even over a hundred years later; whereas this one only places it a few days before or a few days after. For you, it is actually not difficult at all. The only difficulty lies in changing the location -- the place where the story happens changes.

The third and second exercises kept the location unchanged, while the time changed. Now this is the fourth exercise, and the location changes.

Then he directs you to make variations of these exercises yourself. What kind of variations? It only provides you with a way to practice, and it lets you change these exercises yourself. You can discover what it is doing -- it is making you change your space and time, making you consider yourself from different focal points of space and time. Since you already know the purpose of the exercise, you do not have to practice exactly according to its method. You can create some exercises on your own, or expand the exercises a little.

For example, change your gender as well -- is that not a variation? Change your parents as well -- is that okay? It is okay too. Change your partner as well -- that is okay too. These are all variations of the exercises. Remember, these are all variations of the exercises. After you have become proficient in the earlier exercises, you can freely change and adjust them as you like.

What the Exercises Will Teach You

What is the purpose of his exercises like these? He says:

They will teach you what cannot be explained.

I have no way of telling you what they will teach you, because this cannot be described in words. You will only know once you do the exercises. Because they will provide a dimension of experience -- a dimension -- a feeling about yourself that perhaps only you can understand. It is simply a feeling about yourself. You will have a completely new feeling about yourself, but what that completely new feeling is, only you yourself will understand; no one else will know. Again, I cannot tell you or describe it to you either; that is your own affair. I am only telling you the method of the exercise. What you can learn from it and what you gain from it, only you yourself can understand.

Isn't this game quite fun? Take out these four little games and practice them when you have nothing else to do.

Usually you perceive your existence within a recognized framework of reality -- who you are, your identity, what year you are living in, where your present life is located. You are within the present framework of time and space, with some objective environment existing around you. You perceive your own existence within such a framework. Now he is asking you to change to another framework. These exercises will teach you to find a feeling about yourself, but a feeling about yourself from within another framework, one that is separate from the world in which you ordinarily live.

And what is more, you will be better able to deal with present circumstances. Through these exercises, you are not being asked to escape from reality, but rather to truly know yourself from a perspective that transcends time and space. Once you know yourself from a perspective that transcends time and space, you are not doing it in order to escape present circumstances, but rather to deal with your present practice better. You will handle present events better.

Because the imagination you have practiced will bring you increasingly valuable material -- that is, information. Through these exercises of your imagination, your imagination will already be completely different from before. You can imagine it. Although you may not have started practicing yet, you may already be impatient to do these exercises. But I hope you will be patient for a little while. After this lesson is finished, practice them before you go to sleep at night.

After you have practiced, the improvement of your imagination will bring you increasingly valuable material. You can try it. We will not go into detail here, because each person's own feelings are different. You can share your own experiences from the exercises in the comments or in the group; that is very magical. If you do not wish to share, that is fine, it does not matter. If you are excited and want to share, then share; it does not matter.

Don't Use Imagination to Solve Current Difficulties

At first, don't just use your imagination to solve your current difficulties. Why? He said earlier that you should not tie your imagination to your physical time. When you tie your imagination to your physical time, your imagination becomes limited.

He says:

I tell you once again, you must credit your creativity to your imagination.

And because of your beliefs about what is practical, you block the solution to this problem. Because your creativity depends on your imagination, and if you use your imagination to solve the difficulties right in front of you, those difficulties are limited by the environment, limited by many, many conditions. For example, if you are currently a person with no money, and you try to solve the problem of how to become wealthy, it will inevitably be subject to many limitations. These limitations will greatly strike at your imagination, causing you to restrict your imagination, and you won't be able to come up with better ideas.

What this is telling you is that in your current environment, you are working at a company right now, with a fixed monthly salary. If you now imagine yourself as a multimillionaire or a billionaire, you don't know how to achieve it, and your imagination is dried up. Why? It's not your problem, not because your imagination is insufficient, not because your ability is lacking, and not because you don't possess such potential—it's because you've used it in the wrong direction. Don't use your imagination to solve the practical problems right in front of you, because as soon as you do that, your imagination dries up. When your imagination dries up, your creativity is gone. Without creativity, how can you change the world? How can you change your current environment? The only thing you can use is your creativity.

So just remember, what is the purpose of these exercises he's giving? It's to let you detach from your current state. After you've detached, after you've finished roaming freely in these exercises, after your imagination has been trained to become tremendously powerful, then you come back and look at your current problems—they'll be a piece of cake, no longer problems at all. Why? Because by then you can already think, imagine, and handle problems beyond time and space, and you are no longer limited by your current environment. All the limitations you currently see in front of you will no longer be limitations at that point. The things you now consider to be facts—when you've finished practicing your imagination and it has become powerful, when you come back you'll discover that these are no longer the conditions that limit you. You are not subject to these limitations.

But not right now. If you haven't practiced, you will certainly say, well, facts are facts, I am just poor, and that's a fact. Then you're done for—there's no way for you to develop further.

Children's Games

He uses a playful heart to do these exercises. You must use a playful heart to do them.

These exercises will trigger other creative times. That is perfectly normal, so do not worry about it. Whatever it triggers, just let it happen. These exercises also involve the use of certain inner senses. Although these inner senses will not give you objective sensations -- because you are doing these exercises in dreams, they will not give you the kind of sensations you get in the three-dimensional world -- you will nevertheless understand your everyday life situation better. You will gain deeper insight into the nature of these events and understand the present circumstances of your daily life. Because you will activate this inner ability.

Just as you did when you were a child, you can subjectively perceive other people's reality. What does "other people's reality" mean? It means you can go and experience other people's lives. What were you doing as a child? You were pretending. You were role-playing. You were playing your father, your mother, and when you played house, you played your brothers and sisters. When you were a child, you were actively living other people's lives, feeling other people's reality. When you do these exercises, is it not the same? It opens up your inner ability.

Suddenly there is an inner knack that allows you to have a much greater sensitivity to other people's feelings than you have now. Within you, there is a knack, and once this knack is opened, you possess an ability to feel other people's feelings more strongly than others can. Your feeling of other people becomes penetrating, cutting straight to the essence. Your feeling of other people is no longer the vague, superficial kind you have now. That feeling is completely different from what you have now. The person in front of you will become more vivid, more full, with more breadth and depth. He has his own historicity. When you see the person in front of you, he is no longer just this present moment. You can feel this person's past and future. You can feel the thickness of his thoughts.

And this kind of perceptive ability requires you to open this inner knack. How do you open this knack? All the previous exercises are meant to help you open this knack. Just imagine, once this knack is opened, how interesting you will be, how much fun life will be, how playful it will be, and how strong your abilities will become.

Of the four exercises above -- the second and the third can be counted as one big exercise -- the first asks you to change to another time to feel a natural object; the second asks you to change your own age; the third asks you not to change your age but to change the era you are in; the fourth asks you to change the space you are in, a change of geographical location. These several exercises are meant to break down your rigid impression of time and space, to break the limitation by which you have firmly confined yourself to time and space, and to set you free.

Because the nature of your psyche is itself not limited by time and space. It is you who have artificially imposed limitations upon it. If you do not impose limitations upon it, it has no limitations in itself. Once again, the brain's ability comes from your mind. The brain's ability comes from the elevation of the mind. When your mind is elevated, the brain's ability is elevated.

Therefore, although you learn to concentrate your consciousness within your body -- to focus your consciousness on your physical body, and you must be this way, because otherwise your physical body cannot survive -- yet your inner senses roam over a far greater range. Your inner perception is not limited by your physical matter, not limited by your time and space. It roams over a much broader range. So then, before sleep, imagine your consciousness traveling along a road.

The Fifth Exercise: Traveling in Dreams

This is the fifth exercise. Before going to sleep, you can imagine your consciousness traveling along a road. Say, for example, the road right outside your front door. Just follow it, keep going down it. You can imagine how far you can go, just think about it. You say, I don't want to just walk straight the whole way; maybe I'll take the subway in the middle, or get on a train. That's fine. If you need to take the subway, take the subway. If you need to get on a train, get on a train. If you need to take a plane, take a plane. Just follow your consciousness as it goes. Wherever it wants to go, you follow along. See where you can go, what you can see, what you come to understand. Follow your consciousness, keep going down this road all the way.

Or you could cross the whole world. You could also say, I want to take another trip around the globe. That's fine. Follow your consciousness as it goes. He says, whatever you like is fine, whatever you want is fine. The world is so big, I want to go see it. Just get up and go. In your dreams, take a trip where you just get up and go, and go have a look.

Forget your body. Temporarily forget your body, and travel with your consciousness. But don't try to leave your body for the sake of this exercise — he emphasizes this. Don't say you're going to leave your body. Don't do out-of-body experiences. After you leave your body, it's your spirit body doing the perceiving, and you're no longer using your imagination. Out-of-body experience is not for practicing your imagination. Out-of-body experience is another kind of perception belonging to your spirit body, and it has nothing to do with imagination practice. What does this exercise ask you to do? Practice letting your imagination follow your consciousness, not practice leaving your body. So be sure to remember this. Don't get it wrong. This is not training you for out-of-body experience.

Tell yourself that you are on an imaginary journey. You say, traveling alone is too lonely. Can I add a companion? Sure. One person is too few. Get a bunch of friends to go out and play. Sure. Whatever you want is fine. You say, I just want to travel alone. That's fine too. Anything works.

If you choose a familiar destination, then imagine the houses you might pass along the way. But we suggest that sometimes it's easier to choose an unfamiliar one. I also suggest this: don't choose a place you're familiar with. Choose an unfamiliar destination. Why? Because if you do that, then while you're imagining as you go, you won't keep thinking about testing yourself, like, oh, is the scenery I'm imagining consistent with what I usually remember? There's a red house over there — well, is there really a red house there or not? In my imagination there's a house there, but actually maybe there isn't. The moment you think like that, you've broken out of the scene. Then you're not traveling with your imagination anymore; you're traveling with your memory. These are two different concepts. It's not asking you to travel with your memory. It's asking you to begin a new journey with your imagination, not to travel within memory. It's not testing your memory.

So you see, once you've studied up to this point, you understand why I put the Week 24 exercise, that Master Key system, together with the magical approach and The Nature of the Psyche. Because many of the exercises in them are very similar. They're all practicing your imagination. They're all helping you escape the limitations of your current time and space.

This fifth exercise, to some degree, your consciousness really is traveling. This is a real thing. It's just that it has come to this world, to the Earth, to your current social world, to travel in actuality.

He says, once again, the playful attitude is best. Traveling is also a kind of play. Traveling is your way of playing and relaxing. If you maintain this playful attitude, and remember the play of children, then this whole thing will be entirely delightful.

What am I emphasizing? When children play games, they play for the sake of playing. Children play for joy, they play for the sake of playing. For the sake of what? In the previous session he mentioned a transparent delight, right? That's what they're after. When you go out to play now, it's the same. Your travels in dreams are also for this — playing for the sake of playing. Don't bring purpose and utility into it, saying, this time I'm going out traveling in order to study and train my imagination, to see what my imagination can do. If you carry that with you, it's too exhausting. Then how is that playing? You're just bringing work along with you.

Don't be like that. Just use your imagination. Think as much as you can think, produce as much as you can produce. Don't push it. Don't force your own imagination. Don't say, you didn't imagine this part in enough detail, or you didn't imagine that part well enough. No, don't. Children don't act like that.

So remember this: don't be demanding of your own imagination. Don't hold it to strict requirements. Whatever you can think of, think of it. Whatever way brings you joy, go that way. Whatever way brings you delight, go that way. Whatever way makes you happy, go that way. You're playing a game in your dreams and you're still making it all tense and anxious — what's the point? Then what joy is left in living?

Scary Things

Even if your experience seems to be something scary, do not be afraid, be cheerful, and you will also recognize that they belong to the same category as children's games. Because there are some people whose thinking is different from ours, who have a fearful inner self. In the fearful inner self, when imagining, they will again produce some fearful things. He says do not be afraid, even if some scary things, some terrifying things happen, do not be afraid.

Why? Because there are things children have that children are not afraid of -- they know a game is a game, and they often play that kind of ghost-catching game. Although while playing they are very tense, very excited, very immersed, they know it is a game. As soon as a parent says come back and eat, they immediately go home, they know it is fine, that ghost is just imagined.

Children often startle themselves, and they also often scare themselves. If you observe children playing games, they often scare themselves, jumping at every little thing. This behavior has quite a few reasons. Why do children scare themselves? Adults also often scare themselves -- you say I would never be afraid, do not scare myself -- but people often watch horror films for the same reason. Are not the people who watch horror films just trying to scare themselves? If a horror film is not scary, can it still be called a horror film?

Usually both body and mind feel weary, and they are really seeking dramatic tension. Life is too dull, watching a horror film gives some excitement, otherwise life is just not interesting. Because our body and mind are tired, our body and mind feel weary, life is not interesting, watching a horror film for some excitement is very normal. Many people like to watch those police-and-robber films, action films, violent films, gunfight films, disaster films -- the purpose is all the same: seeking dramatic tension. They want to seek dramatic tension in this life, so that their life can be rich and colorful, providing material for their dried-up imagination. While watching, they have a sense of immersion: what would I do if I were there? If I were in this room, and this ghost pounced from behind, what would I do? They will have this sense of immersion, bringing this kind of dramatic tension to their own dull and boring life. This is something people need.

People scare themselves for many reasons, and they have known this since childhood. Under ordinary circumstances, through the release of hormones that have been suppressed by repressive habits -- watching horror films can release many hormones that normally cannot be released. You break out in a cold sweat all over, your heart races, adrenaline is secreted rapidly, and that feeling is different. After such a series of bodily reactions, your body is flushed clean, and those unreleased hormones are released in this situation. In other words, in a state where adrenaline surges to an extremely high level, you get a refresh, you get a refresh again.

So do not be afraid. Even in this imagined world, even if you experience these things, it is the same. For example, suppose in the previous exercise, suppose you were born in 1958, you would have exactly experienced the Cultural Revolution. Some things during the Cultural Revolution were indeed very terrifying, and you might experience those. In the imagined world, he tells you in advance, I am also giving you a heads-up here, do not be afraid, go experience it, let the horror film be even more horrifying.

The body demands release, and your mind is the same, your mind also needs release. A frightening dream, even a frightening daydream, is the same, it can all achieve this purpose -- release. The body gets release. In an ordinarily plain and uneventful life, how can you get release? There is no way to release.

You say my life demands this kind of plainness, I just like living this kind of plain and uneventful life, that is what is real. Then you have only understood half of it correctly. A plain and simple life is indeed real, but this way of riding a roller coaster is also real. You cannot say that I sit there plainly, brewing a pot of tea, quiet and natural, that is the true essence of life; while other people riding roller coasters, going clubbing, going to nightclubs, that is not normal, that is not real? Only you are real, and when other people dance until their heart rate reaches 120, 150, that is not real, and only when your heart rate is 50, 60, as calm as still water, is that real? Who certified that for you? No one did.

What does he himself think? He tells you that a frightening dream or daydream can both achieve this purpose. This creative game of his mind often provides symbolic time. In this creative game your mind plays, it can often provide some symbolic time, and this symbolic time will lead to a therapeutic physical reaction. When you play this game, some symbolic events will be produced -- for example, terrifying scenes, joyful scenes, all kinds of different scenes -- all of them are symbolic events.

Remember, just as you use your imagination to do these exercises, some symbolic events will occur. The occurrence of these events has a physical healing effect for you. It can also serve as a suggestion after your dream. When you wake up from a dream, these events that occurred -- these symbolic events, in the process of the imagination playing games, in these four or five games you did -- they carry a certain symbolic meaning, and they are a suggestion for you after you wake from the dream. It may be healing for your body, or it may be a suggestion for you in dealing with real life after you wake from the dream. It will bring you inspiration -- you will discover that things you encounter in real life are very similar to things I encountered while dreaming, or in a certain era, at a certain moment, in a certain place, and at that time I solved it using that method. This burst of inspiration is this kind of post-dream suggestion. And that is also a hint often offered for remedial action -- telling you which of your current matters have remedial measures, which actions you can take to get improvement, he will give you some hints.

I mention this again, and we mention this only to point out that there are similarities between certain dreams and certain children's games. Dreams and children's games have many similarities; they both use their creativity, and they both expand their creativity. This expansion of creativity and the development of imagination can both enrich the event, and can also provide a completely different angle and line of thinking for the resolution of your events.

And it shows that all dreams and all games are closely related to the creation and experience of events. How are the events of our three-dimensional world created? They are all created from here, and they are closely related. How does the experience of our three-dimensional world come about? Every thing we experience has its own experience, and part of that experience comes from dreams and from games. We will practice in dreams and games, experiencing what kind of experience one thing will bring. And the richer this practice and experience is, the richer your experience in real life will be -- rather than experiencing one thing with only one experience or one feeling, your experience and experience will be greatly enriched.

For example, you encounter something that is not good for you. Ordinarily you think it is just a bad thing, but in that state, you will discover that this thing will bring a series of subsequent effects. For example, getting into a car accident is just a bad thing, and then you have to deal with compensation, insurance, a whole series of complicated matters. But when you have experienced this kind of similar car accident in other dream scenarios, you will know that afterward it may lead to a series of other things, possibly some good things that you do not yet know about now. For example, some people met their life partner precisely because of a car accident. This is all possible. I am just giving an extreme example.

He said loudly: "The events of this session are complete." He said that this session's class is over. Then he asked two or three other questions, unrelated to this book, so they were not recorded. So this session ended at 12:12.

So today's interpretation ends here. I wish everyone a magical and beautiful day.

Session 794: Dreams, the Brain, and the Workings of the Mind

This session was held on Monday, February 21, 1977, at 9:31 p.m.

At the beginning, Seth said that early last week a friend had sent him a copy of his wife's double dream. A double dream is being aware that you are experiencing two dreams at the same time, or one dream inside another dream. Last Friday evening, when Jane and I were discussing this matter, I said that a double dream might be the two hemispheres of the brain each having its own dream, and those two dreams trying to blend into one ordinary consciousness. This was Rob's own understanding—he told Jane that a double dream might be the left brain doing one dream and the right brain doing another dream, and then in order to come together, they became a double dream.

I also said that each dream would carry the characteristics of the hemisphere it belonged to. For example, based on the functions we currently know about—the left hemisphere is more analytical or intellectual, and would have dreams that concretely express those qualities; while the creative right hemisphere would contain dreams involving symbols, art, and emotion. He said my concept was malformed. I further said that although the two hemispheres of the brain are separate, their brain stems—the left and right hemispheres are connected through the brain stem—so there is some communication between them, a great deal of communication. Likewise, there is also a connection between the two dreams in a double dream.

Later Jane suggested that I ask Seth to comment on this during the session. Of course there may be other reasons for double dreams, some of which I had discussed in The "Unknown" Reality.

Seth came through, and he said:

Now we will turn to your question, and we will answer the question that concerns you.

He first gave the first point, and the first point is very important:

First of all, your memories, feelings, and emotions, while they are connected with the body and leave traces, are separate from the body.

This point is crucial. Your memories, emotions, and feelings—although they are all connected with the body, and they all leave traces in the body—any feeling or emotion you have leaves a trace—but in essence, your memories, feelings, and emotions exist separately from your body. It is as if the experiences of your life were captured onto a film, onto a movie reel. In this scenario, the film is the body's tissue; the movie reel is the tissue of your body, the tissue of the brain. But the experience itself exists independently outside the film, and the film in any case cannot capture the full picture of the event.

Your body and brain are like a movie reel. Although they record the things that happen in life—including actual events, and also the simultaneous feelings, emotions, and sensations—this movie reel has nothing to do with the events themselves. It is only a record.

To put it one way:

Your brain's activity adjusts the speed at which you, as a physical creature, perceive the events of life.

This is interesting. What does your brain do? It adjusts you into a physical creature, and then the speed at which you perceive life events—it synchronizes the speed of your perception of events in life to match your body, a synchronization in time. You live in a three-dimensional world, and events that occur in a three-dimensional world must depend on, must rely on, the time constraints of the three-dimensional world. The time constraints under which events occur in the three-dimensional world must coordinate with your physical body, because your physical body has to live in this three-dimensional world. The speed at which events occur and the speed at which your body responds to them—these two speeds must be consistent.

If these speeds are not consistent, you would be in chaos, unable to keep up with anything. Let me give a simple example: you go to catch a subway or a bus. The subway comes in, stops, lets you board, and then the subway leaves again. The speed at which the subway comes in must be consistent with your brain's cognition of the subway arriving and with your body's reaction speed, so that you can get on the subway. Otherwise, if these two frequencies are different—for example, if the subway arrives at eight times normal speed, while your body reacts at two times slow motion—then you simply cannot get on the subway. By the time your brain commands your leg to step aboard, the subway has already left.

So your brain is what takes you as a physical body, as a creature, and takes all your movements and actions, their timing, and the events—the speed at which events occur in the three-dimensional world around you—and synchronizes the two, calibrates them into sync. Otherwise you could not live in a three-dimensional world. Theoretically speaking, those events could slow down, or they could be projected faster—both are possible. As for the speed of the subway just mentioned, how fast or how slow it should be—anything is possible, entirely possible.

Again:

In a manner of speaking, the sound, the picture, the unity of space, are all dubbed in.

In other words, in this three-dimensional world you live in, the sounds, pictures, and spatial unity happening around you—that is, their synchronicity, their consistency of pace, their coordination—require your brain to dub them in. Without this work by the brain, they would not be synchronized.

The film is projected at more or less the same speed. Suppose the speed of the events around you is the standard speed, one. Then your brain must also adjust its speed of perceiving time to one, so that you feel synchronized with the time around you. If your brain perceives in fast-forward, recording in high-speed footage, then what you see appears to be fast-moving things; if your brain records in slow motion, what you see is slow-motion footage. This is one of the main functions of your brain.

The body's senses join in together, giving you a dramatic sensory chorus. Each sound maintains perfect timing with all the other sensory modes, so that there is usually a harmonious sense of continuity, with no embarrassing interruptions.

This kind of synchronization, this kind of perfect coordination, allows you to feel that your life is very harmonious and continuous, without the kind of thing you see in early films—Chaplin's black-and-white movies¹⁴—where people bounce and jump along. That was because early films did not have enough frame rate; they recorded at 12 or 16 frames per second, while our normal human eyes require more than 24 frames per second¹⁵ for the picture to match our normal movements, to match our normal speed. Too fast or too slow would both cause our brains to produce a sense of discontinuity, different from our real world.

The same applies to your thoughts. If you listen to your thoughts patiently, you will find that your thoughts seem to arrive one after another, smoothly. It is not like watching a movie in fast-forward or slow motion, where one thought enters your mind extremely slowly, or another thought enters your mind extremely quickly. No. Your thoughts seem to maintain a relatively stable, smooth speed—one thought after another, one idea following another—and they more or less follow the sequence of external activities. Your thoughts are related to the external environment—you see a flower, and you think, oh, the flower is so beautiful; you hear a bird singing, and you think, the bird is singing. These are matched together; your thoughts also seem to be synchronized in time with the external environment.

The brain, like a movie screen, gives you a physical picture of those inner activities that themselves have no physical appearance, and provides it with stereophonic sound.

Those inner activities that themselves have no physical occurrence—that is, dreams—your dreams are inner activities that have no physical occurrence. Your brain still has to give them a physical picture, so in dreams there is a sense of imagery, and then sound is also provided.

This is what thoughts are.

Many of your thoughts have no physical occurrence. Your brain gives you a convenient and very necessary reference system for directing physical life. Your brain gives you a unity of time and space, which is to say it gives you a reference frame. If you have studied physics or any of the sciences, you know the function of a reference frame—without a reference frame, nothing can be discussed at all. So the brain gives you this reference frame of the space-time continuum.

The brain, then, puts together events that could be used to organize experience in many other ways, in the order that you consider appropriate.

The ways of experiencing events can be endlessly varied; it is not necessarily the case that event number one is followed by event number two, and event number two is followed by event number three. The experience of events can be completely unordered. But your brain, based on its own experiential judgment, arranges them into an appropriate sequence, like a storytelling director who edits the shots together according to the plot. It puts these events together in an appropriate order, so that you can have a sequential cognition of them.

Of course, the brain and the other parts of the body are attuned to your planet, to the earth.

Your brain also has to attune all the parts of the body—the cells, the various tissues and organs—to your earth time, synchronizing them with earth time. After synchronization, these countless temporal sequences can be synchronized, and your body, your molecules and cells, can take appropriate, suitable action in this three-dimensional world. Otherwise everything would be in chaos.

Your brain organizes these activities and transfers these events, but your brain does not originate them.

Just like our movie camera—we only record them, transfer them.

Events have an electromagnetic reality. Every event is an electromagnetic reality, and it is then projected onto a brain, in readiness for timely activation.

Every event—the possible events in the brain, including your thoughts and the events in dreams—they all have an electromagnetic reality, as real as matter exists, except that they are electromagnetic. And then these events, because they are electromagnetic, are projected onto your brain, in preparation for future use in the actual world, in your waking world—an advance preparation.

Your instruments can only accept certain levels of brain activity; they cannot perceive the activity of the mind at all.

The brainwave instruments that we humans study can only receive the activity of the brain; they cannot receive the activity of our mind. Only when the activity of the mind is imprinted onto the brain can your human brainwave instruments capture it. And the activity of the mind, before that—before it is imprinted onto the brain—you cannot capture it. But did it occur? It occurred, yet our instruments have no way to capture it.

This reminds me of a scientific experiment I discussed in Taking You into the Space of Thought—where people were asked to press a button when they saw something, for example seeing a number or a letter and pressing a button to confirm what they saw, and then through brain testing, to discover the correlation between pressing the button and the brain generating signals. The experiment found that 5 to 8 seconds before the person actually pressed the button with their hand, the brain had already made the judgment¹⁶. And 5 to 8 seconds before the brain made that judgment, your conscious mind was still not aware of it—yet your brain cells had already received it, and your muscles had already begun to prepare, but you did not know any of this. Only 6 to 8 seconds later could you realize: what I saw was what—was it red or blue—which button do I press.

But what I want to say is that what the instruments record is already late. And even before this, your mind already knew—before that image even appeared, your mind already knew. This is something that humans today cannot understand: how can you know something that has not yet happened? Whether a blue one or a red one will appear—how does your mind know? How does it prepare in advance to have your brain notify your body's muscles which button to press?

This is very simple. Because at the level of the mind, at the level of your consciousness, there is no concept of time. You think there is; it thinks there is not. So what you think is going to happen later is, for it, something that has already happened. It already knows what will happen to you later. Just as discussed earlier, many children have imagery in their brains about disasters that are about to happen, and they avoid disasters that might befall them—it is the same principle. They have this precognitive ability, this ability to see in advance. So we humans can only measure the activity of brain cells, but where does the activity of brain cells come from? It is our mind, our conscious mind, that causes it to arise.

Each dream, then, is imprinted in this way.

Your dreams are imprinted in this way—taking your mental activity, taking the electromagnetic reality of these events, and projecting them onto your brain.

For example, when one part or one hemisphere of the brain is activated, the corresponding parts of the other half are also activated. This all happens at levels that scientists cannot perceive.

When one part of the brain is activated, the other part or the whole is also activated. It is not as scientists believe—that one part of the brain is responsible for language, another part is responsible for perceiving creative artistry, another part is responsible for logical thinking and reasoning. That is our human cognition, and that cognition is wrong. And to call one side or the other the dominant hemisphere of the brain is ridiculous. When you say a person is controlled by the left brain or the right brain, or that at a certain period—for example, at this point in time your left brain is dominant and your right brain is subordinate; and when you are doing artistic creation, your right brain is dominant and your left brain is subordinate—these ideas are all very ridiculous, and wrong. Because the full richness of worldly experience requires the use of both hemispheres; both brains are needed. Your dreams are the same; they use both brains.

So here Seth directly rejected Rob's earlier hypothesis about double dreams—the idea that a double dream is the left and right brains each doing different dreams, connected through that link and then joined together. That is not the case.

However, in the dream state, the complete sensory picture that is usually projected by the brain and reinforced through bodily action is not necessary.

That is to say, in dreams, we do not need the cooperation of bodily action. We have a projection of an event in the brain, and that is all; it does not require our body to fully match it—for example, if the picture in your brain is of you running, it will not make your thigh muscles or body muscles actually run. There is no need for reinforcement through bodily action.

Those dream experiences, when reviewed or recalled in the morning, seem disconnected—lacking logic, or with blurred focus—precisely because they occur with a complexity that the ordinary waking brain cannot process. Our brain, when awake, can only process single, sequential events, while many events in dreams occur in parallel, and our brain cannot process them. So you feel that your dreams are completely illogical and disconnected—you dream that somehow you arrived at some place, and then suddenly the scene shifts, and you do not know why you are in another place, with no apparent continuity in between.

The body, obviously, must respond in what you recognize as the present.

Your body has to respond to the present moment—you want to eat, you want to drink, you need to act; that is called responding. Therefore:

The brain, then, neatly uses spaced neural responses to ensure a sequence in physical time.

What is meant by spaced neural responses? Your nerve transmission, from one neuron to another, must jump across a space in between. If you have studied neurology or human anatomy, you know that at the two ends of a synapse there is a transmitting apparatus and a receiving apparatus, with a neurotransmitter in between. Through this neurotransmitter, what is on one neuron is passed to another neuron. This kind of transmission is a spaced neural response, somewhat like dominoes—although they do not fall over, they just pass a signal along. Our brain uses this seemingly spaced but very neat, very fast neural response to maintain a normal temporal sequence in our physical time.

The entire physical reality is dependent upon sensory information that is timed.

We need this kind of temporal cognition and temporal sensation; this requires synchronicity, to give the body an opportunity to take precise action. For example, you want to drink water now; you pick up the cup, bring the water to your mouth—your mouth, tongue, and hand-eye coordination must all be coordinated and consistent. If the timing is not synchronized in the middle of this, it would be chaos—the cup reaches your mouth, but your mouth has not opened yet; would the water not spill all over your face? When the mouth should open is precisely coordinated and directed by the brain in the middle. You cannot keep your mouth open the whole time waiting—would that not make you look like a fool? The water has not even been brought over yet and you are already waiting with your mouth wide open—only a fool would do that. So coordination and cooperation are necessary; this is very normal.

In dreams, the senses are not so limited.

In dreams, your senses do not have this requirement of temporal synchronicity.

Present and future events can be safely experienced. Even what you would call probable events can be experienced.

Past events, present events, and future events can all be experienced by you simultaneously. Not only can past, present, and future events be experienced, but those possible, parallel probable events are also experienced by you. Because the body does not need to take action on them, you can experience many things at the same time. These probabilities occur simultaneously; if your body had to cooperate with all of them, that would be disastrous—two probabilities occurring at the same time, which one would your body act on? So in dreams this kind of thing can happen. In real life this function is screened out; you are not allowed to do simultaneous things, because you cannot do them anyway—you only have one body, and only one synchronized timeline running. You cannot drink water and run at the same time. I do not mean drinking water while running; I mean at the very least you cannot drink water and talk at the same time, right?

Because of the brain's necessary clarification—the brain needs to be clear about what it wants to do; things need to be simple, clear, and well-organized. And the larger portion of your own reality, from the perspective of your brain's clarifying function, is illogical and should not appear, so your brain cannot understand it, cannot support it, and it cannot emerge through the brain's support. The brain needs clarification, and your larger self cannot be clarified, so the brain automatically screens it out. That larger portion of you—the brain treats it as background noise, or as static—things it cannot understand are noise.

It is the mind, not the brain, that is the nonphysical counterpart of the brain.

You can think of the mind as a non-materialized brain—a brain without brain cells, without the physical brain—it is a nonphysical copy of the brain. It decides which data will activate the brain. The mind decides which of these events will be imprinted onto the brain, which ones will activate the brain.

The mind contains more than the brain does; there is more in the mind. It decides which ones will stimulate the brain, activate the brain.

The so-called ancient portions of the brain are the brain stem and the limbic system.

This is an ancient part of the brain. It contains the memory of the mind; the human brain contains this kind of mental memory:

Generally speaking, this is important data of will, but it does not need to be given conscious attention.

In your brain, the brain stem and limbic system, this ancient portion, records these memories of the mind, but it records them in a way that does not require your attention. So for you it is unconscious. Does it exist? It exists—our brain contains this memory of the mind, but it exists in a way that does not require your conscious attention. And the information of the mind stored in that location cannot possibly be given to your brain. Because the time scale on which that information is processed is one that the more refined portions of the brain can no longer process.

He used the word "refined," but actually "refined" is not quite right; it should be "sophisticated"—the original meaning of the word is worldly-wise, experienced in the ways of the world, the kind of state of someone who gets along well in the world. Your brain, although it is already very seasoned, very experienced—it handles daily affairs, manages every aspect of you, with an accuracy and precision beyond description—still cannot process that portion of information. Why? Because its time scale is completely mismatched with your brain's; the brain cannot process it.

The ancient levels of the body's own biological knowledge of probabilities—on those ancient levels activity occurs that results in cellular communication among all species.

Our body itself possesses this kind of biological knowledge of probabilities. What is meant by biological probabilities? It is the same as the probabilities of events. One level refers to your current biological nature—the cells of your body, going back to the level of cells, atoms, and molecules. Your body's biological nature contains within it the biological attributes of all things in the world. Do you remember the organization of consciousness that spans all species, discussed in Chapters 8 and 9? That is what is being referred to here. Do not think of your body as only your human body; within this body are also the attributes of the animals you have eaten. It is a cross-species existence. Your present consciousness, your present being, is a cross-species existence; your body is formed by this kind of consciousness. So your body is not merely a human body; it may simultaneously be the body of a leopard, the body of a tiger, the body of a bear, the body of a sheep, the body of a dog, the body of a pig. Your consciousness itself is the existence of a cross-species consciousness. The body has many kinds of knowledge of probabilities; this is the first level.

What does the second level refer to? Because your consciousness itself exists as multiple probabilities—just as events have multiple probabilities existing simultaneously, at the level of the mind. But your body is only one. Yet as your beliefs change—because your beliefs have many possible existences—as your beliefs adjust and change, your body will also change accordingly. From another angle, on different space-time levels there are different physical versions of you, different versions of your body. For example, there is a you who is not sick, and there is a you who is sick. Suppose you are sick now, and you want to become not sick; you only need to switch to the you in that parallel space-time, and you become the one who is not sick. So "biological knowledge of probabilities" refers to these two levels of things.

Yet the brain's own astonishing adaptability is such that one portion of its endowment can take over for any other portion, performing its activities while also performing its own.

Your brain's adaptability is extremely astonishing. One portion of your endowment can take over the function of another portion. This will be discussed later—when one part of your brain is damaged, another part will take over its work. It is not as human scientists have studied, that when a certain part of the brain is damaged, the function of that part is lost. That is not the case. Such cases have occurred—you have seen many news stories: someone had an object penetrate their brain, a steel rod went straight through, and the person could still get up, still had consciousness, and eventually the steel rod was removed. That portion of the brain had been damaged, but the person still lived normally. There was even a child, even more astonishing—his brain was entirely filled with water; there were no brain cells in the entire brain, and none of the brain's tissues, just a mass of water sloshing around inside. Everyone thought this person should be an anencephalic infant, with nothing at all, yet this child was like a normal child, with no abnormalities whatsoever; you could not see anything unusual about him. He simply had no brain. Such cases are not common, but you often see people like this appearing in various medical news reports.

So the human brain's adaptability is extremely, extremely astonishing. When one part is damaged, another part will take over its function, performing its activities while also performing its own. For example, one part of the brain was originally responsible for language, and another part might be responsible for the sense of smell. Suppose the part responsible for smell is damaged; the part responsible for language can then handle both language and smell.

This kind of biological probability is unknown to us. But:

Beliefs about what is possible and what is impossible often dull that equipment.

Because you think it is impossible, you believe each part of the brain has its own fixed function, and you think that if that part is damaged, you no longer have that ability. If you believe this, then that part really is gone, and the response of the alternative functional equipment becomes sluggish, and the effect is not obvious. If you firmly believe that the various parts of your brain can operate in coordination, then you will use the function of that part especially well, and even if a certain part of the brain is damaged, it will not be affected. There are many examples of this; many people have suffered brain damage, but later they recovered very well.

Here I want to make a simple analogy for everyone. What is your brain like? It is like a cloud computing machine. Cloud computing, I do not know whether you can understand what cloud computing is. The computing power of this cloud computing is astonishing. You need certain parts of its capabilities, and they each have their own functions, but when one part is damaged, another part can automatically take over for it. Or you can think of it as a group of computers; if some computers break down, other computers can step in. The brain itself has this function.

Although the neural connections are definite, and although basically a learned biological behavior is dominant, the various parts of the brain are nevertheless innately interchangeable, because they are directed by the actions of the mind.

The physical connections of the nerves are definite: which parts connect with which parts, and what functions and roles the neurons serve. Although in our ordinary lives, the behaviors in our biological nature stimulate the development of our nerves — when you learn a skill, learn to drive a car or ride a bicycle, it is actually a process of rebuilding the structure of your brain — these biological behaviors in the three-dimensional world play a key role in the rebuilding function of the brain. But that does not mean that if a certain part of your brain is lost or its function is missing, another part cannot take its place. The reason is that your brain is directed by your mind, and this mind does not exist at the level of the brain. This consciousness or mind that you think of does not exist inside your brain; it is a nonphysical existence. At the very beginning of this session, was it not said that these things do not depend on our physical bodies for their existence? So if a certain part of your brain is damaged, your mind will direct another part to take its place. It is that simple.

He says:

But the ability to live a fully conscious life is a natural gift of every portion of the body.

Why is this said? Let me give a simple biological example. In our intestines, we think the intestines are only responsible for digestion. That is wrong. There are many neurons and nerve cells in the intestines, exactly the same as the nerve cells in the brain, only not as many as in the brain — roughly one twentieth of the nerve cells in the brain¹⁷, about that amount. So in some extreme situations, when your brain truly suffers complete damage, the neural processing system in your intestines will also actively take on the function of controlling your consciousness. This is very interesting. The subtlety of the human body surpasses the understanding of modern biologists regarding the human body.

But in fact, if this were not so, the smooth, simultaneous synchronization of your body would be impossible.

It is precisely because every part of your body can provide the ability to live in a conscious state that your body can have this kind of simultaneous synchronization. That is to say, every part of your body is like your brain, extremely clear. For example, take the simple example of drinking water I just mentioned — your hand automatically reaches for the cup, just as precisely and accurately as your brain. When your brain gives the command to your hand, your hand actually already knows what kind of movement it should make. You can also regard this hand as a hand that has the thinking ability of a brain. That is what it means.

The brain has abilities that you do not consciously use, because your beliefs prevent you from activating those appropriate neural habits.

Our brain has some functions that we have not made use of, but because of our own beliefs, we prevent ourselves and do not bring them into play.

Certain portions of the brain seem to be dominant only because of the neural habits adopted in a particular civilization or era.

We often say whether the left brain is dominant or the right brain is dominant; that is because of certain neural habits we have formed in that civilization and that era.

But in other cultures of your past, a very different reality was experienced, as a result of encouraging different neural patterns, and of combining experience through other focuses.

In some other cultures of your past, you experienced a reality completely different from the present one. And in that era, in certain civilizations, different neural patterns were encouraged, rather than only one neural pattern as now. At that time, experience was combined through other focuses, unlike now, when we organize our experience only through the focus of the three-dimensional world. We look at everything from the focus of this three-dimensional world — what help this matter can give to our three-dimensional world, and to what extent it can improve our three-dimensional world. The focus you use to consider any problem is the focus of the three-dimensional world, including our experiences in dreams — whether this dream is of any help to our three-dimensional world, whether it can foretell something for me, whether it can indicate that I will be promoted or become rich. But the people of that era were not like this; they could combine experience through other focuses, so they could experience a reality completely different from ours.

He says, for example, in that era, in that civilization:

Dreams could be brought into focus with greater clarity, so that at least some of those experiences could be consciously utilized.

Dreams could be brought into the focus of our consciousness as clearly as things experienced during the day, so those experiences could be clearly used by us. But most of our dream experiences cannot be remembered, so even if we want to use them, we cannot — after experiencing things in dreams, only some vague or transformed remnants remain. When this situation occurs, you consciously use practical logic to handle the experiences of extracurricular activities — when this situation occurs, that is, when the scenes of dreams are brought into that conscious focus of real life.

Body Dreams: Communication and Healing at the Cellular Level

We need to consciously make use of those experiences that are, physically and logically speaking, extracurricular activities. By "extracurricular activities" here, he means those activities that are not focused primarily on our three-dimensional world. We need to make use of those experiences that we are ordinarily unfamiliar with, the non-three-dimensional, non-logical ones.

We register the traces of events that are unlike waking events in the brain, and then bring them into our consciousness. What we bring in are only traces, whereas what they bring in is a clear focus. Dream events are only partially recorded in the brain, but the brain keeps this kind of experience separate from waking experience -- we clearly know that this is a dream, and that what happens in a dream is not something that really happened.

In a manner of speaking, dreams can provide you with experience that at least is not encountered in time. Although dreams are recorded by your brain according to the brain's time scheme, with a sequence of before and after, within the dream itself there is a segment of timeless time. Theoretically speaking, certain dreams can provide you with the experience of a lifetime for you to draw upon, even though the dream itself may have used less than an hour of your time.

Theoretically speaking, certain dreams can provide you with the experience of a lifetime for you to draw upon, even though the dream itself may have used less than an hour of your time.

This is like the story of "The Yellow Millet Dream": in the time it took for a pot of yellow millet to cook, the man experienced his entire life in the dream, right up until he died, experiencing several decades in full.

In many respects, dreams are the invisible thickness of your normal consciousness.

Our normal consciousness cannot see this thickness, so dreams are very, very thick, and the experience within dreams is extremely rich. Yet to our consciousness, it is invisible -- you cannot see it, and these experiences are of no use to you either, because none of them can be felt by you.

Dreams necessarily involve both hemispheres of the brain. They activate the brain in a ghostlike manner -- because they do not involve concrete actions of your body, only certain images and responses in the brain. It is like a kind of preview, rehearsing the events of the dream in the brain, while at the same time reminding your brain of actions that might be taken in the future. It is a kind of choreography, rehearsing all the possible events. Whichever action will actually be taken in the future, every action has already been rehearsed.

If one wanted to discuss dreams thoroughly, it would require an almost impossible linguistic expertise.

Dreams are too rich, with too many layers. If we wanted to discuss this dream clearly, what is needed is not a question of how long we discuss it, but a specialized linguistic knowledge, and this knowledge is almost impossible -- we human beings do not have such linguistic knowledge to discuss dreams.

Although dreams do not involve actions of the whole body, the brain cannot record the entire dream. Dreams are indeed used to initiate biological actions. For example, the release of hormones is a biological action. Dreams are biological in many senses: for instance, that feeling of fear you have when dreaming is hormones being released, the release of adrenaline, exactly the same as your body's reaction when you encounter something terrifying in real life.

But there are also what I will call "body dreams."

No level of consciousness is fully manifested in matter.

How should we understand this? It means that this consciousness itself contains many, many levels, but it cannot display all of them in our three-dimensional world; it can only display certain levels.

Between all parts of the body, there is always constant communication.

There is always communication between the various parts of the body, but ordinarily we are not aware of it. When the conscious mind turns away, when the conscious mind has been turned in another direction, that communication often increases. Actually, it is because you have noticed the consciousness of the cells, at their own level, and thus a body dream is formed.

For example, your liver says something to your lungs, and your kidneys say something to your intestines. Let me give an example -- the heart lodges a protest with the stomach and intestines: "You have too much fat; my heart can no longer handle it." Isn't this back-and-forth communication between the various parts of the body just like a body dream? You can understand it as a kind of dream.

These communications do not involve images or words; I am using figurative language to make an analogy for you. Actually, such body dreams have no images and no words. Your consciousness does not receive them in the form of images and words at all, but rather like electromagnetic imagery -- like something formed between electromagnetic signals, anticipating what kinds of actions are to be taken. These are then used as the initiators of therapeutic dreams: after the various parts of the body have communicated with one another, they discover which area has a problem and needs therapeutic action, and at that point a therapeutic dream begins to be generated.

Seth has said in many places that we often have a self-healing function in our dreams. While the body dream is in progress, you do not consciously receive it. But when they are about to initiate a therapeutic dream, at that point this higher level of consciousness knows -- it is no longer the underlying consciousness of the body -- which part of your body has a problem, and it will initiate a self-healing dream at the level of dreams to help heal you.

Many problems are foretold through body dreams, and the illness is simply cleared at that level.

Very often when your body has a problem, the body dream says: "You have a problem here; it needs repair; it needs self-healing." At that point a healing dream occurs at the underlying level, and for the most part you are unaware of this dream. Your body is healed in this way. The illness is cleared at the underlying level, at the cellular level, and never even reflects up to the level of your consciousness. So you have no idea that you were once ill, and that you once healed yourself.

Although consciousness enjoys its physical orientation -- which is why we came to this world to experience -- it is at the same time too creative to restrict its activities to a single direction. It does not focus only on the physical orientation; it also wants to try out all kinds of possibilities. Dreams provide consciousness with its own creative play. When consciousness discovers that in dreams it does not need to actually employ bodily movement, it can more freely use its innate characteristics. What is the innate gift of consciousness? The innate gift of consciousness is creativity. So in dreams it creates all kinds of possibilities on a grand scale, since it does not need the cooperation of the body anyway.

Double Dreams and Triple Dreams: The Multiple Creativity of Consciousness

Many people perceive double or triple dreams, when they seem to have two or three simultaneous dreams. Usually, at the instant of waking, these dreams are suddenly compressed into that main dream, while the others take a subordinate position. Although the dreamer is certain that a moment before, those dreams were equal in intensity. But such dreams are representative of a great creativity of consciousness, hinting that it can carry on more than single-line experience at the same moment without losing its ability.

We people often have double and triple dreams, and these dreams occur simultaneously. But at the instant of waking, we suddenly feel as though these two or three dreams have merged into one main dream, or that one of the dreams is the main one and the others are subordinate. This depends on your emotional intensity, or on your desires and thoughts, and it differs for each person in that state. These three dreams then become not of equal intensity; some are strong and some are weak. At this point you feel as though one dream is subordinate to another, that you are in a dream within a dream. In fact, they occur in parallel, simultaneously, and consciousness can handle multiple lines at the same time, not just single-line experience, and it does not lose itself. It also arranges things very well for itself -- it arranges three simultaneous dreams into one dream being a dream within another, and this arrangement is to let you tell yourself that you can handle these three dreams at the same time.

Generally speaking, in physical waking life, you must do one thing, or you can only do another thing. Obviously I am simplifying, because you can eat an orange while watching TV -- this is Seth giving an example. You can eat an orange while watching TV, and also scratch your foot and yell at your dog at the same time; these can probably all be done at the same moment, if we are not being too strict about it.

However, you cannot be in Boston and San Francisco at the same time, or be 21 years old and 11 years old at the same time.

You also cannot be in China and in America at the same time, cannot be in this city and in that city at the same time, and cannot even be in this room and in another room at the same time. But in your double dreams or triple dreams, consciousness is clearly of a transparent, simultaneous nature. The three roles of you in these triple dreams are not necessarily of the same age, and they do not even occur in the same time: of the three dreams, one may occur in youth, one in adulthood, and one in old age, and they occur in three different places.

You simultaneously encounter the experience of several different lines of dreams. Each one is in itself a complete storyline, but when the dreamer wakes and faces reality, that experience cannot be transferred mentally or neurologically. Because one dream takes the main position, while the other dreams are more like a ghost image.

You cannot say, "I am simultaneously old, young, and adolescent, in three places at once, having three dreams at the same time." You can only say, "I had several dreams," but you cannot say, "I was having three dreams at the same time." This is a problem that you cannot explain in reality.

There are too many variations of this kind of dream, and dreams within dreams also have many variants, which he cannot describe one by one. But they all involve a dispersed point of consciousness -- in this process your consciousness disperses into several parts, yet it can maintain its identity, its essence, and each part can maintain its essence.

Consciousness circles around itself.

That is to say, your consciousness divides into three parts at the same time, experiences three different storylines, experiences them through three different roles, and at the same time does not lose its own identity and essence. It knows who it still is, knows that the selves in these three dreams are all itself, and knows that it is playing different roles. This is like consciousness playing a game with its own shadow -- I divide my consciousness into three, and each goes to experience three different things, to see what will happen.

Such dreams involve an order with which you are unfamiliar.

Of course it is different from our order; we like one thing after another, while it has three things coming at the same time. They hint at the true dimension of consciousness -- consciousness is a multidimensional existence, able to be in three places at the same time, to experience three different times at the same time, to play three different roles at the same time, without losing its awareness of its own essence. This is the original face of consciousness, and it uses this dream to let you recognize what it itself is like.

You actually form your own historical world in the same manner -- that is, a world that dominates above all other experience, and is projected upon the screen of your brain.

You ordinarily form your three-dimensional world in this way. You think there is one dominant dream, and this dream dominates the main line of your life; it is like a story projected on the big screen of your brain, and this is your life, your world, your theme. And those other second and third storylines are hidden by you, and you cannot see them.

The Orange-Eating Exercise: Catching the Second Dream Line

He said he would give a simple example, a very small experiment, a very interesting exercise that we can try. He said it is like using eating an orange as the exercise.

Let us playfully imagine first of all how that event is interpreted by the cells of your body.

This entire Chapter 10 is titled "Games That Anybody Can Play," so here he is starting to play games with everyone. When you eat an orange, think about how your body's cells perceive and understand the event of "eating an orange." For example, maybe it is directly felt by your fingertips -- you hold the orange segment and bring it to your mouth, or you can feel it when peeling the orange; your nose can smell the fragrance of the orange peel; when you put the orange in your mouth, the juice bursting from the segment in your mouth, you know it immediately.

But can the cells of your feet perceive it? Do the cells of your knees know you are eating an orange? Do your feet know you are eating an orange? You can take an orange right now, eat it and think at the same time: do your feet know you are eating an orange? How do they perceive it? Do they feel anything?

Take all the time you can with this.

Concentrate all your attention; at this time do not think about anything else, only this one thing. Then explore your own conscious sensory perception of the orange, calling upon all your sensory perceptions to feel the process of eating the orange. Focus on its taste, touch, smell, shape, and color.

Do it playfully, take your time.

Then let your own associations flow through your mind. You look at the color, smell, and taste of this orange, and then you think: can your feet smell the fragrance of this orange? Can your feet feel the taste of the orange in your mouth? Concentrate and think about it. What does the color, smell, and taste of the orange make you associate with? What can you recall? When did you first taste an orange? When did you see an orange? Have you ever seen an orange grow and blossom? How does an orange grow? What does it look like on the tree? What does its color remind you of?

Then pretend you have a dream in which the image of an orange serves as the lead-in.

Pretend you have such a dream, in which you are eating an orange, and then starting from this orange in the dream, think about how each part of the body feels about the orange -- from the most direct feeling to the least direct feeling, from the most direct feelings of the mouth, tongue, hands, nose, and eyes, to the feeling of the very tips of your toes at the far end of the body toward this orange, associating in sequence. Then follow this dream in your mind.

He has done this exercise before -- in Chapter 3, Section 3, in that process of "dreaming in the daytime," he had you use anything at all to create a dream, and this is very similar to that. You follow this dream, starting from eating the orange, and do not place restrictions on what happens afterward; whatever is supposed to happen will happen. He only provided some suggestions; you can follow those thoughts, or you can think of other things, it does not matter.

Now the key step comes. You just follow your orange dream onward like this, and then you pretend that you suddenly wake up from that dream -- suddenly someone comes looking for you, or the phone rings, or someone wakes you up. This dream was originally also pretend, a daytime dream. I suggest setting a countdown alarm on your phone, three minutes or five minutes, and when the time is up it will ring automatically, serving as a reminder to call you back from the dream.

At this moment, what will you discover? You will discover that there is another dream going on at the same time. When your phone alarm rings, originally you were only having this one orange dream, but at the instant of waking, you tell yourself: it seems I did not only have the orange dream, I had another dream too. Then quickly ask yourself: what was that dream? Besides the orange dream, there was another dream? Quickly press yourself with the question. Follow the sequence I gave you: first do the orange dream, get interrupted halfway, and after being woken up ask yourself, I was also having another dream, what was that dream?

The exercise will allow you to draw circles with your own intent, so to speak, and to catch your consciousness as it comes and goes.

This is somewhat like practicing a kitten playing with its own tail -- treating its own tail as another kitten to play with. Just practice it; practice more when you have time, it is quite fun.

The final question: what did you see in that other dream? Besides the orange dream, what did you see in that other dream? A whole new series of images and thoughts should be brought into your mind. From that fleeting image, did you seem to catch hold of a tail of that dream? And then from there discover that this dream seems to have some plot, gradually discovering it, all of it entirely new images and thoughts. And that indeed was happening at the same time as your daytime dream about the orange.

This exercise of Seth's is to have you create a double dream in the daytime. You say, how is that possible? When I am awake, how can my consciousness think about the orange on one hand and produce something else on the other? He says, try it and you will know. Do not jump to conclusions first; we cannot remain only at the level of theory, how dull and boring that is. Go practice it, and after practicing you can also give this exercise to your friends and family, let them try it too, and see whether they have double daytime dreams.

The feeling and rehearsal of these exercises are their main point; they are the manipulation of a creative consciousness.

First eat the orange, then use your entire body to feel this orange; this in itself is a creative activity of consciousness.

You exist outside of your present framework.

But actually this statement is meaningless unless you give yourself some freedom to experience events outside of those rigid frameworks. These experiences will alter your usual organization, and therefore allow you to contact experience in a fresher way.

The purpose of Seth having you do this exercise is to tell you: besides your present cognitive framework -- that is, "I am eating an orange" and then visualizing this process -- when you concentrate and think only about this one thing, you think your consciousness has only this one storyline. But when he presses you on whether you also had another dream, you discover that there is actually another thread also developing simultaneously on the level of your consciousness. And that conscious activity which escaped your attention, is it not outside the framework you ordinarily perceive? Can you not then experience events outside of those rigid frameworks?

Unless you can experience it, the statement "you exist outside of your framework" is pale and meaningless to you. Your existence is your eating the orange, is existing in this present moment, and you think this is a fact. But through this exercise, you suddenly discover that while you were doing this daytime dream of eating the orange, you also had other conscious activity, and were also having another dream.

The double dream is like certain people who have two homes, each in a different city, living this kind of double life. He seems to manipulate separate strings of time that would be highly confusing to other people.

Many people may not quite understand the meaning of this sentence. Let me give an example: suppose you work in a big city, but housing prices there are too expensive to afford, so you buy a house in the suburbs. Taking the subway to work every day, you are actually living between two locations, and this feels different from other people's experience.

There is an even more fitting example: some people go abroad to study or emigrate; they have a home abroad, renting a place in the school dormitory or near the school; during summer vacation or holidays, they return to their home in their home country. When switching between these two homes, there is a kind of dazed feeling. Especially after an overnight flight, for example flying from America to China, you sleep and wake up back in your home in China, sleeping in your parents' house, in the room from your childhood, while your previous sleep was on your dormitory bed in America. When you wake up the next morning, you have a dazed feeling: "Where am I? Who am I?" You seem to be split, living two completely different lives in two times and spaces at the same time. When you first return to a place, during that initial period you are dazed, and your surroundings do not feel quite real -- yet they are so familiar, while also carrying a slight sense of strangeness.

If the body only follows certain sequences in its operation, then consciousness still has inner depths of action that are not displayed on the surface lines of experience.

Your body must follow this timeline of the three-dimensional physical world, but your consciousness does not have to follow this timeline. Consciousness has its own inner depths of action, its own degree of freedom, which are not displayed on the lines of experience of our ordinary daily life. It is like an undercurrent surging beneath the surface. That is to say, there are several storylines; what you see is only one main storyline, and beneath the main line there are many branches of consciousness, which we ordinarily do not notice.

Although each person usually follows a particular stream of consciousness and identifies this stream of consciousness as the self, beneath the surface there are other alternate threads, and they are also perfectly legitimate, belonging to the same identity. They do not receive attention because the body must have a clear, direct pattern of action.

Why do they not receive attention? Because your body must have a clear and direct pattern; it must know what the body should do and how it should act; it cannot be vague. You cannot weave together the stories of two lives and let them proceed in a crisscross fashion, or your body would fall into chaos. Your consciousness can play these games and experience different things, in dreams or elsewhere; but in real life, your body must have a very clear and direct pattern of behavior. Eat when it is time to eat, sleep when it is time to sleep; you cannot be vague and say, "I have other stories unfolding below."

These streams of consciousness are like a continuous double dream.

Beneath your main consciousness, there is always some other conscious activity that you cannot perceive, operating continuously, as if you are always having a double dream. Just like when I asked you earlier what the other dream was while you were eating the orange, at first you felt, "Impossible, I did not have one," but when you suddenly ask yourself and experience it, you know that you did have other thoughts at that time. This is equivalent to your consciousness always having a double dream.

They are also recognized as a framework of the self.

In times of stress and challenge, the recognized self may sense these other streams of consciousness, and realize that a fuller experience, a greater psychological thickness, is possible.

Normally you do not feel it, but when you are in a very extreme, very tense, very challenged moment, when you cannot solve the difficulty before you and feel that this difficulty is very hard to overcome, you will discover that you have another thought, another possibility, another angle from which to view this problem. And that angle will make you suddenly realize: you have a greater experience; you do not have only this one way of thinking or this one mode of thought, but also a completely different way of handling the problem from another storyline. In that set, you view this event from an entirely different angle, and handle this matter with an entirely different thought. So you can perceive that a greater psychological thickness is possible.

In certain dream situations, the recognized self can expand its perception enough to utilize these other portions of its own entity.

You must acknowledge these double dreams, these conscious activities you did not notice; they are all you. If you recognize yourself and believe it truly exists, then within this dream you can make use of the other parts beyond the entity -- the experience from another storyline. Sometimes double or triple dreams can represent such encounters; certain dreams can provide you with such situations within this, to help you solve problems.

Consciousness always seeks the richest, most creative form, while at the same time maintaining its own integrity.

There is no contradiction in this. "Its own integrity" is its own recognition of identity. Imagination, play, art, and dreaming all allow consciousness to enrich its activities by providing feedback received outside of the physical environment itself. These activities require richer, more abundantly creative forms, and consciousness seeks precisely this kind of greater experience.

Seth's Double Session

This session was both a dictation for this book and, at the same time, an answer to your question.

He said this is an example of a double session -- you see how humorous Seth is. He was saying, aren't we talking about double dreams right now, so this session is also a double session. Why? Because this session both answered Rob's question from before the session, about how his friend's wife had given him a record of a double dream and wanted Seth to explain it, and Seth in this session both explained Rob's question and very skillfully placed the content of that answer into this session, into the appropriate position in this chapter, making it exactly a very necessary section in Chapter Ten, "Games That Anyone Can Play." So you see, this is an example of a double session -- there are double dreams, and there are also double sessions; this session had a double function.

Now if you have no questions, we will begin to end. I wish you a double good night, and I hope you have some excellent double dreams.

How humorous Seth is. Rob answered, "Thank you, and I wish you the same."

This session is an excellent example showing how Seth wove our questions and concerns about double dreams into the content of the book, and his answer was also expressed appropriately, fitting the larger framework he had in mind -- that is, the framework of this entire book. Even though our personal lives do sometimes influence the way Seth transmits this information, he still quite thoroughly covered the topics he wanted to discuss.

What influenced his transmission? Well, Seth was supposed to be dictating Chapter Ten of The Nature of the Psyche, but the two of them insisted on asking Seth specific questions about double dreams. This question actually disrupted Seth's ongoing narration of the book. But Rob discovered that Seth very skillfully used his powerful psychological framework to weave such an answer deftly into the book, and placed it just right, perfectly fitting. So here Rob could not help but sincerely admire Seth's ability to steer the session and steer the entire knowledge system -- it was indeed very skillful.

This kind of thing happened often in his sessions, not just once or twice: some incidental, seemingly external event interrupted the session, but Seth, in answering that question, would again skillfully use that question as a very good case study within the session. There had been things like Augusto and others before, all like this.

Regarding the interpretation of Section Two of Chapter Ten, that is, the question about double dreams, we will conclude our interpretation here today. I wish everyone all things magical, and also a very wonderful double dream.

Gender Switching in Play

This session was held on February 28, 1977, a Monday¹⁸ evening at 9:33 p.m. Before the session began, Rob said that he and Jane were looking over the manuscript of Volume 1 of The "Unknown" Reality again, after the editors had finished and the publisher had sent it back to them. Few people know how many stages at a publishing house are involved after a text is written; for example, the page proofs for The "Unknown" Reality, that is, the version laid out as actual pages, would also be sent to them for detailed proofreading. He was describing some details of publishing. And one day, this session of The Nature of the Psyche, of course, would go through the same publishing process and be published.

At this point Seth came through. Seth said:

In play, children often imagine exchanging genders. The young self is relatively free in its identity; it has not yet been taught to identify its personality entirely according to gender.

There are many examples of this. For instance, many little boys, roughly during elementary school, or before they have started school, during kindergarten, but already quite old, around five or six or seven, some maybe about to enter elementary school, will ask to wear a skirt to school because they see little girls wearing skirts and think they look pretty. This kind of thing often happens among children; mothers who have had boys at home should have some experience of this. Parents become extremely frustrated and do not know how to handle it; no matter how they try to explain, they cannot get through.

And in play, this sort of thing also happens occasionally. For example, a little girl will say, "I will play the mother, you play the father"; but sometimes they also switch genders a bit, and if the father is not played well enough, the little girl will say, "Then I will play the father, and you play the mother." This does not happen often, but it does happen occasionally. So a child's identification with gender is not as complete as an adult's.

In children's dreams, the same activity—exchanging genders—continues. Therefore boys also have many, many dream experiences as girls; in the dream he is a girl; and vice versa, many girls in dreams are boys.

However, after this stage, in children's dreams, just as in their play, changes in age are also very common, going beyond this kind of gender variation. In dreams, children also often make age changes; for example, when a child dreams of his or her future counterpart, the child obtains a kind of psychological projection into the future world. A child will dream of what he or she will look like when grown up, dream of the grown-up appearance of his or her counterpart.

Adults examine many of their own dreams, and many changes in gender orientation often go unremembered. We adults often examine our dreams and discard or delete those patterns that do not conform to our logic or to our beliefs. So when we adults examine our dreams, the kind of gender-switching dream rarely appears in my own dreams. Why? Not because it does not occur, but because we delete it, so it is not remembered.

Counterparts

Regarding counterparts, he puts "counterparts" in quotation marks here. What does he mean by "counterparts" in quotation marks? It is the way this child will look when grown up, which is also a counterpart to this child. For example, the way a child will look thirty years later is, to the child's present moment, a counterpart. But to the child now, these two seem like two separate people -- the self thirty years later and the child now seem like two different people; that one is an uncle or an aunt, yet that uncle or aunt is what he or she will look like thirty years later, but the child does not recognize it. This is a "counterpart" in quotation marks.

And what is a true counterpart? It is when a fragment personality is on Earth, sometimes there may be two, three, or four of them, in different countries and different regions, appearing as a counterpart who is contemporary with you -- meaning contemporary -- a counterpart in the same era as you. That person is not another you, but he or she has countless subtle connections with you; the two of you come from different fragment personalities of the same soul.

This involves the nature of the psyche, which is far more complex than we humans imagine. You should never think you can use a single rule, or something like physics or science, to regulate it and say, the soul should be like this, like this, like this -- there is always something in it that you would never expect. Counterparts will be discussed later, not in this book, but in other books. Because when we get to that part, we will then explain what counterparts are. When you meet your own counterpart, you will find it very amazing, but this counterpart is not what people usually call twin flames or soulmates; that is another concept.

Gender-Swap Exercise

Seth says, well then, play a game properly. This is the next exercise he wants to do, and it is also the last exercise of this chapter. In the first section we did what seemed like five exercises, in the second section we did one or two more, and in this third section he has given one more exercise.

What is this exercise? Treat it as a game to play, which is that you pretend to switch genders. How do you switch? You must actually switch in real life. For example, when you encounter something involving traditional gender concepts, play this game: ask yourself, if your gender were different, how much would your current beliefs differ? If you are a parent, imagine that you are your spouse, and in that role, imagine how you would look at your children, using your spouse's gender role to look at your children, and see what changes and shifts occur in your own beliefs. This is a gender-swapping game or exercise.

In daily life, you can also pick one day each month, for example you can set a specific fixed time, and you agree with your partner that the two of you will swap genders for a whole day. From the time you get up in the morning, you are his gender, and he is your gender, and the two of you swap for the whole day. You have to play it convincingly here; you cannot be sloppy about it. Just for this one day, handle things at home under the other gender identity. It is best not to do this at work, because at work people will think you have gone crazy. You can do it on a weekend, during a time of rest, when you do not need to go to work and do not need to be in public social settings; then as a couple you can try swapping roles for one day, completely swapping over. Actually it is easy for you, because you already know how he usually behaves, and how you usually treat him; the two of you swap for one day, it is very interesting, do it once a month.

What is the purpose of this kind of swap? It is to get you to break down your gender-based perceptions, so that you do not look at issues only from your current fixed gender, which would cause your beliefs to become solidified around that gender-based perception. Just as the earlier exercises broke down your concept of time, broke down your concept of space, and broke down many concepts, now it asks you to break down your concept of gender, and earlier it also broke down your concept of age. It is all about getting you to break free from the rigid frameworks you currently have, so that your spirituality can attain true freedom. And this is something you often do in your dreams; now he is asking you to do it again while awake.

How Beliefs Color the Memory of Dreams

Your beliefs about dreams will color your memory of them, as well as your interpretation of them. What do you think of dreams? If you feel that dreams are all unimportant, or that they are fundamentally a trivial matter, then you will affect how much of them you remember; if you feel that dreams are very important, that they are very meaningful to you, and that they have guiding significance for you in reality, then you will remember your dreams. It will affect your memory of dreams, and it will also affect your interpretation of dreams.

At the point where you wake up, that is, at the instant you wake up in the morning, you carry out a remarkable psychological deception. You make last-minute adjustments, and in this moment just after waking from the dream, you make a last-minute coloring and adjustment of the dream, so that the dream becomes more consistent with your conscious expectations. You are deceiving yourself, and you also change the dream, altering it to match the result you wanted.

For example. The sexual symbolism often attached to dream imagery is oversimplified, and it makes you interpret your dreams in a particular way. In dreams, this kind of symbolic imagery about sexual behavior, or dream imagery related to sex, has all been simplified by you. You deliberately simplify it yourself when you wake up. The purpose and meaning of this simplification differs for each person, but for the most part it is simplified, and this is quite normal.

For example, some people dream, whether boys or girls, that they marry the person they like, that the two of them are together, including the entire wedding process and the scene itself, all vividly lifelike in the dream. But when the wedding in the dream is over, the relatives and friends have withdrawn, and it is time to enter the bridal chamber, on the wedding night itself, at this point the dream may instead wake up, or there is simply no such segment in the dream. Why is that? Because you yourself erased it, or it is just an extreme simplification, like in a movie, where the light goes off, the light goes out, and that is the end of it. This is very interesting. Each of us will use our waking beliefs to tamper with our dreams, including how we understand them or explain them.

Biases in Dream Research

As a species, you do indeed have a memory of dreams. Humanity as a whole has a dream memory, carrying certain natural symbols. Dream memory is very natural; these are personally experienced, and there is great variation. Everyone's experiences come together to form a dream of the whole of humanity. Each of us also has our own dream memory: there is a collective dream world and dream memory, and there is also a personal dream experience and dream memory, just as this world has a world history, and then you have your personal history — it is the same principle.

But the research done on male and female dreamers already has biases. The investigators — that is, the so-called objective scientists, psychologists, or researchers who come to conduct the study — are themselves gendered, and crucially, they carry certain fixed ideas about gender. The dreamers themselves also have a perception of their own gender. So such research on dreams will have many biases.

What kind of biases? For example, men will remember their boyish, masculine, very manly dreams; and in the same way, women remember dreams that fit their gender — for instance, running away when encountering something frightening, panicking, being afraid; boys are always very brave, and brave in their dreams as well.

People often plan their waking memories in the same way. We alter our memories; what actually happened in real events no longer matters, because through our beliefs and our ideas, we reshape them into memories that fit our gender perception. In your memory, if you are a boy, you will always remember the times when you were especially manly; a girl will always remember herself as especially gentle, especially cute, especially well-behaved, very feminine in that regard. And memories of the other side, even if they exist or did happen, are all erased — deliberately made impossible to recall.

Psyche, Gender, and Aggressiveness

Once again, your psyche not only does not identify with one gender -- the psyche does not identify with gender, the psyche is above gender -- but it is also a storehouse of a larger psychic and psychological potential. Not only does it not identify with gender; on the contrary, it is what provides gender with all kinds of material. It is a storehouse, and all the various levels and gradations of gender must emerge from this storehouse of the psyche.

Seth says that the psyche is not sexless, but is indeed a combination of the richest components of what are considered male and female. I have talked about this before, and there are two levels here. Here it may be somewhat confusing, and for the sake of explanation it is somewhat conflated, so I will emphasize it once again: regarding this gender cognition of male and female, from the psychological level, our psychological perspective actually contains both male and female; from the psychic level, it also contains both genders; but from a higher level, from the level above the psyche, it has no gender. The essence of the psyche has no gender cognition; it is simply a pure energy body, without gender.

Here it mentions that it is a combination of male and female, only for the purpose of explanation at this point. So here, this "psyche," I think should not be translated as "spirituality"; keeping "psyche" would actually be easier to understand. Why? The psyche is one manifestation of spirituality in a person. Spirituality itself is a pure energy body, and one of its manifestations in a person is the form of the psyche. The psyche is what we can call spirituality after a person has added such limitations and qualifications. So from the perspective of the psyche, it is not sexless; it is a combination of the rich components of male and female.

Session 795

The human personality is therefore endowed with a freedom in sexual and psychological terms that is not limited by strict sexual orientation. (Session 795)

So human nature, or the human personality, each person's personality, in sexual or psychological terms, is actually endowed with a freedom that is not subject to strict -- the emphasis here is on the word "strict" -- it is not saying that psychologically he is not subject to sexual orientation. He is subject to sexual orientation, but it is not the strict, rigid kind of "I am a man, so I must be such and such." He is not limited by such strict sexual orientation; he has this freedom: within males there will be some feminine psychology, and within females there will be some masculine psychology.

By not dividing any of humanity's mental or psychological abilities into two opposing camps, it contributes to the survival of the species. (Session 795)

At the level of human nature, it does not divide humanity into two great camps of male and female and make them fight each other. Doing so has far-reaching significance: it makes the survival rate of humanity higher. Apart from the actual physical process of reproduction -- apart from the real process of bearing children -- the species, humanity, can freely arrange its psychological characteristics in whatever way it chooses, with no additional inherent plan asserted. Here he is specifically referring to psychological sexual orientation. What this means is that, apart from the stage of bearing children, apart from the reproductive age, how a human being wants to appear psychologically in terms of gender characteristics is completely unrestricted. There is no inner limitation, at the psychological level or the psychic level, saying that you as a person can only consider problems from a male perspective.

In dreams, this psychological complexity becomes even more apparent. Because of external planning, many people do not dare to have the most harmless natural reactions. Because we have certain external restrictions, we do not dare to have some especially natural, harmless, natural reactions, and these are often expressed in the dream state.

What is meant by harmless natural reactions? For example, a man also needs to depend on others; he also feels vulnerable; he also needs to cry. But in real life, none of this is allowed, not allowed by mainstream society. So in life he pretends he is not afraid, pretends he does not need dependence, does not need such comfort, and also feels he does not need to be very emotional.

However, those dreams are precisely the ones least remembered, because the censorship has become habitual. Those expressions that should be obtained in dreams -- for example, a man might be more emotional in dreams, more prone to crying, more in need of dependence, more helpless -- but these dreams seem not to be remembered by you. Why? Because they do not conform to your waking perception of gender, so at the moment you wake up, in that instant, you erase them, and you do not remember them. This censorship has become habitual. Whenever you do any kind of behavior, you first have to filter it through the perspective of gender. For example, if a man were to take out a piece of floral paper, you would definitely say that is very effeminate, you cannot do that. Unless you are deliberately trying to perform, a man in normal life absolutely cannot do certain behaviors. The same goes for girls: a girl absolutely cannot sit with her legs spread apart, sitting there with both legs wide open in a careless manner -- she herself cannot get past her own inner check. Because this censorship, this daily behavioral censorship, has become a habit, and this habit is also carried into his dream process, so dreams are also constantly being censored.

Aggression Is Not Natural

Men's aggressive tendencies are often regarded as a basic characteristic of the species itself. This aggressiveness is generally considered masculine, but we equate it with the characteristics of humanity as a whole, as if we humans are all very aggressive. Seth says this is an exaggerated, learned aggressive response. And this aggressiveness is not innate, not natural; it is something we learn after birth.

Why is it learned after birth? Because after birth we are taught that we live in this physical world, that the resources of the physical world are necessarily limited, and that limited resources in the physical world necessarily lead to competition -- if you do not compete, you will have nothing. So this aggressiveness is all taught and learned after birth.

In your species, it is not natural. Remember, aggression is not natural. Is it natural in any other species? It is not natural either. Aggression is not an inherent attribute of nature; it is all something we learn after birth.

Then you say, that cannot be right, because animals are very aggressive -- look at fierce beasts, venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, they are all very aggressive. He will explain why below.

Basically speaking, this artificial aggression, this pretended aggression, or this manufactured aggression, is also unrelated to the struggle for survival. Many people say that humans are aggressive because we need to survive, that animals are aggressive because animals need to survive -- this is the current understanding of humanity, but in fact it is not so at all. Aggression has nothing to do with the struggle for survival.

It is a direct result of men being taught to deny certain basic emotions that exist within themselves. Where does this artificial aggression come from? Mainly from men being anxious to deny the feminine characteristics within themselves. Because every person has bisexual characteristics, but a man, in his eagerness to deny his feminine characteristics, deliberately makes himself very manly, deliberately displays this masculine sense of strength, this aggressiveness, to show that he is an entirely different kind of animal from women -- that he is a pure man, pure, one hundred percent pure, without any feminine characteristics. He thinks that the more he is like this, the more women will like him. Yet this denies certain parts of his own humanity -- the feminine part, which he is anxious to deny.

Then, he is forced to show an excessive reaction to the expression of those emotions that are permitted and expected, and he tries his utmost to suppress them. In his works, in different books, he has discussed the reasons for this one-sided focus, why men have such extreme manifestations on this issue.

However, men chose to take on a specialization of consciousness, and they overdid it. It is not that doing so is wrong, but you have gone too far. Men want to specialize this masculine consciousness, want to present themselves as very manly, and they overdo it, resulting in a rigid, excessive objectivity -- excessive objectivity means going too far.

In your era, in your society, it is only in dreams that men have the freedom to cry without shame, or to admit any dependency. In real life, men can only cry freely and boldly in dreams, unlike in real life where they have to cry secretly; or only in dreams do they dare admit that they are also fragile and have strong dependency. And only on certain occasions, and usually in very private occasions, is he allowed to express feelings of love. He must be in a private setting before he will express to the opposite sex he likes how very much he loves her, expressing it like a little child. But the moment an outsider is present, he immediately puts on his very manly appearance, and he no longer dares to express it. Even if he does express it, it is in another way, in that very manly way, which is quite interesting.

His anger turns outward. This man's anger turns outward into aggression. Why does he become angry? He is actually very stifled. All that anger and grievance cannot be spoken, all those painful things cannot be expressed, and he must keep suppressing them, so he turns this anger outward into aggression.

And projecting that artificial aggression universally outward onto the animal kingdom is extremely foolish. This belief has invisibly influenced all of your studies, your studies of animals. Worse, it causes you to misunderstand an activity within nature itself. Because we think men are aggressive, and we call this aggressiveness a universal attribute of humanity -- that humans are meant to attack -- so he also attributes strong aggressiveness to women, thinking that women competing for mates, in jealousy and rivalry, also have strong aggressiveness, not hesitating to fight violently, even directly hurting people, injuring people, even killing people. So he elevates aggression to an attribute of humanity, and not only elevates it to an attribute shared by all humans, but also extends it further, projecting it onto the animal world, believing that the animal world is also extremely aggressive.

Then he uses his own perspective to judge this very natural behavior in nature. An animal hunting and killing prey for survival is a very natural behavior, and he interprets it as aggression. He says, look, animals are just like humans, right? This is not something only humans have; animals all have it too -- they all have aggression. He uses this to make excuses for himself, but in fact he completely misunderstands animals.

Those who imagine that they view the natural world with the most objective eyes are the very people who are most blinded by their subjective beliefs. Those people say, I am very objective, I observe nature without any bias, I observe the animal kingdom completely objectively. Seth says no, these people often have the strongest subjective beliefs; their subjective beliefs are very strong, because they cannot see through their own misunderstandings. Everyone carries such misunderstandings and biases, but if a person can recognize his own misunderstandings and biases, then they would no longer be called misunderstandings and biases. It is precisely because he cannot see the deviations, misunderstandings, and biases in his own perception that these things can be called misunderstandings and biases.

Statistics and Interpretation

Someone once said that statistics can be used to persuade people of two mutually conflicting things at the same time. Thus through the brain's beliefs, the mind's organizing ability assembles the facts of nature, and can interpret them in entirely different ways.

What does it mean by two mutually conflicting things? It means right and wrong, positive and negative, high and low, up and down. And these two things, in statistics, each has a chance to show itself, because statistics deals with the question of its statistics and probability, so in the statistical results, you can see the multiple facets of things, because it is without emotion, it is an objective expression. Statistics is a relatively objective thing.

But when we process things through the brain, we also have this ability: we organize these things of nature, assemble them, and then we can interpret them in different ways. We can use an objective angle, one that transcends gender, transcends the angle that "all species are aggressive" to interpret them; we can also follow humanity's currently existing viewpoint -- that all things in the world are natural selection and survival of the fittest, you have to adapt to this environment, you have to compete, how can you survive in this natural world if you do not compete -- and so this aggressiveness, we regard it as a universal attribute of nature. And that is wrong.

So he says, you can, through your brain, through your beliefs, assemble these facts of nature together, but you do not interpret them in the way nature does. You interpret them in an entirely different way. What way? The human perspective, the human way to interpret them, in other words, the way of your beliefs. When you look at the natural world and natural phenomena, you inevitably carry a great deal of distortion in it.

The Outer Covering and Inner Core of Dreams

The outer covering of dreams has also been contaminated, contaminated to that degree. If you can have such great misunderstandings, deviations, and prejudices about the natural world, then the same applies to dreams. The outer covering of a dream, that is, the outermost layer of the dream, the part you can remember, has also been polluted by you to a similar degree. But the actual inner core of the dream provides information, a constant inflow and feedback of new information, as well as insight coming from the psyche.

Therefore, a person does not rely solely on his outer experience, nor is he limited only to the feedback of the environment, but has also always been provided with fresh intuitive information and direction. The outer covering of dreams has already been contaminated by a person's beliefs; he looks at the dream through tinted glasses and filters it. But the inner core of the dream has always been connected to your psyche; it has always been receiving the inflow and feedback of new information, at the deep level of the dream, and there is also this insight coming from your psyche. Only in this way can a person not rely solely on his outer experience, that is, our three-dimensional world experience, and not be limited only to the feedback of our outer environment, while at the same time, in this process, also always be provided by our inner world with intuitive information and intuitive direction. Our information comes from two sides, from the outer and from the inner.

Even if such dreams are not recalled, "How come I have never had such a dream?" Perhaps you do not remember, but they have still flowed through your psychological system. These underlying dreams are generally not remembered; the core of the dream may have lost its memory, but they have flowed through your psychological system. And they have contributed to humanity's capacity for invention and creativity. It is within the inner core of dreams that we have the capacity for invention and creativity, and they even bring a new kind of understanding, different from the previous ability to understand. And when these involve our physical world, they can be used, they can be applied to improve our lives.

The Physical Past, the Psychological Past

Let me say it again, let me repeat it once more: in your terms, humanity has a physical past, and therefore it also has a psychological past. Experience is never lost. The life experience you gain will not be lost, will not go missing. The most private of events is still written upon the collective psyche of humanity, upon the collective spiritual system of the human race. Even your most hidden, most private events, the ones only you know about, are all written into the shared collective spiritual record of all humanity.

He says, I am now using the terms past, present, and future to explain this, because there are certain concepts that you can only understand when they are expressed in that way. If I said they all happen simultaneously, then you would not know what I was talking about. And your understanding is what matters more.

So, take that as a given:

Each of you is born with a conscious knowledge of what has happened before. (Session 795)

For example, every human being, at the moment of birth, has some kind of conscious knowledge of the events that occurred before his or her birth. Your brain -- as he has said before -- is never a blank slate, not like a blank slate or a blank sheet of paper waiting for the first experience to be stamped on it, then the second. We say a newborn baby is like a blank sheet of paper, but no, that is not how it is. When every person is born, his brain is already equipped with a complete equation. This equation can tell you: who you are, where you came from, where you come from.

Symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon this slate, you have not wiped it completely clean either; you have not scrubbed it clean -- there are still some marks left on the slate. On the contrary, from these past events, not only have you not wiped them clean, you have deliberately left them there, left them very clearly. From the events of the past, from the experience of your ancestors, you draw experience, and then trace it backward -- in your terms, from the viewpoint of our human time and space -- all the way back to that age beyond memory. We keep tracing backward, keep drawing upon the experience of our ancient forebears, drawing experience from it, and we keep tracing all the way back to that remote period of human antiquity of which we have no memory at all.

A person is born with his own humanity; every person is born with his own humanity. He comes with certain innate tendencies; he is inclined toward development. Every creature and every person has an innate nature inclined toward development. Every person knows what the human voice sounds like; even before his ears can hear those sounds, he knows what the human voice sounds like. He is born wanting to form civilization; a person is born wanting to form human civilization, and the genes within his body carry all the information and ability needed to form that civilization. He has said similar things before in The Magical Approach.

A single individual could also form the vast civilization we humans have today. For example, take the beaver: the moment it is born, it wants to build dams¹⁹. As soon as it grows up, it wants to build dams, and it seems no one teaches it, and no one knows where it learned it from. If you have seen beavers building dams, you can look up animal documentaries -- it is truly amazing. Humans still do not know how they learned to do it, because people think that this method of building dams and catching fish should be a very advanced ability involving tool use, yet they find they do not know how the beaver learned it. It seems no one specifically taught it how, and it is simply born knowing how.

So there is an old Chinese saying, what is it? Dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes, and the children of mice know how to dig holes²⁰. It speaks of a similar idea. Every species, the moment it is born, has its own innate nature, has an inclination, has a basic attribute of development.

Children's dreams activate the inner psychological mechanisms, and at that very time, when their present age makes it impossible for them to obtain such broad substantive knowledge of the world -- for example, we can now know what is happening in the world through our phones, through the news, through the media -- but a child has no way of obtaining that. So how does he know? He knows in his dreams. In dreams, they are given information about the entire world environment. How amazing is that? He does not need to look at a phone, look at websites, watch the news, or watch television -- he just knows. How does he know? He knows in his dreams.

Physical feedback is, of course, necessary for development. If a child only develops his brain, and the body does not develop in coordination with it, then the brain will also be affected. As for the body's development, that goes without saying -- there would be no way to walk. So your brain and your body must coordinate well. A child deprived of physical feedback in this way will be unable to mature fully.

Physical feedback cannot be deprived; deprived of it, the child cannot fully mature. However, the development of dreams follows an inner pattern, activating the child's growth at a deeper level and stimulating his development.

The development of dreams follows an inner pattern... activating the child's growth. Even in infancy there are key-like dreams, and only through such a dream can the necessary hormonal functions be switched on.

It does not mean he dreams of a key; rather, the nature of such dreams is like a key -- extremely critical, absolutely indispensable.

Before the actions of crawling and walking have actually been physically accomplished, the child has already practiced them in dreams. Dreams are a prime mover of muscular cooperation and development.

Infants practice language in the dream state.

Indeed, it is this kind of mental practice that leads children to begin speaking much more quickly, forming sentences in speech. Many children speak very early, while others are later -- some may not begin speaking until they are over a year old or even two, while others can speak at eight or nine months; each is different. Were it not for this, it would simply be impossible to speak that quickly. If mental learning did not take place in dreams, language would not develop so rapidly; one would not learn to speak within just a few short months.

The dream world develops faster than your physical experience.

The word "faster" here means ahead of time -- dream experience runs ahead of physical experience. For a period of time, the child is relatively safe in dreams.

Remember: without dreaming there is no learning, and therefore no memory. So the importance of dreaming is enormous; not dreaming simply will not do.

Events are processed in dreams, placed in the necessary perspective, sorted and arranged.

In dreams, we must rearrange, sort, and organize events, and it must be done from the dream's perspective; we cannot use our three-dimensional perspective. The three-dimensional perspective can form memory, but dreams must re-sort and arrange events through their own perspective. Why? Because it leans more toward classification from a spiritual angle.

This can only be done when the conscious mind is released from its direct intake of physical events.

The material world has an enormous influence on the conscious mind, affecting it at every moment; but when you are asleep, the material world's influence on it has become negligible, almost nonexistent. At this time, your conscious mind -- the conscious mind -- begins to sort and organize these events.

Dreams serve to blunt the impact of the events of the day just past. For dreams begin a new event... letting the meaning of those activities sift through the various layers of the personality, and take their proper places within the compartments of intent and belief.

The events that happened so vividly during the day have a very strong impact; but in dreams, that impact is blunted. Then dreams, according to the various layers of your personality, according to your intents and beliefs, put events in their proper places -- classifying them as related to family, related to work, or some other category, and associating them with whatever events they are connected to. All of these things need to be accomplished in the dream state.

Often the true impact of an event does not occur until it has been interpreted or re-experienced through dreams.

Let me give a very obvious example. When someone's closest relative has just passed away, the grief is not that intense at first. For instance, if a person's father or mother passed away just this afternoon, he will cry and he will grieve, but not that intensely. Because he still has many concrete matters to attend to: he has to go get the death certificate, take the body to the funeral home, arrange the burial clothes, arrange the funeral affairs. In China, there are many customs for the elderly, and many young people do not know them; they have to rely on the older family members to tell them. While you are busy with these matters, the grief is not that intense for you.

The real grief generally does not surge up until two or three days later. After the sedimentation of a dream, after the dream interpretation and re-experiencing just described, the pain of losing a loved one will well up from the depths of the heart -- it is a heart-wrenching pain. It does not come immediately; it only surfaces later. The reason and the mechanism are clearly explained by Seth here.

There are many, many things like this. It is not only the extreme case of losing a loved one; the pain of a breakup is the same. Many people, at the very beginning of a breakup, do not take it to heart; they are angry, they curse the other person, they hate them to death. But after a day or two, two or three days, the pain grows stronger and stronger. Only after the summarizing, sorting, and organizing done through dreams does that pain truly surge up.

For dreams follow their own paths of association. They break through time and barriers... they allow the individual to mix together, match, or compare the different periods of his life, all of this done somewhat in the manner of children's play, through the formation of creative dreams, dramas, in which the individual, from a playful standpoint, is free to play a million different roles, and only then examine the nature of probable events.

What this passage means is that dreams follow the path of association, not the path of logic or the path of time that we ordinarily think of. They break through the limitations and obstacles of time, taking events from different periods of each person's life and mixing them, combining them, matching them, comparing them, and then summarizing and classifying them. When doing these things, it is just like a child playing games.

Through the formation of dramas in creative dreams, in dreams we take all the experiences of our lives and use them as material for play. It is as if you are a highly creative director, and all the experiences of your life are like individual shots. Tonight's dream -- how do you want to edit it? In what manner of presentation does it want to express itself -- flashback, chronological order, intercutting, montage? That depends on the creativity of this director, which is to say, the creativity of the you in the dream.

In real life, you clearly have only one role, and that is the "you" in quotation marks. But once you are in a dream, although it is still this one you, through the continuous recombination of plots, you can stage countless roles, just like children playing house. That is exactly what you do in dreams.

In this process, what is your purpose? It is to examine the nature of probable events. When I say purpose, I do not mean a conscious purpose on your part; it is simply accomplished unintentionally. Its essence is like play, like children playing games, without any purpose at all, only trying as many possible plots and possible combinations as possible. And after this is accomplished, the result it brings is meaningful -- this result is that you can examine the nature of all probable events, and only then decide which ones can be actualized in reality when conditions are ripe.

In the course of play, children can temporarily adopt certain rules and conditions.... His countless play events can occur with varying intensities, and yet, generally speaking, when the play is over, the results are also gone.

When children play games, they agree in advance on what circumstances mean the game stops; they have unwritten rules and conditions among themselves, and they can stop at any time. The events that happen in dreams are like countless play events, occurring with varying intensities -- that depends on how much stimulation that play event gives you. Although in a dream it is a complete storyline, once the game is over, the result no longer matters.

The child plays at being an adult, and when his parents call him, when they call him home for dinner, he is a child again. So the effects of play are not long-lasting, but they are still an important part of a child's normal life, influencing the way he interacts with others.

This is very important: it influences the way he interacts with others. I happened to mention this point in the previous session: if a child does not play games, when he grows up he will not know how to get along and interact with others in adult society; this is his greatest social handicap.

So if parents do not let their children play, you should be aware of the consequences. Look at many children nowadays: not only do they have difficulty socializing and interacting with others, they even have difficulty interacting with their own parents -- why? He never learned it; he lost this. You say, can you teach him later? "He is this old and still does not understand? I will teach him." Sorry, it is too late. Once grown up, it cannot be taught. When to learn what -- some things can never be learned after you grow up. Like this manner and ability of interacting with others, once you are grown up, you really cannot learn it anymore; it is very, very difficult to handle relationships with others completely naturally.

But can it not be changed later in life? It can be changed. When you recognize your own problem and truly acknowledge it, at that point it can be improved through later effort.

In dreams, events are only effective during the time of dreaming; they do not actually intrude upon your waking time.

Just like children playing games: the moment a parent calls, it is over. No matter that he is being chased by the cops and robbers and is about to be caught, he will still say, "My mom is calling me home for dinner," and then the game ends. A few years ago there was a famous meme in World of Warcraft: "Your mom is calling you home for dinner." Everyone thought it was hilarious -- because suddenly inserting a real-world event into the virtual world of a game is especially jarring. Same principle: when you open your eyes, the bear that was attacking you has certainly disappeared; it will not really be circling around you in your bedroom, chasing you. The moment you open your eyes, it is gone.

Humanity's great diversity of response to events is extremely dependent upon this ability to dream.

In real life, our ability to handle the diversity of events happening around us -- for example, a bear chasing you, an event you have never encountered before -- depends entirely on the ability to dream. You may never have been chased by a bear in reality, but in dreams you may have experienced it many times already; you have experience in this area, and you know what to do.

In dreams, people try out possible responses to probable events... and thus we have a more thorough preparation for future actions.

We take those events that might happen, even those we think unlikely to happen, and rehearse them all, giving the body, the psyche, the cells, and the muscles a kind of advance rehearsal. When the event actually happens, you are not caught completely unprepared.

To a certain degree, dreams are also participated in by cellular consciousness, for the cells have an equal interest in the individual's psychic and physical worlds.

Of course the cells are willing to participate in this kind of thing -- it is so much fun, startling one moment, crying and laughing the next. The cells are not willing to live the same unchanging life day after day either. Their interest in this world is the same as yours.

In certain respects, dreams are of course an act of composition; they are a mental and psychic game, suited to the purposes of both mind and body.

Dreams are a composition of your spirit and your psyche. If you still cannot tell the difference between spirit and psyche, then you may not have gotten started yet -- this is already elementary knowledge, and I will not explain it here. Dreams serve the purposes of both mind and body.

However, feedback from the physical environment can also trigger a warning dream, causing the person to wake up.

During sleep, feedback stimuli from the physical environment can also wake you from a dream. A very simple example: many people search everywhere for a bathroom in their dreams, desperate, wandering all over the place, unable to find one no matter what. At that moment, in your urgency, you may wake up. When you wake up, you find that you also happen to need the bathroom right away, and if you do not go soon it will be too late. This is a kind of warning dream -- it warns you that in the real three-dimensional world, your bladder can no longer hold out, and if you keep holding it you might actually wet the bed, so it wakes you up. But some people dream too deeply, too exhaustedly, and the body's various functions want to wake up but cannot; then they dream that they found a bathroom and relieved themselves right there -- and when they get up in the morning, they may find they wet the bed.

Certain chemical substances, by altering the reality of the cells, can affect dreaming. So many sleeping pills are of this kind, and they are harmful. In that they inhibit the body's natural response to the environment during sleep, they rigidify the intimate relationship between the dreaming mind and the sleeping body.

During sleep, the body does respond to the natural world, to the three-dimensional world. But sleeping pills make you sleep so deeply that you know nothing of the surrounding world -- and if you take too many, you might even pass away; that is quite normal. Like the bathroom example just mentioned: even when the body is asleep, it still maintains a close connection with the mind; but the effect of chemical substances like sleeping pills severs that connection.

Is taking sleeping pills good for you? No. Those who have taken them know that you do not feel good in the morning. Today's sleeping pills may be much better in quality; many are natural sleeping aids extracted from porcine melatonin, and those are somewhat better. But if it is the kind of chemical sleeping pill that suppresses the nerves, when you wake up your head is foggy and miserable, as if someone took a stick wrapped in cotton and, not forcefully but continuously, hit you on the head all night long. In the morning your head is just foggy and numb, not comfortable at all. So sleeping pills are actually very bad for the body.

What if you really have insomnia? Here are two points. First, you need to have a correct understanding of insomnia: how much sleep do you think is enough? If you have always believed that you need eight to ten hours of sleep to be adequate, then you are oversleeping, not suffering from insomnia. If you cannot sleep at all the whole night, that is insomnia. If you can sleep three or four hours every night and then cannot sleep anymore, that is not insomnia; that just means your sleep is different from others', or that you sleep a little less, but it does not affect your health -- two or three hours or three or four hours of sleep is actually enough. But if you think three or four hours is too little and insist on taking sleeping pills, then you are doing the opposite of what is helpful.

Your concept of logic is extremely narrow.

We think that only things conforming to the brain's analysis count as logic. In your view, it seems the dreaming self cannot make judgments; we think that in dreams there is no logic, that dreams are illogical. However --

The dreaming self works with astonishing discrimination. It sifts data, sends some of it to certain parts of your body, and forms certain memories.

The dreaming self is very clear-headed, and its logic is very strong. It sifts data, sends some information to the parts of the body that need it, and forms memories in certain places -- some of them cellular memories. When the cells experience the dream along with you, they receive cellular memory from the dream, and this is necessary.

Sleeping pills also hinder this judging mechanism of dreams.

The you in the dream has actually never been resting; he is very busy. And sleeping pills interrupt this judging mechanism of dreams, a side effect we often overlook.

Dreams involve highly intense, highly creative acts. These are not only built up intuitively; they are formed by a logic far more advanced than your concept of logic.

He does not deny the role of intuition; intuition does play a role. But apart from intuition, dreams also rely on a more advanced logic that far surpasses your understanding of the concept of logic. Our concept of logic is too narrow -- we think that only what conforms to human cognition counts as logic.

Let me give a simple example. In real life, we think linear things are logical: one thing happens, then another thing happens, following chronological order; because of something, something else results; under certain conditions, certain outcomes occur. That is what we consider logic. But the logic in dreams is more like a matrix, and a three-dimensional matrix at that, even a multi-dimensional matrix -- it is not even three-dimensional; it may be four-dimensional or five-dimensional. In mathematics, there are multi-dimensional matrices. Dreams process things with this kind of multi-dimensional matrix logic, rather than relying on linear logic as we do when awake. Linear logic is two-dimensional, but dream logic may be three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional -- using such multi-dimensional logic to process the combination and arrangement of dream events. It far surpasses our narrow understanding of logic in the three-dimensional world.

These creative acts are joined to one another through the process of association; they are connected together with extreme precision.

We stage dramas, stage events, stage probabilities; these creative acts are joined together through the process of association, and they are connected together with extreme precision. It is not the haphazard patchwork you imagine, thrown together carelessly. The reason dream events can form is precisely because of this extreme precision. If it were not precise enough, dream events could not take shape. So never underestimate the dreaming self, thinking he knows nothing and has no logic. It is just that his logic is too advanced, beyond your comprehension, so you assume he has no logic.

Dreams are not a passive event... this should be obvious.

Yet mainstream society today generally believes dreams are useless, that it does not matter whether you have them or not. Seth says, does this even need to be said? I have already explained so much about the active nature of dreams and their influence on memory.

Some of them, in their intensity and even in their efficiency, can rival events that actually happen in our three-dimensional world. They involve your body and mind in a very active coordination, bringing the individual experience that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

The intensity of some dream experiences surpasses that of events that actually happen in the three-dimensional world. They bring about an active coordination of body and mind, and if it were not for dreams, you could not obtain this kind of experience. Because some scenarios cannot happen in real life; they can only happen in dreams. So the active nature of dreams is enormous; it is a positive, active undertaking, just as important as the things you do during the day.

Seth offers a small suggestion here: when you are so sleepy you can barely keep your eyes open, just about to go to bed --

When you are sleepy... you may take a small amount of an ordinary stimulant.

An ordinary stimulant, like coffee or tea. Coffee and tea are both mild stimulants; drinking too much may keep you from sleeping. But he says this kind of stimulation can have a powerful effect in activating dream activity and assisting dream recall. Of course, you cannot drink too much; too much will wake you up, or you will wake up in the middle of the night. Take just a tiny amount, a small quantity.

It allows you to bring the conscious mind into your dreams more easily.

When you are already extremely sleepy, your body very tired, your energy running low, a small amount of coffee or tea will actually make your conscious mind more alert and more active, and then it will carry your conscious mind into the dream, allowing you to have a lucid dream or a clear dream, dreaming with your conscious mind. The conscious mind can serve as an excellent observer there, watching the events of the dream like a bystander -- you then have two perspectives: one is the perspective of the dreaming self, and the other is the perspective of the conscious mind observing from the side.

A very small amount of alcohol also works.

Drinking a small glass of red wine before bed -- a small amount of alcohol has a similar effect. But do not down a whole bottle; that will not do. Do not get drunk; getting drunk is counterproductive.

Anything of a depressive nature will also inhibit your dreams.

Do not use depressive substances, such as sedative-type drugs; those are exactly the opposite of what you want. Use the kind of thing that activates you, that makes you more active.

It is well known that anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming time will most likely begin to produce hallucinations while awake, because too much experience has accumulated that needs to be processed.

I have mentioned this several times already. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine a couple of years ago²¹ used experiments to prove that sleep has a substantive effect on human beings. Without sleep, people do indeed suffer harm, and this harm is real, substantive, and physical. It is not that going without sleep is fine; going without sleep will not do.

This is also why, in many places, when interrogating prisoners, they no longer use traditional torture; the most effective method is simply not letting you sleep²². Although many people think, "I did not beat you or scold you; I just did not let you sleep," this kind of sleep-deprivation torment is even more terrifying, and no one can withstand it. It is said that after several consecutive days without sleep, the person breaks down and confesses everything. Why? Because he has actually begun to hallucinate, unable to distinguish reality from actuality. By that point, he has accumulated a massive amount of information that needs processing, but has no way to process it in dreams, so hallucinations arise in broad daylight.

There are many times when a good deal of secondary hormonal activity can only occur in the dream state.

Hormonal adjustment and release: some secondary hormones can only be released in the dream state. This confirms what the Nobel Prize winner mentioned earlier discovered: this kind of harm is substantive and biological, not purely psychological torment. Beyond a certain point, it becomes substantive. Because the hormones that should have been secreted were not secreted. Although they are not major hormones and will not kill you immediately, the body has already suffered tremendous disorder and damage. These secondary hormones did not get their normal release because you did not sleep and did not dream. They can only be released in dreams.

As mentioned earlier, dreams are like codes. Certain special events in certain special dreams act like codes that directly trigger influences on the body's cells, directly trigger hormones, and allow the body's cells to be adjusted in the dream state. This kind of adjustment of secondary hormones can only be accomplished in dreams and cannot occur at other times. With long-term hormonal imbalance, all sorts of strange phenomena will appear in the body.

Even the growth and rejuvenation of cells is accelerated and restored at an accelerated rate while the body sleeps.

For cells to regain their vitality, their restoration and growth are accelerated only while the body sleeps. If you do not let it sleep, none of this can be completed. The cells cannot be restored and revitalized, the secondary hormones cannot be released, too much information is not processed in dreams, and then hallucinations arise: all of this is caused by the inability to sleep. So the harm of not sleeping is very great.

How do many cases of depression arise? In the early stages, depression has some psychological causes, but in the later stages, one of the main turning points in its onset often occurs when the person goes without sleep for several days in a row, or even ten days or longer, and cannot fall asleep. He keeps thinking about his issue all the time. Generally speaking, depression involves getting stuck in a mental dead end, and each person's dead end is different. At the beginning, when a person first gets stuck in that dead end, if psychological counseling helps him work through it and come out, then everything is fine. But at this point, the person often no longer communicates with others, so others do not know he is stuck in a dead end, or they know he is stuck but do not know how deep it goes, and only assume he may be dwelling on that issue. At this stage, there is still no great impact, and no substantive harm is caused.

But when he gets stuck in that extremely narrow angle, and in his mind and thoughts there is only this one thing, he cannot sleep at night. He thinks about it over and over, from every angle, and everything seems to hint at the thing he is thinking about. That thing may be completely impossible, or it may be only something he imagined, but because he focuses on it so intensely, as Seth said, everything he sees seems to hint that the thing will definitely happen. Then he cannot sleep at night. Of course, there are many kinds of depression; I am only describing one of them.

When this sleeplessness goes on for a long time: at first he cannot sleep for two or three days, and finally it develops into a week or ten days without sleep. Think about it: if a person cannot sleep for ten days, what does he feel? Seth said he will suffer substantive harm. What is the result of that harm? Scientists now have a preliminary understanding: the most typical characteristic of a depression patient is that the region of the brain that produces happiness has a problem. As long as that region is active, a person will feel joy and happiness. But in a person with severe depression, the region of the brain that produces happiness has already turned into a state resembling continuous electrical discharge. Does continuous discharge mean he is very happy? No. A state of continuous discharge is equivalent to suppressing the region of the brain responsible for happiness, so that he cannot feel any happiness at all.

So the greatest manifestation of a depression patient is that in life he has no interest in anything: no desire to eat, no desire to live, not even sexual desire, no desire at all, no happiness. The reason is that this part of the brain has a problem. Scientists are still studying it, but from Seth's perspective, it is caused by insufficient secretion of certain hormones in the body. Doctors today have also discovered that the secretion levels of certain hormones in the brains of depression patients are different from those of normal people, so many medications for treating depression are also aimed at adjusting these.

We are not discussing depression today; I am just giving everyone a simple foundation: for a normal person, if he goes without sleep for several days in a row, or does not sleep for a long time, it can also lead to depression, with the same consequences and the same severity.

One last point: depression is not something to be afraid of. It is like a cold or a fever: an illness that anyone can get. Research on depression is now very advanced. Mild cases can be handled without medication, just through counseling. If the condition is severe and a doctor determines that medication is needed, then you must take medication, just as you must take medication when you catch a cold or get pneumonia. That is a simple principle. If a doctor, a good and conscientious doctor, determines that you really need medication, then take it without hesitation, and do not feel any inferiority: "How did I end up with depression?" Do not think that way. Depression is like a cold: anyone can get it. Getting depression does not mean you have a mental illness; there is no such connection at all. Anyone can get it, and anyone can fully recover. In the early stages, take some medication; in the later stages, with the help of medication, begin your own psychological counseling, read materials related to body, mind, and spirit, or go do something meaningful to distract yourself, and with the company of friends find a more valuable goal in life. All of these can resolve the problem.

Of course, I am not an expert in this area, nor a doctor in this field. The above views are only for reference. If you or your friends and family really have symptoms of this kind, you should still go to a proper hospital for examination and follow the advice of relevant specialists.

注释与核实

1. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and Starship development timeline. ↩

2. First-stage booster recovery and reuse. ↩

3. Estimated cost reduction from reusability. ↩

4. NASA Commercial Crew and cargo contracts. ↩

5. Starlink satellite constellation. ↩

6. Panasonic 18650 lithium-ion cells. ↩

7. Tesla battery degradation data. ↩

8. 18650 cell capacity around 4,800 mAh. ↩

9. Battery pack energy density around 140 Wh/kg. ↩

10. Typical EV battery capacity in kWh. ↩

11. Tesla market capitalization surpassing legacy automakers. ↩

12. Annual sales volume comparison. ↩

13. Bill Gates's vision of a computer on every desk. ↩

14. Early silent films were typically shot at 16 to 18 frames per second, and when projected at the modern standard of 24 frames per second, the action appears sped up and jerky. ↩

15. The human visual system generally perceives smooth motion at frame rates of approximately 24 frames per second and above. ↩

16. This refers to the Libet experiments and subsequent replications, which found that readiness potential in the brain precedes conscious awareness of a decision by several hundred milliseconds to several seconds. ↩

17. According to Mike's original words, "the gut contains many neurons and nerve cells, exactly the same as brain nerve cells, just not as many as the brain—about one-twentieth of the brain's nerve cells"; upon verification, it should be "the number of neurons in the enteric nervous system of the gut is far less than one-twentieth of the brain—common estimates are 100 million to 600 million, quantitative research measured about 168 million neurons in the human enteric nervous system, while the brain has about 86 billion, a difference of several hundred times (on the order of one percent to one-thousandth)." (Source: Michel et al., "How big is the little brain in the gut? Neuronal numbers in the enteric nervous system of mice, Guinea pig, and human" (Neurogastroenterology & Motility, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nmo.14440) ↩

18. Source: Wikipedia, "February 1977" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_1977) ↩

19. This claim could not be verified. ↩

20. Source: Wen'an County People's Government, "Li Meijin: Your tone determines your child's attitude" (https://wenan.gov.cn/GOV1/Item/38327.aspx) ↩

21. This claim could not be verified. ↩

22. This claim could not be verified. ↩