Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 2

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text is from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter centers on the proposition that "the dreaming psyche is awake," pointing out that waking and dreaming are simply consciousness tuned to different frequencies or organizational ranges. In dreams, language and imagery are one, while waking experience is compared to a drama that one arranges and performs in; real change occurs within, not in external events. The end of the chapter discusses the psyche as a conscious gestalt of energy, that individuality is not destroyed, that life and death and time are not absolute boundaries, and reminds us that material laws cannot be applied to explain other realities.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The dreaming psyche is just as awake as the waking self; the difference lies in the frequency to which consciousness is attuned and the way it is organized.
• In dreams, language and imagery are one; interpreting dream experience after waking by using waking definitions is a distortion of the dream experience.
• Waking life is like a drama one arranges and takes part in; real change occurs within, not in outer events.
• The psyche is a gestalt of aware energy, indestructible, and individuality is not diminished.
• The laws of birth, death, and time in the physical world cannot be applied to other realities, and the reverse is also not valid.

Main Text

The Title of Chapter Two

This session is actually the tail end of the previous one, that is, the third part of the Chapter One commentary. But just as that class was about to end, at 11:50, almost approaching 12 o'clock, Jane had been in a very good trance state the whole time. After we talked for a few minutes, she added a sentence: "My God, I received Chapter Two." Then she said: "No, it's too late, I don't have the title for Chapter One yet." The title for Chapter One had not yet been obtained, but there was the title for the next chapter. Her gaze was unfocused, her eyes deep and dark. Rob told her she looked too tired to continue. She retorted: "No, I'm not tired." Her denial was comical and stubborn, because it was obvious that she was tired. It was already close to 12 o'clock, but she continued: "Now let me write a sentence or two for this chapter."

The title was: The Psyche in Dreaming Is Awake.

Then Seth immediately came through and said:

You have hypnotized yourself, so that you seem to feel there is a great division between your waking and sleeping states.

This is a kind of hypnosis we humans have imposed on ourselves — we believe there is a huge difference between waking and sleeping.

Tonight each of you will fall asleep, and there will be some experiences that you forget.

In sleep, you will forget many of your experiences in dreams. You forget only because you were told that you cannot remember them. Others told you: "Oh, dreams can't be remembered, they fade quickly once you wake up." You are hypnotized by this kind of belief, so you cannot remember your dreams. After conscious practice, many people can clearly remember their dreams.

When you sleep, however, many other dimensions of your own reality will clearly appear.

Your reality is not only this one three-dimensional world; there are many other dimensions, but these dimensions will clearly appear when you are dreaming.

When you sleep, you forget all the lessons passed down and the definitions placed upon yourself and your own existence.

In sleep, you will forget those definitions that were once placed upon you, or that once existed in your own being. In sleep, you use the purest form of language and imagery.

In dreams, your language and images are at their purest, because they have shed the influence of the traditional beliefs you are subject to while awake — the definitions of certain concepts, the definitions of certain words, have all been transcended.

In dreams, language and imagery seem to combine in a strange fashion, only because you have forgotten their great alliance.

Language and imagery are connected. Originally, language was meant to express and to liberate, not to define and limit. How did language come into being? Precisely for expression, for liberation. Only later was it developed into something increasingly complex, including definitions, concepts, and limitations.

So when you are dreaming, images and language are often mixed together, so that one becomes the expression of the other, and one completes the other. In dreams, language and imagery are frequently blended together.

The Unity of Dream Language and Imagery

Let me give a simple example: in ancient China, there were many of our own views on dream interpretation, the most famous being The Duke of Zhou's Dream Dictionary¹. A typical saying from it is that dreaming of a coffin is a good thing, meaning you are about to rise in rank and gain wealth. The words "coffin" and "rise in rank and gain wealth" have only a phonetic, linguistic similarity between them -- they are homophones -- with no connection in meaning whatsoever. A coffin itself we might feel is not an auspicious thing, but the dream interpreter would say that a coffin means you are about to rise in rank and gain wealth.

Seth is saying exactly this. In dreams, language and images, pictures and imagery, get mixed together, so you cannot tell them apart. That is why ancient China said that a person dreaming of a coffin is a good thing.

When you wake up, you try to squeeze the language of the psyche into the terms of definitions.

When you wake up, you connect the word "coffin" with the coffin in your reality, squeezing it into the definitions of your language. Because you think the coffin means just that, but you do not know that it actually means that "rank" and that "wealth," so you distort it.

You think language and imagery are two different things.

In your imagination, language and imagery are completely different things -- language is language, imagery is imagery. Therefore you try to put them together. Do you feel they are different? You want to mix the two together.

Actually, they are one thing.

In dreams, language and images are one thing, constantly substituting for each other. In dreams, you use the true ancient language of your own being -- in dreams, you use the truly ancient language of the psyche, the language of the soul.

Waking Organization and Dream Organization

This session did not end until 11:59. At the end of it, he received the title for Chapter One.

Next let us look at the main content of the first part of Chapter Two. This is Session 756, Monday, September 22, 1975, at 9:17 p.m. Not long after the session began, Jane told Rob that she thought they would receive material for this new book, along with some other information that interested them. Since the previous session, they had had several visitors. Rob was busy writing notes for The "Unknown" Reality, and he gave himself some time every day to paint. Jane was busy writing her own notes. In her dreams she had traveled back and forth three times to what seemed to be a confirmable probable reality — Jane went to the same probable world three times in her dreams, and she described it in her own notes.

At this point Seth said:

Now we begin the dictation, continuing with our Chapter Two.

He said that this dreaming psyche of yours seems to be — it seems as if it is dreaming. Only because you do not recognize that particular waking state as your own.

When we are dreaming, the self in the dream is certainly awake. Whatever we do in the dream, that self is certainly awake. But we do not realize that that waking state is yourself. You think it is a scene in a dream, a dreamscape, and that you yourself are asleep. Actually that is not so. Your psyche is awake the whole time.

The psyche that dreams, that soul of yours, is actually just as awake as your normal waking self.

The you in the dream, that soul, that psyche of yours, is just as awake as the you that is ordinarily awake. But the waking organization is different — you could say that you can enter the dream from different angles. When you are awake, the organizations that are awake include your body, your outer senses — your eyes, nose, ears are all awake; whereas the part that is awake in the dream, those organizations are not the same as the organizations that are awake when you are awake.

When you look at dreams from the waking state, all the sensations in dream activity, the off-center quality that is felt, the different viewpoints, the altered perspectives, and so forth, all add to the confusion of the picture.

That organizational state you have when you are awake — that waking organization — you consider that to be your center; in other words, this center that is based primarily on your outer senses. But when you are asleep, in the dream state you use other organizations, such as your inner senses and so forth. Between these two, you feel that the waking state is the center, and that the dream state is off-center — all those sensations feel off-center. Therefore you create many changes in viewpoint and changes in perspective, which make the picture very chaotic. You feel as though the events in dreams are all disorderly and illogical.

Session 756

In your terms, many centuries ago, words and images had a closer relationship.

This was indeed the case a very long time ago. Many Mayan characters are also pictographs. The earliest Chinese -- even today our Chinese characters are still pictographic; we evolved from pictographs, and present-day Chinese characters still have six basic methods of character formation, one of which is pictographs.

And now that relationship is somewhat hampered.

Now there is no relationship at all. Yet this ancient relationship appears in dreams -- in dreams, words and the images corresponding to words become connected again.

Here we can use English as an example. Other languages have similar examples, just as the example I gave earlier was in Chinese. He says, for example:

The stable descriptive quality of words can point out the unity between the images and the words that appear in your dreams.

For example, in the past a man who sewed clothes was called Taylor -- in English, Taylor means tailor. A robber could become Rob -- Robert in English means robber. If you were someone's son, you could also simply add this "son," meaning the son of so-and-so. So very likely names would be Jackson, Robertson, and so on -- meaning Jack's son, Robert's son, and so forth. Every reader can think of many such examples. In an English-speaking environment, all of this is quite normal.

Now names are no longer so descriptive -- in the past, something like Smith meant blacksmith, but now names are all very strange and no longer carry so much representational meaning.

However, you might have a dream in which you see yourself noticing a tailor's shop. Perhaps the tailor is dancing, perhaps dying, perhaps preparing to marry -- not necessarily any one of these. Later, in your waking daily life, you might discover that a good friend of yours is named Taylor -- because tailor in English means Taylor. And then this Taylor might happen to hold a banquet, or die, or be about to marry.

In any of the above cases, you may never have connected that dream with the later event. You never thought that the tailor dancing, marrying, or eating in the dream had any particular connection with this friend named Taylor in real life. Because you do not understand the way in which words and images can be linked in your dreams. You did not realize how closely connected this tailor and this Taylor are.

The Television Analogy

Your waking life is the result of a most precise organization.

When awake, we use a complete system to organize our own lives. This organization is one you are capable of, and one created with astonishing clarity. The waking organization is a result of a clear, most precise organization.

Although each person views that picture from a subtly different focus, it still occurs within a certain range and frequency.

Each person's angle and focus are different, but it definitely occurs within a certain range or a certain frequency. This is something you must remember.

You bring this waking world clearly into your focus.

Almost in the same way you adjust a television picture -- by adjusting the frequency. For a television to receive a certain station, the frequency must be tuned to that station. But in this case, it is not just sound or image, but a far more complex phenomenon.

In such an example, let us suppose that this waking reality world is a certain specific frequency. The main reason we are able to operate in this waking world is that we have aimed the focus of our consciousness at this waking frequency. Then you become aligned with this waking frequency, you become synchronized. Your consciousness becomes attuned to your waking world, and therefore you can perceive everything in the waking world. And everything in this waking world is also the result of your being precisely organized -- it is the result of your psyche organizing it.

Just as in this analogy, each person sees a slightly different picture of reality. The world in each person's eyes is never exactly the same; it is roughly similar, but all different. And each person selects his own program. In this same three-dimensional world, when the same event occurs, one person may choose to focus on this level and view the problem from this angle, while another person may choose to view the problem from another angle. Although this reality event, this thing that happened, is roughly the same, the angle from which each of us views it, the angle from which we choose our own program, is different. Therefore the same event may appear to you as a challenge, as an opportunity, while to some people it appears as a disaster.

Yet when you are dreaming, to some extent you experience truth from an entirely different television set.

When you are dreaming, that television set changes; it is different from when you are awake -- an entirely different television set.

Now, when you try to adjust that dream television set the way you do when you are awake, when you try to adjust that television set in the dream state, what you get as a result is static noise and blurred images.

The frequency is wrong. You still want to use the frequency you use when awake to receive, but by this time the television set has already changed, and the channel you are receiving, the television program, has also changed. But you do not know this, and you keep using the same frequency to receive, so you get a lot of noise and blurring.

But this television set itself is just as functional as the one you use when awake.

It is not that the television set is broken -- do not think that just because the television only receives snow and noise, the television is broken. It is not that the television is broken; it is that your frequency is not tuned correctly.

And it has a far broader range of reception.

The width of the frequency, the width of the spectrum, is broader, so it can receive more stations -- far more stations than you can receive when awake -- and can bring in more programs. This television set is more advanced.

Reality in Waking and in Dreams

Let me give you an example. Ruburt and Joseph often watch the old show Star Trek² while they eat dinner -- a classic series that is still airing to this day and has influenced several generations. They sit comfortably on the sofa in the living room, with their dinner placed on their coffee table, surrounded by all the familiar trappings of comfort customary in your society. As they sit there like that, they are watching that television series. For instance, in this series, a certain planet explodes -- on another planet, evil forces challenge the bold captain of the Enterprise and the fearless Spock. None of this threatens Ruburt and Joseph in front of the television set; they, along with their coffee and their dessert, are unaffected.

Your normal waking reality can be compared to a television drama.

Our life when we are awake can be compared to a television drama. In this, you directly participate in all the performances being staged -- in this living drama, we are everywhere. You created them in the first place; you formed your individual and joint adventures. Because there are other actors here as well -- a leading man, a leading lady, supporting actors and supporting actresses, and also some extras performing together. In your drama you are the leading man, but in that other drama someone else is the leading man, and you may be the second male lead, or perhaps you do not even count as the second male lead -- you are just an extra.

You employ the tools of your own physical substance -- your body -- in a particular way.

You use your own body in a particular way to bring these dramas into your experience.

You adjust your frequency to a large program arrangement.

We are adjusting our frequency to this physical reality. This physical reality is like a very large programming area, in which all kinds of dramas are staged every day, with many different television stations and many different channels. Whichever one you want to take part in, you take part in that one. One station is showing a comedy, another station is showing a tragedy, another station is showing a gunfight drama, another station is showing a science fiction drama. Whichever station you want to watch, you watch that station. That is to say, in our three-dimensional world, many dramas are staged every day; it just depends on whether you want to take part.

For example, take the recent events concerning Black people in America, the death of Floyd³, with many people taking to the streets in protest and so on. You can choose to participate in this event, or you can choose not to participate. But whether or not you participate, that drama is still being staged there. If you want to participate, you go out into the streets and become one of the marchers; if you do not want to participate, then this matter has nothing to do with you, and you just watch it as if watching someone else's farce.

So in your terms, these television stations become alive.

If you do not participate, then you watch the introductions in the television news, as if this matter had nothing to do with you; but if you actually participate yourself, then it is different -- then it becomes alive.

You are the drama that you experience.

The television drama that you experience is your life. And all of your activities seem to revolve around you, with you as the center, and you are also the one who watches -- you are both the actor and the audience. Not only are you the protagonist in every drama, with all the people revolving around you and the plot revolving around you, you are the main thread of the story, and at the same time you are also the one watching this drama.

Another Television Set in the Dream State

Yet within the dream state, you have a rather different television set. With this new television set, you can not only view and receive many events from your own viewpoint, but also from other focal points. With that television set, you jump from this station to that station, not merely watching but actually experiencing what is happening in other times and places. In dreams, you jump from this space-time to that space-time; you are experiencing what is happening in different space-times, and while you are generally experiencing it, you are also observing yourself at the same time.

Events are organized in a different way.

Within that dream, because the television set is different, events are also combined in a different way within that reality space. Not only can you experience this drama that you have closely designed — you can go through the plot related to you from your own first-person perspective — but the range of your activity is also expanded. You are not only participating in this game, in the performance of this drama, from a first-person perspective; you can also look at time from outside your usual scope, and you can also step outside and watch this play. You can observe a drama on one hand and participate in it on the other.

This is a very typical example. It is as if we now have two perspectives. I do not know whether you have seen that kind of movie — many movies have two versions, one called the producer's cut or the director's cut, and one called the regular theatrical version. The regular theatrical version is the one the audience watches, and it pulls the audience into a state of immersive viewing. Then sometimes this movie also releases a director's cut, in which the director has a voice-over, telling you from the side why he set up such a shot, why the plot was arranged this way. While the movie is playing, he introduces it to you at the same time. That is, the production staff of the television drama, the backstage personnel, come out to the front stage and tell you why this drama was arranged this way, why the characters were set up this way, which parts are foreshadowing, and which props have their deeper meanings.

In dreams, you can actually do exactly this — you can be acting in this drama on one hand, and on the other hand step outside and look at this drama from another angle.

Waking and Dreaming: Different Frequency Levels

When you are in the normal waking state, you are active in one of the many levels inherent in your psyche.

When you are awake, you are only active in one level of your psyche -- the physical level.

And when you dream, from your viewpoint, you enter other levels of reality that are equally inherent to your psyche.

Those times and spaces may be relatively unfamiliar to your waking self, but to your psyche, to your soul, they are equally an inherent level, just as this physical world is also an inherent level to it. This psyche itself is a multidimensional existence, a multi-dimensional being, and the physical world is only one of its facets. Those other facets are relatively unfamiliar to you because you lean only toward the physical world, whereas to your psyche, those other facets are the same as the facet of the physical world -- they are all part of what it itself possesses, what it has always had.

The dreams you remember are then colored or altered.

Why is that? Because although you have gone to different times and spaces, you still carry the perspective of the physical world when looking at these matters. Because the consciousness, the ideas, the beliefs you use are the same consciousness and beliefs you have when you are awake. You enter the dream with this perspective, wearing tinted glasses. When you look at other times and spaces, you are wearing a pair of glasses called the Earth perspective. This pair of Earth-perspective glasses has its own characteristics, its own color. First, it has a view of time and space -- there must be a temporal sequence of before and after. Second, it demands a kind of reasonableness -- things must be sensible and logical. For example, a child cannot be born from a tree, a telephone cannot eat by itself, things cannot be illogical.

It is even checked to some extent.

Even to some degree, your waking beliefs and consciousness will go and check on the things you do in your dreams.

There is no inherent psychological or physical need for this.

This in itself is unnecessary. There is no need to insist on adding these checks, on adding this coloring. But we automatically superimpose it.

Your ideas and beliefs about the nature of reality and about mental soundness therefore bring about such a division.

Division is a distortion. When you use your waking beliefs, the Earth's tinted glasses, to look at events in your other reality spaces, division arises. The reason is your view of the nature of reality -- that is, your view of what the world actually is, what the world should be -- and also your idea of mental soundness. You think that so-called mental soundness means that everything must be sensible and logical. If things are not sensible and logical, would you not be insane? If you saw a pizza growing out of a tree, would you not be insane? There would be something wrong with you. This is the belief you hold, the idea you hold -- keeping everything sensible and logical, keeping a concept of time and space that you can understand. So this dream must take place within a specific time and space, and the events in the dream will not appear in a time and space you cannot understand; they will all be pulled into the angle of a time and space you can understand. So although the scenes in dreams are basically rather chaotic and disorderly to you, they are still basically sensible and logical.

There is no need to subject them to examination, to look at them with the Earth's perspective, the Earth's glasses, but we automatically do this anyway. This then leads to such a division.

The Structural Parallel Between Dream and Waking Experience

Let us return to our friends -- Ruburt and Joseph watching Star Trek². Just as each of them watches the programs you enjoy, Ruburt and Joseph, for example, know that Star Trek² is not real. Planets can explode on the screen, and Ruburt will not spill a single drop of his coffee. The imagined catastrophe happening only a few feet from the sofa leaves the quiet living room completely untouched. Even if a planet explodes right in front of you, it does not matter; it does not affect you in the least, because you feel it is fake, you do not feel it is real.

In certain respects, such programs reflect certain beliefs held by your society, so they are like a specially drawn waking dream of the masses, real and yet not real.

All television dramas are like a kind of shared waking dream of our collective. For example, when we go into a movie theater, the dark theater lights go off, the screen lights up, and then the movie begins. Movies today, whether IMAX or 3D, with immersive sound effects added, make you feel as if you are really there. Two hundred people sit in the theater, and these two hundred people are somewhat like they have collectively dreamed a dream together. Whether it is a television drama or a movie, you can draw this kind of analogy.

Why can you draw this analogy? Here you feel it is both real and not real. What does it mean to be both real and not real? You clearly know this is a movie, not real, but the plot, the images, the sound give you a feeling -- especially now with 3D movies, if you watch an IMAX 3D movie, it is simply lifelike and immersive. Add to that the emotional rendering of the story, and many people will have their hearts racing because of it. In a 3D movie, when something flies straight at you, you instinctively dodge it. So it is both real and not real for you.

But let us switch for the moment to the game you enjoy of soldiers and robbers -- that is, police and gangster films. When we watch a police and gangster film, for example, a woman is shot and killed. In such a drama it becomes more real, more possible, and then it is not so comfortable anymore. Because this is a social phenomenon around you, and if this case happened right next door to your home, then you would be even more nervous. Therefore, watching such a program, you yourselves may feel slightly threatened, but on the whole you still are not worried -- a little worried, not very worried. Everyone will think, "How terrible, society is like this now, such a thing can happen right on the street."

Some people may not watch this kind of program at all. Instead, they watch wholesome legends, religious dramas. A preacher may be glowing with health, his eyes fervent, extolling the benefits of good deeds, and then cursing the devil's team. And for certain viewers, that unseen devil who never appears still seems very real -- through the preacher's vivid depiction, it seems as if this devil truly exists, but how could it? Yet it is depicted as if it were real. So it forms certain of your focuses.

You happily ignore certain dangerous plots that are broadcast -- just as some girls, when watching a movie and a terrifying scene comes on, such as a bloody murder scene, will instinctively close their eyes, cover their eyes and not look. Everyone has this ability to automatically ignore dangerous plots. This is quite a good adventure story. And at the same time, other plots may strike your heart, and you think they are too real. That kind of explosion scene, the immersive feeling -- if you watch Avatar⁴, you will also have this feeling. If you have been to Disney or Universal Studios, in Orlando, Florida there is a park with a special Avatar attraction⁵. If you have experienced that attraction, that sense of reality is too lifelike, even more lifelike than watching a movie. You ride on something, put on 3D glasses, and directly take off flying.

Therefore, in your waking dream experience, you will make the same kind of distinctions.

When you watch a movie, you automatically skip over those dangerous, terrifying plots, and you feel they are too real. But when you are awake, you do the same thing as in dreams -- you automatically avoid those things that make you afraid, that make you fearful. You will not walk down a very dark road at night, you certainly would not dare enter some haunted houses, there are many terrifying places you do not dare go, and you do not even dare ride things like roller coasters. Why? You feel they are too frightening.

You will be touched or untouched by these waking or dream events according to the importance you assign to them.

In your mind there is an order of importance and priority, and you will decide what you want to come into contact with and what you do not, what events you want to have happen in your life or in your dreams, or what you do not want to have happen in your dreams or in your life. All of this is within your control.

If you do not like a television program, you only need to turn the channel and you can switch to another station -- back then televisions still had to be turned by hand, now you just press the remote control to change the channel. If you do not like your physical experience -- your experience in the physical world -- you can also switch to another more favorable station. But only when you recognize that you are about to be the producer can you switch. Only when you think of yourself as the producer can you change your drama at any time.

Just a while ago, in Stella's sharing, she also mentioned a similar point -- the television station can be decided by you, can be changed by you; it is not that it cannot be changed.

Nightmares and Changing the Channel

In the dream state, many people learn to escape by waking from the dream -- when we have a certain nightmare, at the moment the most terrifying thing is about to happen, you suddenly startle awake, sit up with a jolt, and shout. You are avoiding, fleeing from that terrifying thing. Or you change the focus of consciousness to escape the nightmare -- perhaps in the middle of a nightmare, it suddenly turns into another dream, or you suddenly wake with a start, frightened awake.

Ruburt and Joseph would not feel threatened by Star Trek²; that program would not make them feel unsafe. But when you find yourself in a terrifying physical environment, or when you are tormented by nightmares, at that point you wish you knew how to change the channel. Because there is nothing terrifying in Star Trek², you can probably watch it normally. But when you are watching an extremely horrifying horror film, or when you encounter a truly terrifying experience in real life, you certainly wish you knew how to change the channel -- you definitely wish you knew how not to experience it.

You are often captivated by a television drama, so that for a moment you forget its unreality and take it as real. And while your attention is fixed upon it, you can temporarily ignore the larger reality around you.

For example, when we watch certain horror films, when they are extremely well made, you really do get deeply caught up in them. You can be scared by a horror program and enjoy it immensely -- some people especially love watching horror films. You may feel you must know how it turns out. Although you are very afraid of this horror film, you also find it very thrilling; you especially want to know what happens in the end. For instance, there was a very old horror film called Alien⁶. In Alien⁶, at the very beginning of the whole movie, the alien itself rarely appears; what appears is its slime, disgusting things, terrifying sounds, or a plot that makes you feel very afraid. But many people kept wanting to see what this alien actually looked like. Yet when the alien actually appeared, it was not as frightening after all -- not as frightening as before it appeared.

You very much want to know the outcome of this horror film, or the outcome of a drama. So you cannot go to bed until you know that the terrifying situation has been resolved. You cannot sleep soundly; you must see the murderer brought to justice before you can rest at ease.

During this whole period, you know that rescue is right beside you; you can always turn it off.

Although you are still afraid, you know you are not that afraid. Even at the most frightening moment, you still have one last resort, which is to turn off the television. If you truly dare not watch, besides covering your eyes, you can also turn off the television. After watching that Japanese horror film Ring⁷, many people were terrified -- because that horror film shows Sadako crawling directly out of the television set⁸.

If a person watching a bloody late-night program suddenly screams or leaps up from the chair with a yell, how ridiculous that looks. A bystander who is not watching what he is watching, but merely seeing him from another angle, would see a person suddenly scream and leap up from the chair or sofa in front of the television. You would think, "Oh, how silly, this person." Because his behavior is inappropriate to the real situation -- his surroundings are very safe, and his fearful expression and startled behavior are extremely inappropriate to the safe living room in the quiet of the night, so it seems ridiculous.

But this is a reaction to a false drama. The shouting or screaming caused by the horror film he is watching has absolutely no effect on the actors in the program -- you cannot change those actors; they are not in the same dimension at all, nor in the same space and time. Nor will you change that drama in the slightest; the plot of the drama is not affected by you in any way, and the terrifying scene continues to unfold. What is the most appropriate thing for you to do? Just turn off the television. If you do not turn off the television, that terrifying thing will continue to happen.

The True Source of Fear

In this example, the frightened audience fully understands—the terrifying events on the screen will not suddenly erupt in the living room. Planets will not explode in your living room, murderers will not appear in your living room, and Sadako will not actually crawl out of the television. You know all this.

But when you are frightened by real, physical events—in the real three-dimensional world, for instance, when you walk through a very terrifying, pitch-dark alley late at night—when you are frightened by this real fear, your shouting or stamping your feet is likewise foolhardy. Because that is not where the action takes place—it is useless. Just as when you face a horror film and you scream and shout in shock, it has no effect on the actors in the horror film. And in real society, when you encounter something terrifying, your shouting, stamping, and screaming are also useless. Because it does not happen out there—it happens in your mind. That fear comes from within your mind, not from that external thing.

You only need to change your television channel—just change the channel. But you often become so wholly absorbed in the scenes of your life that you fail to realize your reactions are inappropriate.

Let me give a simple example so you can understand. For instance, some people, because of a breakup, are so grief-stricken they cannot go on living. Their lives completely change; they stop eating and drinking, and spend every day weeping, and this can go on for a long time. Even worse, some people jump off a building and kill themselves because of a breakup. As bystanders, we think it is such a pity, so childish, so ignorant—that you would do this to yourself over a mere matter of emotion. But the person involved does not think that way at all. For that person, it is completely real; that emotion, that determination not to live, is utterly firm.

For the person involved, he is focused on his life; he does not see that he is merely in a play, and he takes it as real—that is why he jumps off the building, why he stops eating and drinking and loses all appetite. If at that moment he could step outside it, step outside and look at the matter from a third-person perspective, he would be like someone watching a television drama—"Oh, isn't it just a breakup? Television dramas show breakups every day, one after another. At most you might cry along with him for a bit and leave it at that—could you really cry every day?"

This is a typical, vivid example to help you understand what this passage is trying to say: you must learn to change the channel. A breakup means the love drama between you and that person has finished. Do not think of the breakup as so serious—it is simply that the play between the two of you is over. Maybe it ran for three episodes and then stopped; maybe in someone else's love drama it ran for fifty episodes and ended in a happy reunion, but in your drama, by the plot arrangement of the third episode, the two of you broke up. So you broke up—then just change to the next one—the next person who will act opposite you has not appeared yet. Why are you so desperate to live or die? The next segment of your plot has not even begun. It is enough to feel appropriate sadness and pain; there is no need for excessive reactions.

What he means by changing the channel is adjusting the beliefs in your mind, adjusting your thoughts, adjusting your view of the matter. When your view of the matter changes, you have effectively changed the channel. At that point you will look forward to it: "Oh, the breakup is just right—now I can begin the next romance." If you adopt such a mindset, you will not be desperate to live or die.

But most of us cannot do this, because we are too focused on this situational drama of life. We treat this situational drama of life as one hundred percent real, and therefore we cannot pull ourselves out of it.

You Are the Arranger of the Program

In all such cases, you yourself are the arranger of the program.

Whether you break up with this person, marry them, or divorce them — all of it was agreed upon before you came here, arranged by yourselves. This plot is something you yourselves arranged. Once the plot is arranged, how you yourself react to this plot, what kind of attitude you adopt — that is not arranged; that is your own. And that is what matters most.

What Stella shared: the experiences in life are not what is important; what is important is your reaction to the event after it has passed. The same event, happening to different people, produces different reactions. And what actually happened or did not happen in the event itself — who you lived with for decades or did not live with for decades, who you married and had children with, who you only met once — none of that is important. What is important is what you felt and experienced in the midst of it.

Just treat it as a plot. Do not focus on the plot itself; focus on what you learned from the plot, what you gained, what you experienced, what you felt. If the plot happens to be very short, only three days and two nights — you and a person may have only had three days together in some special place, some special time and space. But those brief three days let you experience what love is, what heart-wrenching pain is, what true love is. After three days you may have parted, yet in those three days you experienced love. But you could live with a person for an entire lifetime and still never know what love tastes like.

The most important thing in all of this is not to get hung up on the material reality of the three-dimensional world. That material reality is the plot. For example, whether you have money or not — these are all things of the material world, all part of a plot, just like the arrangements in a TV drama — you play the tycoon, he plays the chauffeur; that is the arrangement. As for who draws something deeper from this plot, that depends on the feelings you as an actor bring to the plot and the sense you convey through your performance. This is the core.

Fate and Fortune

So a lot of people ask: if our lives are all fixed, then what meaning is there in our living? You are thinking in terms of the physical world. From the standpoint of the physical world, the major plotlines of your life may indeed be set. If you place your life's pursuits and goals only in the physical world, then from that angle, your fate does have a fixed number within it, and there is a rough storyline. But this fixed number is not arranged by someone else; it was arranged by you yourself before you came. It is still your own arrangement. But it is an arrangement, and it is an arrangement in the physical world — for example, what kind of family you are born into, what kind of country you are born into, what your birth environment is like, what era you are born in, whom you will meet, what things will happen to you.

From the standpoint of the soul, from the level of the spiritual, these physical arrangements are not important. The spiritual is about what kind of experience you have under such physical arrangements, and what you gain. And this is what matters most. This part is completely free and open, completely blank. The soul has placed no restrictions on it at all; it is entirely blank and open.

The same event of a failed romance will have different outcomes for different people. Some people sink into depression and never recover; others, receiving such a stimulus and motivation, begin from then on to strive with determination and open up a very great career — two completely different outcomes, two completely different paths in life. So whether the failed romance is good or bad depends on which angle you look at it from.

If you ask: is your life arranged, and do you have no autonomy at all? If you look at it from the physical angle, to a certain extent that is the case. Of course, after learning spirituality, you can revise and adjust this. If you want to change, you can take a 24-week course, you can do 21 days of meditation, you can change your beliefs through other means, adjust and replace your beliefs, and change your life. That is another matter.

Right now I am assuming the life of an ordinary person — someone who has not learned spiritual things, has not learned spiritual knowledge, and does not understand these spiritual theories, just the life of an ordinary person. Then basically the physical events he encounters in this life have already been arranged. If you ask me whether his fate is fixed, from the physical level it is fixed; there is a fixed number within it.

If you look at it from the spiritual angle, from the soul's angle, from the angle of a higher dimension, nothing is fixed. Only some storylines have been designated. How the remaining matters are performed, how they are experienced, how they are felt, what can be recognized from them, what can be learned, what elevation and refinement can be gained — all of this is what the soul values most. And all of this is not fixed in the least; it is entirely handed over to you.

And from another angle, when the same event occurs, when your viewpoint changes, when your attitude changes, then the things that follow also all change. Take the failed romance again. If you sink into depression from then on, your latter half of life may be a very desolate one, one in which you no longer trust anyone — if you are a woman, you no longer believe in any man; if you are a man, you no longer believe in any woman. Then your emotional life becomes a mess, and your life becomes a mess.

How do you know that the one who arranged the failed romance did not intend for you to strive with determination and become a leading figure in a new field? How do you know it was not arranged that way? So when this event happens, how you think at that moment will also affect the later changes in the physical world. A single thought can make all the difference.

Fortune-telling and destiny, luck, and feng shui

This brings us back to fortune-telling in our Chinese tradition. China has many forms of fortune-telling, and the West has them too, such as astrology, tarot cards, innate talents, Mayan energy, Light cards, all sorts of systems. China has even more, such as the I Ching⁹ eight trigrams, Zi Wei Dou Shu, the Four Pillars¹⁰, and so on, all of them exist.

How exactly does a fortune-teller do the reading? This is a question many people have asked. What the fortune-teller sees is a rough scene behind all this, or a rough image. That thing was more or less set when you came here. By making contact with those levels beyond the three-dimensional, he can catch a glimpse of it.

So we often say in fortune-telling, "First destiny, second luck, third feng shui." Let us start with "first destiny" -- after this person arrives, his destiny is already fixed, for example what family he is born into, what environment he is born into, that is set in stone.

What is "luck"? This is something many people do not understand. Let me put it to you plainly: luck is the thoughts in your head. In relatively scientific terms, it is your belief system. How you view things, how you handle things when they come, your methods for handling things, your way of viewing things and your angle on them -- that is your luck. If you view everything positively and optimistically, then your luck throughout life will be very good, and we say great fortune is upon you; even in adversity you can walk out onto a brilliant path ahead. If you view everything pessimistically -- no matter what happens you see it that way, for example when something good happens you think, "Do not think about good things, bad things always follow good things," you say how could there be such a wonderful thing, surely misfortune is right behind it -- if you are a pessimistic person, then even when good things happen to you, you interpret them from a pessimistic angle, and you live your whole life in fear and anxiety, always expecting the worst, then your luck as a person is poor.

Explained this way, you can especially understand the relationship between destiny and luck. Destiny can be fixed, but luck is entirely in your hands. And the most valuable thing here is not the destiny -- if you are a person of the three-dimensional world and treat the material world as your only pursuit, then destiny is indeed very important to you; but if you can understand it from the angle of luck, you will discover that the destiny is not important at all. Whatever arrangement of destiny you are given, you can view it positively, and you can live happily and joyfully. That is the relationship between destiny and luck.

What is called feng shui is what Seth in Seth Speaks calls points of energy intersection. Points of energy intersection include main points of intersection and secondary points of intersection, and they are distributed everywhere in the space around us. The closer you are to a point of intersection, the stronger your energy transformation will be. So what feng shui means is that you should try -- if possible, when you have a choice -- of course the closer to a point of intersection the better, the more energy you will receive, and the faster the speed of manifestation will be. This is "first destiny, second luck, third feng shui," a viewpoint from traditional Chinese culture.

Action Is Not Where It Seems to Be

You need to understand that you yourself are the arranger of this program. And the real action is not where it seems to be.

That is to say, what can truly change this program is not in the outer world. You would think that to change this program, I must exert effort on outer events, I must go and change these outer events, and that will change the arrangement of the program behind them. You are changing the wrong place -- it seems to be there, but it is not there.

On the contrary, it is in your heart, where you write the play being performed.

What can truly change the arrangement of this program is your psyche. There you are writing the script, you are writing the play that comes after.

In the dream state, you write and perform many such dramas, and the same is true in waking life.

This is all you, you are the scriptwriter. So when you want to change a play, when you are dissatisfied with your present living environment, with your present life circumstances, do not go after the living environment itself; go and change your inner self. Only when you make changes within your inner self will outer events change. Otherwise you are putting the cart before the horse, climbing a tree to look for fish -- you are going in the wrong direction.

The dramas in your dreams are performed in just this way, and the same is true in your waking reality. As for the further relationship between dreams and reality, he will elaborate on that later in this book as well.

Session 758

Starting from the Frequencies of Dreaming and Waking

Today we continue with the second part of our interpretation of Chapter 2 of The Nature of the Psyche, that is, Session 758, the session of October 6, 1975. At the beginning of this session, Seth says that Session 757 concerned other matters of particular interest to Jane and me, and was therefore unrelated to this book, whereas this session is related to the book.

At the start of this session, he first uses an analogy to compare how we differ when waking and when dreaming. Do not forget, the title of this chapter is "The dreaming psyche, or the dreaming soul, is awake," and the theme of this chapter is to discuss the difference between dreams and reality.

He says that our brain is capable of operating on countless frequencies, and each frequency presents to the person at this moment a picture of a world that is that frequency's own reality. Here you must remember, this is only an analogy; do not get it wrong. Many people, including much of today's spiritual material, talk about frequency at every turn, treating frequency as some kind of standard to be reached, or saying that the high or low frequency of a person's energy or spiritual energy represents some kind of score. I only want to tell everyone, remember, this is only an analogy; there does not exist a frequency in the way you think of it. If there really is a frequency, it should be at the quantum level — at least above the quantum level — rather than the electromagnetic frequency you understand. Be sure to remember this.

Each frequency corresponds to its own reality; one frequency corresponds to one world. This frequency corresponds to this world and brings it to your physical senses, brings it into your physical senses in a certain way, and then you can feel it. It organizes these materials in its own particular way, and each frequency deals with the body itself and the contents of the mind in its own somewhat different manner. One frequency corresponds to one world, so different frequencies, that is, different worlds, will have different ways of dealing with the body or your mind, that is, the contents of your consciousness. In other words, our brain has the ability to face many different worlds, or one could say different dimensions; that is what it means.

Generally speaking, your life in the waking state operates on one particular frequency. Our waking frequency is a special frequency, and therefore it seems as though beyond the reality you recognize, beyond this world, there is nothing else, only our physical world; and apart from the material you are normally familiar with, there is no broader material either. This is a characteristic of our waking frequency.

So events seem to happen to you. This is very interesting, and I have said it many times — you feel that these things all "happened to you," that they are aimed at you. You say, why did this thing happen to me, why did this illness happen to me, why is this person always so harsh toward me... There is always a feeling of something "happening to you," as though the event is always aimed at you. Often it seems that you have no more control over your life than you do over the outcome of a television program. Although in daily life you seem to feel you have a great deal of autonomy, from a macro perspective, within the three-dimensional world you are confined, and you seem to have little power to change your present life; you are often helpless. You want to change your life, but you often find that you cannot change it.

This is somewhat like what? It is like watching a television drama: among the plotlines there are some you like and some you do not, but no matter how much you shout in front of the television, you will not change the plot in the slightest. And our lives are often like this as well: when we are dissatisfied with life, when we complain, shout, feel depressed and disappointed, we hope to change our lives, but life does not change, and we continue step by step with the life we have been living. Seth mentions here that it is just like watching the content of a television drama; the feeling is the same — you cannot change the content of the drama, and you cannot change the things in your life either.

Yet sometimes your own dreams or inspirations still startle you; they give you information that you cannot obtain within our usual order, information that does not exist within our normal thinking, logic, and environment. In dreams it suddenly emerges and startles you. The plots and scenes provided by the usual mental planning can hardly explain this event — our ordinary brain and intelligence find it hard to understand. The storylines and scenes we ordinarily provide are completely out of place with it; in dreams and inspirations some very strange things happen.

You are so conditioned that even when you are awake, you try to monitor your experience and interpret dream events according to the habitual frequency that you have learned to accept as the only standard of facts that are real. That is to say, even in dreams you monitor in real time, using your so-called orthodox concepts or official concepts and consciousness to monitor the things in dreams. Actually this no longer makes sense, but you are already used to it; you are used to examining dream scenes with the waking frequency.

But quite literally, he tells you, when you are dreaming, you are tuned to a different frequency. I have to tell you, the truth is that when you are dreaming, your frequency is different from your waking frequency. Your body responds biologically to these on different levels — different levels, which you can understand as different dimensions or different worlds; your body can have these biological responses in different worlds. So in dreams you will have physical reactions, such as a faster heartbeat, rapid breathing, sweating, and that kind of fear that makes your hair stand on end; these are all physiological reactions, and they do exist. Yet the dream is not at all something from our three-dimensional world.

As far as dreaming is concerned, your physical body is naturally adept at handling the projection of consciousness — that is, projection of the consciousness; your body is born with this ability. It is also called out-of-body experience, or out-of-body travel, off the body travel, out-of-body travel. He says this is a certain residence, something everyone is born with, no matter what you like to call it. Your biological structure already includes the mechanism that allows a part of your consciousness to leave your body and return again. So whether you call it out-of-body experience or projection of consciousness, no matter what it is called, this ability is innate in every person; there is no need to feel it is miraculous. These mechanisms are also part of animal nature; animals have them too, not only you.

The physical body is equipped to perceive many other experiences; your physical body originally has this ability to perceive experiences of nonphysical reality. It is already fully equipped. It is somewhat like a Tesla car: all the configurations are already in place, its autonomous driving, cameras, and sensors are all there, but they are not activated; you need to pay to subscribe to that service before you can use the assisted driving function. For example, a while ago Tesla introduced an acceleration boost package that could improve the Model 3's acceleration performance from 4.9 seconds to 4.11 seconds, and it cost 2,000 dollars to achieve this¹¹. Actually it only unlocked part of the motor's functions. Later an engineer directly cracked Tesla's program and unlocked all the motor's power. The motor of this Tesla car had its power limited at the factory, because they were afraid it would compete with higher-end cars like the Model S, so they restricted the Model 3's motor performance; actually the motors are all the same¹². After that engineer cracked it, he raised the car's acceleration performance from the official 4.6 seconds directly to 3.8 seconds¹³. For a car, if you know sports cars, this performance improvement is already very significant.

The reason I give this example is to say that every human body is like a Tesla car: the hardware functions inside are all present, and you need your software to activate them. This ability is present in everyone — not only the ability to perceive our three-dimensional world, but we can perceive other dimensions; this ability itself is already there, and we only need to activate it ourselves. And this does not require payment; Tesla requires money, but this does not.

The Limits of Social Norms and Beliefs

These out-of-body experiences are all innate human experiences that are not acknowledged, not officially recognized; even now scientists do not recognize these things. So to a certain degree, you have learned to constantly monitor your behavior, and this is a tragedy for humanity. Monitor what behavior? You make your behavior conform to the established standards of evaluation for what is considered sound or rational experience -- that is, we often judge abilities we originally possess as abnormal, special, or supernormal. Because we ourselves have set a standard in our waking life and world, and whatever does not conform to our waking standards we consider abnormal and unconventional. And these standards are all artificially set by us; we have drawn many frames around ourselves.

He says you are like animals, a social species. He is explaining why we draw these frames: although you have many firmly held false beliefs, the existence of your nations is the result of cooperation rather than competition. All social groups are also like this; we need to cooperate within a group, and humans are social animals. If you are expelled from the group, it is not a pleasant thing. Being rejected by a group is not a pleasant thing. So the comfort of social discourse represents a great edifice of family and civilization -- the social recognition of a group is a very important thing representing family or civilization, and to you it is like a huge edifice in which you feel secure. People generally do not want to detach themselves from family and group, or expose themselves outside civilized society; that is a state without security.

Seth here mentions why people are willing to cling to those seemingly stubborn, erroneous beliefs: it is because we are afraid of appearing so out of place that we would be cast out by the social group. This is a fear within us, and this fear causes us to cling to certain so-called orthodox, official ideas that society considers correct. Therefore that whole set of so-called official standards of evaluation is used as the framework for social group organization, or for the psychic, spiritual, and material framework. This kind of so-called mainstream social value system of behavioral standards becomes the standard for all our social groups, and also becomes our behavioral standard psychologically, spiritually, or materially.

However, within this framework there is still more flexibility than is acknowledged; it is not that rigid. For example, you still try to bring the reality of your own cultural viewpoint into the dream state. What does flexibility mean? It means we often try to bring our cultural viewpoints and social attributes into our dreams. But the innate heritage of both body and mind escapes such oppression -- this innate ability of your body and mind escapes these ideas of yours that try to bring social attributes and moral norms into dreams, and it runs contrary to your intent. So in dreams, you come into contact with the greater picture of that reality which refuses to be set aside. That is to say, in dreams you come into contact with a broader world of possibilities that you could not contact in ordinary life.

It has already gone beyond the constraints of your normal moral norms and social standards in the waking state, so in dreams you are often unrestrained and free. For example, you may sit together with an enemy you could never sit with, you may have interactions with people across time and space, you may drink and chat happily with people you have never met. Even people with very strong religious beliefs may do things in dreams that go against their religious beliefs. There is no innate reason for it, no reason that it should be so. He says there is no reason for you to be so restricted in the waking state; no one has stipulated that when you are awake you must be governed by this set of behavioral standards, that you must follow these mainstream social values, nor is there any requirement that your perceptual system be focused only on this one physical world. But you restrict yourself; this boundary is set by yourself, not by others.

For example, your body can naturally heal itself. Many people verbally acknowledge this belief and say that our bodies can heal themselves. But in reality, when you actually get sick, you mostly still do not believe it, and you will not experience this state of the body healing itself; you will still take medicine and get injections, and still go to see a doctor. You experience a far different picture, one that is opposite to the picture of bodily self-healing that you yourself claim to accept. You believe it in theory, but in practice you do not believe it.

For example, you have read the Seth material, and it says that when you yourself are sick, that is one thing; but if your child is sick, do you dare not take him to the hospital? You do not dare. This is the actual situation we commonly encounter in daily life. You always think, what if? What if I delay my child's treatment? What if because I do not take my child to the hospital... no matter whether it is my spouse, my parents, or other people, they will all think I am crazy, or that I have joined a cult and that is why I refuse to seek treatment. You cannot withstand this social pressure, and you will still follow mainstream social values. Seth tells you that no one restricts you; these boundaries are all set by yourself.

In this, you must make every effort to protect the physical body -- in practice you will think of every possible way, taking all kinds of medicine, getting injections, seeing doctors, so that it will not naturally tend toward a state of accumulating illness or poor health; you will deal with it through modern medical methods at the very first sign of trouble. Also, we usually try to avoid viruses, hiding from viruses everywhere, especially now with the novel coronavirus; we hide from it as if we had no resistance to it at all. We feel we have no resistance, so every day we wait for a successful vaccine to come out; people all over the world are waiting for the vaccine, out of fear.

This natural healing that often occurs in the dream state is often wiped out in the waking state. The spontaneous, natural healing function you have in dreams is not acknowledged when you are awake, and you just go and do whatever you think needs to be done. In the waking state, any such healing is considered miraculous or unconventional -- if you could get better without taking medicine or seeing a doctor while awake, you would think it was amazing, and others would also think it was too abnormal, a miracle. Yet in your dreams, you often very correctly see the reasons that lead to your physical difficulties -- in dreams you can discover what caused your body to become ill, and then begin a healing that you can consciously make use of. But once you wake up you forget about it, and even if you remember, you do not trust what you remember. In the dream you say, "Oh, I healed myself in the dream, as if a magical hand just fixed it," but when you wake up you think this is pure nonsense, impossible.

Occasionally, actual physical healing does occur in dreams, even though you may think that in the waking state you are rational and knowledgeable, while in dreams you are ignorant or half-mad. If you could be, in the waking state, as foolish as you think you are when dreaming -- the foolishness you yourself consider ignorant and half-mad -- he says your health would be much better. That is, if you could treat yourself in the waking state the way you do in dreams, you would be much better off. The ignorance and foolishness you perceive are actually far wiser than your intellect; they are healing your body.

In such healing dreams, you are attuned to other frequencies. What frequencies? The frequency of your body being well. They are indeed closer, closer to your biological soundness. The frequency you attune to when dreaming is the frequency of your body's healthy state, so it heals. But there is no reason you cannot do this in the waking state. How to do it is very simple -- just think of how you are when you are well. For example, if your leg is broken, then think of the leg that is not broken; think of the parts of your body that can still function, and then use them well. As for the broken part, think of what you want to do after it heals, and do what you can do now. It is very simple. This question has been discussed before, so I will not repeat it here; it was also discussed in The Nature of Personal Reality.

When such seemingly miraculous events happen -- the reason you think they are miracles is because you have transcended your usual official beliefs about the body and health and illness. You have transcended them, and are no longer limited by them, so you allow it to happen naturally.

Waking in Dreams and the Analogy of Channel Interference

Often in dreams, you become truly awake. In dreams you are actually truly awake — you could say you grasp your spirituality and your biological nature with both hands. In dreams you consciously grasp both parts of yourself, your spirituality and your biological nature, and understand that each of them is far (he used boldface here) far vaster than the reality you go about guiding and assuming. It lets you understand another world that is far vaster than the world you now understand.

But usually, instead, it is only a vague glimpse of this greater reality, or a tentative look, and then things become even more confusing. You may automatically try to interpret the events in dreams according to your usual picture of reality. You could say that when you are awake it is like switching channels — when you are dreaming you are clearly on a different frequency, yet you insist on using the set of rules from your waking frequency to explain the content received on that different frequency in the dream. If you do that, your interpretation becomes very forced and confused. Because it is already a different world, a different frequency, yet you insist on using the rules of another frequency to explain the things in this frequency.

Let me give a simple example. It is like watching television, where each channel can represent a frequency. For instance, on this channel there is a story about a Western cowboy; on another channel there might be a drama about palace intrigue in ancient China; on yet another channel there might be a science fiction film about humans exploring Mars — for example, Away¹⁴, the new series Netflix is showing about exploring Mars. These are entirely different eras. If we assume that television channel frequencies represent this, each frequency corresponds to the historical period of the drama happening on that frequency, and it has its own set of rules, social norms, and legal rules, all different. If you keep switching between different frequencies and insist on judging them all by one set of rules, that is completely unreasonable, or impossible to understand.

Below he gives an example that says something similar. He says, for instance, suppose you turn on the television to watch a program, and because of some malfunction, a large-scale leakage occurs — what is leakage? It is channel interference, what we call channel interference, when several programs get mixed together. Modern people may never encounter this anymore. In the past, televisions used outdoor antennas to receive signals, and when the antenna angle was bad or wrong, channel interference often occurred. Channel interference is when the frequencies of several stations mix together and overlap, and the television's receiving frequency falls between two or three channels, so it can receive some signal from two or three channels, but none clearly enough. The television images from these several channels are all blurrily superimposed on one another, and full of static.

Once channel interference occurs, there seems to be no rhythm or reason. The picture becomes chaotic and disorderly to you, with no obvious theme. Of course there is no theme — three dramas are playing at the same time, with the images superimposed, how could you make it out? And it is blurry. Some characters may look familiar, while others you do not recognize at all. That is what it is like when we dream — some people are familiar, some people you do not recognize at all. A man in a spacesuit might be riding a horse, chasing Indians through outer space; at the same time an Indian chief might be piloting a fighter jet... All of these replace the program you expected, because they are all mixed together. You originally expected to watch a Western, but it got mixed together with a science fiction movie, and you could not watch either one. So you inevitably conclude that all of it is meaningless.

But in fact, every character, every scene, every moment in the film, represents a fragment of another perfectly proper program. These seemingly chaotic and disorderly things may seem meaningless to you, but on the channel where they belong, within that storyline, they are a very clear, important, and very meaningful scene. But because of the channel interference, because they are mixed together, they seem meaningless. That is what he means.

In dreams, you are sometimes also aware of too many television stations. In dreams it is very similar, so our dreams are often disorderly and mixed together. When you try to piece them together into the picture of the reality you recognize, they may look very chaotic. There are ways to adjust these images properly, to separate the frequency bands, and then each station can play its own program — there are ways to tune in to those other very natural frequencies, to tune in to each individual television station's frequency. Relative to your present three-dimensional world and physical world, the programs on those television channels would provide you with a broader perspective, just as when you often watch National Geographic or history programs that take you exploring around the world, you will find that they bring you a broader perspective.

Defining Spirituality

In your case, spirituality is not wrapped in a structure too fragile to express it. Only your beliefs about spirituality and the body limit your experience to its present degree. Your spirituality itself is unlimited, but you use your beliefs to limit it, allowing it to focus only on this three-dimensional world of ours.

He says that in dreams you are so foolish—he is making a joke. You will believe there is communication between the living and the dead. In dreams you often dream of dead people, and you sit there talking with them face to face. You are so irrational that you imagine you are sometimes speaking to your deceased parents. You are so unrealistic that you seem to visit old houses that have already been torn down, or you travel to strange foreign cities you have never actually been to—for example, sometimes you go to a place you have seen in a TV drama or in a photograph. But you are so unrealistic—how could dead people speak? Yet in your dreams all of this can be realized.

In dreams you are so crazy that you do not feel yourself shut inside the cabinet of space and time; instead you feel as though all infinity is waiting for you to command it. In dreams you feel as though infinite possibilities exist, that you can do anything. He says when you are awake, if you had an equally versatile incarnation—when you are awake you could also speak with the dead, you could also travel instantly to places all over the world—he is joking when he says that then you would put all religions and all scientists out of work. If you had such abilities when awake, then you would not need science or religion; they truly would not need to exist. If you could teleport to places all over the world, then science would hardly have any meaning before you; if you could also speak with the dead, that would be even more extraordinary. Therefore you would understand the greater reality of your psyche, and you would know where the important events take place.

Why? Because if you had this ability when awake, you would know why you have this ability—this ability is all within you, all in your heart, this is the innate gifted ability of your spirituality itself. You yourself all have this ability, only you tell yourself that when awake you do not have this ability; you tell yourself you do not have it, and then it is gone. So many people will have out-of-body experiences, will have clairvoyance, telepathy—all the same.

The scientists' hands are already on the doorknob—the physicists are already very close. If physicists paid more attention to their dreams, they would know what questions to ask. That is, if physicists did not study the external world but began to study human dreams, they would discover the truth from within them. Their hands are already on the door, but they have not opened it.

He says spirituality is a gestalt of conscious energy. Here he is attempting to give a definition of spirituality—he has said before that spirituality is very difficult to define, and here he is still attempting to give this definition. He says what is spirituality? First, spirituality is a gestalt of energy. What is a gestalt? A gestalt means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, if I use Lego blocks to build a human figure, each piece of Lego is just a plastic block, with not much meaning in itself, apart from differences in color and size. When we arrange them in a certain combination into the shape of a person, this complete figure of a person is a gestalt, because it transcends the sum of the meanings of each little Lego plastic block. This human figure may carry its history, experience, joys and sorrows, or carry its own meaning, but it has already transcended the things of the Lego plastic blocks themselves. So a gestalt is when the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts.

So Seth often uses the word gestalt. He says our spirituality is a gestalt of energy, and this energy itself is conscious—that is, energy with self-awareness. Energy with self-awareness is spirituality; this energy can perceive the existence of the energy itself, as if this energy itself has life. An energy that can perceive its own existence is a spiritual thing. What is spirituality? This is spirituality. Just like you—every person can feel their own existence, and each of you is also an existence of energy. This is one definition of spirituality, or a relatively simplified way of putting it.

So when you ask what your soul is, your soul is a gestalt of energy. It is made up of a great deal of energy—you could also use the analogy of energy of many frequencies, or a total energy that is a combination of many different energies—and this energy has its own clear self-cognition and awareness; it is conscious. This is spirituality.

Within this energy also dwells your own inviolable identity. In The Nature of Personal Reality, I forget which chapter—it was also somewhere in the twenties or after chapter nineteen, I cannot remember—he said that each person has an inviolable identity, and at that time he used about two or three paragraphs to describe it. I do not know if you still have an impression of it, whether you can remember—a person has an indestructible identity, and that identity is not your outer ego's cognition, not that thing; it is an inviolable, completely protected, indestructible identity. That identity dwells within it, so one reason the soul can be immortal and indestructible is that it has an inviolable identity within it.

When you realize your potential—when you begin to continually realize your potential, to bring into play your energy and the abilities of all the possibilities that have been latent within—this identity is always changing. It is inviolable, but that does not mean it is dead. When we say inviolable, do not imagine it as something like a diamond—glowing, crystal clear, and eternally unchanging. It is an energy, constantly changing, but it is indestructible, forever inviolable. That is the identity you call yourself. So you are also always changing, and your soul is also always changing. As you continually exercise yourself in your life, every little bit of your daily life is enriching this identity of energy.

Meeting Deceased Relatives in Dreams

He says that relatives of yours who have died are still alive, and they often appear to you in dreams. But you usually interpret their visits according to the standpoint of your own reality—you see them as they were before, limited to their relationship with you. And as for the other aspects of your existence that seem unreasonable according to your own beliefs, you cannot see them or do not remember them.

That is to say, your deceased relatives are still alive on another level, and in dreams they often come to visit you. But you still interpret these visits according to the ideas you hold in your daily waking state. You will say, oh, he came to visit me because I was thinking of him during the day, or because some matter was connected to him, so at night I dreamed of him. You use your normal daytime way of thinking to understand these deceased loved ones you meet in dreams. In dreams they still appear as they were before, still in the form they had when they were alive—perhaps the appearance of a certain period, basically the appearance of the stage when you were most familiar with them. He will not appear in the form he had as a child, because at that time you did not know him; if he came to meet you looking like a third grader, you would not recognize him at all. So he definitely appears in the image of the stage when you knew him.

He says that in such cases, you actually do not understand the meaning of his appearance at all, because you are using your waking understanding to interpret why he appeared in your dream. And as for those other aspects of existence that lie outside what you consider reasonable—as long as you consider them unreasonable, you cannot see them in dreams, nor do you remember them. They may have appeared in the dream, but when you wake up you feel you do not remember them or cannot see them.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose your relative was homosexual, but this was something you never knew even after he died. When he came to you in a dream, he may have already told you about his homosexuality, or he may have shown you that he was in a homosexual state. But because in the dream you still use your waking beliefs to consider this matter, when you wake up and recall the dream, you cannot remember that he told you this in the dream. Even if he told you, you would not accept it, and you would not see it or remember it. Why? Because you are still using your waking belief system to filter your inner information. As long as something does not conform to your beliefs, something you consider unreasonable, even if it is shown to you in the dream, you cannot see it or remember it.

So if your belief system is too narrow, if the sieve holes are too fine, if there are too many rules and restrictions, then what you can obtain in dreams is very limited, not much different from the material you obtain in your waking state during the day. This is why in The Nature of Personal Reality, we must tear down and remove all those restrictive beliefs that limit you. Because beliefs will carry you into different spaces of consciousness, different levels, different dimensions, and different worlds—you will always carry your belief system with you when you enter. If this belief is too narrow or has too many restrictions, it will affect your judgment and your sources of information, because the sources of information have already been filtered out by it.

Therefore this kind of dream is often like a prearranged play—because it has all been filtered by you, screened by your beliefs, and in it you use familiar props to stage this visit. You use your familiar ways and familiar props to stage this visit, but in fact you have no idea what its intention was, because its real intention has already been filtered out by you.

When you experience extraordinary flashes of inspiration, or perceive other unofficial material—that is, unofficial material that falls outside your normal belief system—you will quickly try to make this material conform to common sense, immediately turning it into a rationalized explanation that conforms to traditional values and mainstream social values. Even if some meaningful information beyond your normal range of cognition is given to you, you will quickly rationalize it.

For example, suppose in a dream you dream that you will be very wealthy in the future. This is an excellent inspiration and hint, or it tells you what kind of business will make you rich. But after you wake up, you will quickly rationalize it. You think it was just a dream, that because you are too poor and want money too much, you had such a dream. You do not consider that this was a hint from your future self to you.

Another example: an out-of-body experience in which you enter other levels of reality—you will immediately interpret it as a kind of tour of heaven, a trip around heaven. In fact, you left your body and went to other levels, other worlds, other universes, or parallel worlds. Many people feel this kind of out-of-body experience differently. But you will interpret it as a journey to heaven; you do not think it was an out-of-body experience, nor do you think you went to some parallel spacetime or another reality space. Or take the voice of your own greater entity that has not yet been recognized—your entity does have a voice; your greater inner self, or that entity, has its own voice, but you have not recognized it. And then you turn this voice of your own entity into the voice of God, a cosmic being, or a prophet, or some people call it a spirit guide, or whatever you like. That is, you have not recognized that it is actually the voice of your own entity.

The You Who Dreams Is Awake

Your dream experiences give you a guiding principle that helps you understand the nature of your own psyche — dreams can let you understand the nature of your psyche, as well as the deeper reality in which it exists. Dreams are helpful for you to understand the psyche and to understand what the soul is.

He once again stated the theme of this chapter: the psyche that dreams is awake, or one could say the soul that dreams is awake, or one could say the you who dreams is awake — that "you" in quotation marks, not the you of waking life. The you who dreams is awake.

At this point, the dictation for this session came to an end. Afterward Seth spoke on several other topics — recently he has often divided the sessions into two parts, one part for this book, and the other part on other topics or some personal material for us. This session ended at 11:34. As for the interpretation of this part of Chapter Two, that is, the interpretation of Session 758, it is now complete.

Session Background and Rob's Dream

On Monday, December 27, 1975, at 9:31 p.m., before the session began, Rob said that Jane had told him before entering the trance state that she felt this session would be about the book. Rob nodded, but he said he had had a particularly interesting dream the night before and hoped Seth would talk about it. As can be seen later in this session, Seth took care of both, discussing the dream as well as the content of the book.

Seth began:

Once again, the psyche that dreams is awake.

This psyche deals with experiences different from the physical experiences you are familiar with, and those experiences are also part of the psyche. Daily life is only one concentrated focus for that part of the psyche you call yourself, and besides that there are many other focuses. In physical reality we do have one primary focus, but do not forget that there are also focuses in other realities.

The psyche can never be destroyed, and your own unique individuality will not be diminished either. Here lies a paradox: many people think, if my soul is eternal, then this person in each of my reincarnations -- my present self, the self I recognize as me, my personality, my character, this part I call "me" -- will it simply disappear when I die, leaving only a soul or something psychic to continue existing?

Seth particularly emphasized that your soul will never be destroyed, and your present individuality, that is, the person you are in this reincarnation, will never be diminished either; it will be preserved. That is to say, your soul is the sum total of this life and all your other lives, and all of them exist within it.

An Existence Both Dead and Alive

Psychic experience crosses over your concept of time. On the psychic level, our notion of time is transcended. To us it seems very clear: we go from birth to death, and this is a fact -- for our consciousness, for our ordinary understanding, for this particular focus on the physical world, there is nothing to argue about; it is an irrefutable fact. The facts you see everywhere are all physical evidence. Perhaps to some degree you believe in life after death, or having read certain materials or believed in certain religions, you believe there is life after death, and various ideas of reincarnation may or may not convince you. But most of you are united in one seemingly irrefutable belief, namely: human beings are bound to die.

But there is another irrefutable belief: you must be alive right now, not dead. Setting aside whether there is life after death or reincarnation, every one of you at this moment considers yourself to be alive now, and on this point you are firm and united. But is this point correct? It is not correct either. You are both dead and alive, both alive and dead.

If you firmly believe you are alive, and you are not even sure of this, then you might be on the verge of a breakdown of the self. But are you really that certain? You would think: dead people do not read books, so I am alive -- I am reading, I am listening, I am watching this video, so I must be alive. Then Seth jokingly says, but on the other hand, dead people usually do not write books either. You would say dead people do not write books, but then who wrote the Seth books we are now reading? Was it not written by a person who has already died many times? So he thinks that whether you are alive or whether you think you are dead is only your own cognition, and it is not as real and actual as you imagine.

Session 759

In a strange way, I am telling you that your life is only that portion of your existence of which you are presently aware.

The "life" in quotation marks here refers to your complete, overall view of life, not just your view of life in this one reincarnation. The life you think you have is only a small part of your entire life experience, and this one reincarnation is only a part of the total life experience of your soul. Broadly speaking, you are simultaneously dead and alive.

Doesn't this somewhat resemble Schrodinger's cat in quantum mechanics? If you know this famous story: whether Schrodinger's cat is dead or alive, the conclusion at the time was that it is both dead and alive, both states exist¹⁵. Seth says people are the same way, each of us right now is also like this. Just like Seth, he is both dead and alive, but his focus is in a region we cannot perceive. Once again, existence is like music played according to a certain frequency; you are tuned to an earth song, so we are only tuned to the frequency of the earth. Right now we are only playing one piece within this larger movement, called the earth song, but Seth says you actually have a larger and broader movement as well.

Sometimes in dreams, you do tune in to a larger picture, a larger, broader perspective and dimension. Again, certain things appear to be facts, and even clear experiences may seem ridiculous and confusing. In dreams, some things are so real they seem like facts, yet when analyzed and judged according to your present experience of being alive, those facts in the dream are so chaotic and ridiculous.

Rob's Dream and Multidimensional Reality

Then Seth began to talk about Rob's dream. He said our friend Joseph, that is, Rob, had a dream that interested him very much, but it also seemed very distorted. In the dream, Rob found himself greeting a large group of people, believing they were family members, as if attending a family gathering, although he only recognized a few of them. Among this large group were his parents, who had already passed away, and also a living younger brother and his sister-in-law, who were present as well. That younger brother really was his brother, but somehow his appearance had changed, carrying a certain Eastern flavor.

The whole dream was very pleasant, as if it were a family reunion. Rob felt strange about the mixing of the living and the dead; he did not understand why the living and the dead could sit at the same table and eat together. When most people have this kind of dream, many of them wonder whether they are about to die, because they have already seen their deceased parents.

However, according to your own time sequence—our human time sequence—the psyche is not subject to this limitation. From your standpoint, your death has already happened; and from the psyche's standpoint, your birth has not really happened yet. The psyche is completely free from the limitations of our time, so it can be completely reversed, death first and birth later, which is entirely beyond our understanding.

There, you can meet deceased relatives, and also small children who have not yet been born; there, you can meet other portions of yourself as this person, portions that exist simultaneously with you.

In a dream, or in a broader dimensional space, you can meet relatives who have already passed away, or children who have not yet been born. So in the family gathering in the dream, you will find many people you do not know—you have not met them yet, they have not been born yet, so how could you have met them? You can also meet other portions of yourself, that is, your other reincarnational selves, which may also appear in the dream. So in this family gathering in the dream, among so many people you can only recognize a few, and most of them you do not recognize—this is the problem Rob is now facing.

In that space-time framework, the living and the dead can freely mingle together, without the concepts of life and death. In this situation, you really become aware of other perspectives of existence. You turned a corner at the edge of existence, and you discovered that your psyche has multiple depths—you saw more dimensions of your psyche.

The Painter's Analogy and the Ant's Limitations

Seth begins to give examples now. A painter works within a two-dimensional world on a flat surface, using perspective to try to represent and capture a three-dimensional feeling. If you have studied drawing, you know that perspective is something you must learn, otherwise you cannot draw three-dimensional things. This technique of perspective itself has nothing to do with the two-dimensional canvas, paper, or board -- when you draw a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, it does not mean the canvas is three-dimensional; the canvas is still two-dimensional, and you can draw a three-dimensional picture on top of a two-dimensional surface.

The painter might vividly evoke the image of a vanishing road.

In the painter's mind there may be a country road he played on as a child. This road may no longer exist now, but it exists in his memory. When he paints his childhood, he may paint this road that has already disappeared. The road looks large in the foreground, then gradually shrinks as it recedes, vanishing into some invisible point in the distance. But no person from the physical three-dimensional world will walk on this road -- it is a road painted on a picture; how could you walk onto it?

An ant crawling across this canvas -- we can assume it lives in a two-dimensional world, so to speak, because an ant can only crawl on a flat surface. If this ant crawls across the canvas, it will quickly pass over what is merely another flat picture, and it cannot sense the road that welcomes it. To the ant, it is just a flat canvas; it has no perception of those fields, mountains, and rivers. The ant has no cognition of the three-dimensional world painted on a flat surface. You cannot perceive things of a higher dimension than your own in a trans-dimensional way.

So in dreams, you occasionally and suddenly have a larger perspective, like Rob's dream, which was able to transcend the limitations of time and space. This perspective that transcends time and space does not function at your ordinary level of consciousness -- just as the mountains, rivers, and roads in a painting have no effect at all on an ant living in the real world. Although you can learn a great deal from the ant's consciousness, it still does not function.

Seth laughed at this point, and he specifically had Rob write down this sentence: "I laughed."

Your own waking consciousness specializes in certain kinds of distinctions, and these happen to help form the structure of physical existence.

When we are awake, our cognition of all things in the world and our accurate understanding of time and space are based on our understanding of the three-dimensional world, and this is very helpful for survival. It is like the story I told before: you cannot be scared half to death by a tiger from the past -- will a tiger in a dream eat people? This is a question often asked in Buddhism or philosophy: where exactly does the tiger in a dream come from, and why can it scare you half to death? In real life we can distinguish between reality and non-reality; what transcends time and space we call non-reality, and what conforms to the laws of time and space we call reality, and we make clear distinctions between these. This is very important, otherwise you would become confused.

Some people with certain mental illnesses do become confused. If you have been in contact with such people, you will know: some people react to the people on a television screen; when they see a war movie they stand up and march into the army, because they feel they are a soldier; when they watch an animal documentary, they feel they are the antelope being hunted, and the lion is about to eat them; when they watch a police drama, they feel the police are after them, and they hide everywhere in fear. This is not an exaggeration; there really are people like this, and they truly cannot tell the difference.

Seth emphasizes that our distinctions regarding the three-dimensional world give your life a framework. To put it very simply, you want to experience a certain kind of event, so you draw a boundary around the world, and then you allow yourself to focus upon it. Simply put, you yourself want to experience this three-dimensional world, and because you want to experience it, you must draw a boundary around it, with a limitation of time and space, and within this specific range you experience it, focusing your own attention upon it.

The Painter and the Creation of the Psyche

What Seth says next is all very profound, so listen carefully and try to understand it. When a painter paints a picture, he uses his discernment to choose the area of focus. He can choose a grassland, a mountain, a city, a person — he chooses the area of his conscious focus. Everything in the picture is appropriate, and the proportions are all appropriate — except for those impressionist, abstract, and exaggerated paintings, in a normal painting the proportions, sizes, and reasonableness all fit the scene of that painting.

Therefore, in your physical life, you are doing the same thing. In our material life, in the three-dimensional world, you are like a painter, arranging your three-dimensional world in perfect order, very reasonable and logical. You would not arrange something that does not fit your logical understanding into your life, just as a painter would not paint a spaceship into a portrait of Jesus — that completely defies common sense, and he also could not paint a modern cell phone into an ancient painting. You do the same in your life, so why does your life look so reasonable and logical? Because you arranged it that way. You arranged it deliberately, like a painter. You wanted to experience this kind of life, so you made such a set.

The painter knows that many paintings can be painted, and within his mind he holds those already painted, and also those still in the planning stage, not yet painted. Therefore your psyche equally holds the lives in progress, the lives already lived, and the lives not yet lived, and deals with a broader perspective, from which your daily perspective emerges.

The painter has countless paintings in his mind that he wants to paint — there are past paintings, paintings currently being painted, and paintings still being conceived but not yet painted, all within the painter's mind. Your psyche is the same: it simultaneously handles the life already lived, the life being lived now, and the life not yet lived in the future, viewing them equally, not thinking that the present life is more important, or the past is more important, or the future is more important. For it, all of these are happening simultaneously. We have already talked about simultaneity many times, so I will not go into detail again. When we discussed the concept of time, we already introduced the idea that an instant is eternity.

You Are That Portion of the Psyche You Currently Recognize

I often speak of you and your psyche or your soul as though they were separate, but in fact they are not.

In fact, you have never been separate from your soul. You are that portion of the psyche or soul that you currently recognize. Savor this sentence carefully: your soul is vast, but the portion you recognize is the you that you are right now. The part you take to be yourself is only your recognition of one portion of a larger self. It is like an elephant being so large, and right now you only recognize yourself as perhaps one leg of the elephant, like the blind men touching the elephant -- you only recognize one part of yourself, and then you take that part to be yourself.

So there is no difference between you and your soul, only the difference between a part and the whole. You cannot say this temple leg is not the elephant, nor can you say it is the entire elephant. It is a part of the elephant, and that is the relationship.

Why do we study the Seth material, why do we study these spiritual things, why do we seek to recognize the larger self? Because the degree to which you approve of yourself depends on the degree to which you recognize yourself. However large a self you recognize, that is how large a self you are. If you only regard yourself as an ordinary person in the three-dimensional world, one among the teeming masses, drifting along without purpose, going to work and coming home every day like a robot, three meals a day, marrying and having children, and finally growing old and dying, then your life will be just that. This is also how most people approve of themselves. Do not blame them, and do not reproach them, because for them that is all they have; they have not recognized the larger portion.

Many people say, I want to know myself -- we often say "I know myself," "I see myself clearly," "I want to find myself" -- but very few are willing to spend that time and effort. Seth says there is a place to begin: try to become a little more familiar with the self you are now. First accept the self you are now, become familiar with the self you are now, become familiar with the fact that he has more layers, and start from this angle, discovering the larger self bit by bit.

He also said something very interesting: do not tell yourself that you do not know yourself.

The Laws of Different Realities Cannot Be Applied to One Another

If you insist on applying the laws of material life to your own greater experience, to the spiritual world, to more dimensions, to other worlds, you will find that other levels of your own reality are of little use. Wherever you go, you never forget your concepts of time and space, clinging tightly to time and space, to the logic of beginnings and endings, of having a start and a finish. Then going to know those worlds is meaningless, because those worlds have none of these rules at all. When you go to understand more levels of your greater self, you must cast off the things of this level of yours, and use the laws and rules of that level to perceive it, because you are already adjusting your frequency, already adjusting to a different reality.

If you bring the values and belief systems of the three-dimensional world to perceive other nonphysical worlds, you will be trapped in a predicament where nothing will match up, and you will collapse and become confused. The reverse is also true. You also cannot insist on using the laws of the spiritual level, the laws of the greater existence, and suppose that one day when you discover them, you want to use them to replace the known conditions of material life — if you bring things like transcending time and space or being able to fly from the nonphysical world into the material world, you will also feel that you are collapsing, and again nothing will match up.

For example, in the spiritual world, if you think of something or think of a place, you are there in an instant. After leaving the body, you can fly as you please, just like it is real, you can feel the wind, and the whole sensation is real. But in real life, try flying and see what happens. It is like that little video from a couple of days ago, where a person told a parrot, "I can fly," and the parrot said, "Bullshit" — extremely funny. If you say in real life that you can fly, people will only think you are crazy.

You will expect to live forever in the same physical body. If you look at the physical world from the perspective of the spiritual world, you will think you are immortal, and then want to be immortal in the physical body, or think you can make your body float at will. This is all applying the laws of the spiritual world to the real world, and none of it is right. You can indeed fly, but the method of operation is not in the manner of your physical body — why not take an airplane? You also have other tools like Iron Man's that can fly. If you say you want to fly without wearing anything, and leap straight down from the Empire State Building, then apart from falling to your death there is no second outcome. Some people really have tried this, and I do not even want to talk about it.

You must first accept the body you have now, and this body will inevitably die. As long as it is something of the material world, even stones will perish. After hundreds or thousands of years, how could your physical body not die? The physical body has its limits. But these limits can be used to emphasize a certain kind of experience, and they are not without use — you came precisely to experience these.

The Dream Body and Openness

The body Rob used in the dream to see his relatives — in the dream he had his own body, attended a gathering, ate and drank — was, in operational terms, very non-physical, non-material. Yet it was quite real. In the dream, eating and drinking are all possible. In that dream environment, the body without flesh can also operate — it can walk, it can jump, it can eat, it can drink, suited to existing in that environment. The dream body is non-material, but it is so real.

In many ways, you have only a very short span of focused attention. Compared with the eternal soul, the spirit that can never be destroyed, this one lifetime of yours is very short by comparison. You merely focus your attention on this very brief period of being alive.

Here he emphasizes that "real fact" is in quotation marks — this is not an absolute fact, only a fact relative to our physical world. Relative to this fact you understand, of birth and death, of going from birth to death, a truer fact is this: you exist simultaneously within this life of yours, and at the same time outside this life of yours. You also exist between two lifetimes — there is a you between incarnations, and there is a you in every lifetime.

In a deeper dimension of reality, your thoughts and actions not only affect this one life you know, but also affect all those other simultaneous existences. What you are thinking right now may very well be unconsciously perceived by some hypothesized 14th-century self — perceived at the underlying unconscious level, because the psyche is open, without a fixed limit, and without an ending. This is an open-ended conclusion; anything is possible, all possibilities are possible, nothing is impossible. No system is closed, especially where the psyche is concerned.

Life Is but a Dream

To your focused attention and to the other portions of the larger reality elsewhere, your life is a dream experience. Simply put, your physical life, relative to those parts of your soul's existence in non-three-dimensional worlds, is a dream to them.

This reminds me of the story of Zhuangzi dreaming of the butterfly. In Zhuangzi's "Free and Easy Wandering"¹⁶, he already mentioned this idea long ago. He dreamed he became a butterfly, and then he wondered: was it the butterfly's dream, or was the butterfly in the dream another Zhuangzi? He kept discussing this question, and what he meant is actually the same as what Seth is saying. So the theme of this chapter -- the you that is dreaming is actually awake -- has a double meaning: the dreaming you may actually be more real, because you are a multidimensional you, with more dimensions coming in; whereas the you that is awake only focuses on physical existence and shuts off everything else. To that more real you, when you think you are awake, you are actually dreaming. So the saying "life is but a dream" is not a literary description; it is true. That is why I often joke about "taking dreams as your horse, so as not to waste your youth" -- take the goals in your dreams as your goals.

The experiences of those other portions of you that do not exist in physical form are also a heritage of your dreams. The things in our three-dimensional world are a dream to them, but we do have an influence on that world, and it is also part of their heritage, just as your dream experiences are also part of your life experience. You often tell others, "Oh, I had a dream that scared me to death." It may not occupy that much importance in your life, but it is still part of your life. How many novels have humans written about dreams, how many literary works -- how can you say dreams are not part of our lives?

How to Understand the Reality of Other Existences

You might ask, just how real are those other existences? My physical existence is so real, so to what degree are those nonphysical existences real? If you want to ask this question, you must first ask: according to whom, and from whose perspective? There is a physical version of everything, which is the version we have now. Within that framework you have birth and death, and there is a definite sequence—certainly birth first and then death, you cannot die first and then be born. Death is a physical reality, and we have all witnessed death. However, it is only real for your physical body; this so-called physical reality is only real for the physical body.

If you accept that way of the material world as the one and only standard for judging reality, then inevitably, death appears to be the end of your consciousness. But if you learn to know yourself a little more in daily life, even if it is just becoming a bit more aware of your worldly life, then you will receive that information hinting that there is a deeper, more supportive reality, and the physical reality rests within this reality.

You will find that you have experiences that do not conform to accepted facts. These strange and wondrous things in our lives that cannot be explained by science, that cannot be explained by the material world—if they become numerous and are added together, they seem to reveal another picture—pointing to a different reality, giving your inner existence evidence more important than the physical assumptions. When you perceive it this way, you discover that the material world you thought of as real emerges from that nonphysical reality.

A certain prudence and understanding is necessary; you cannot just listen to me say this, you have to analyze and understand it yourself. Basically, the inner reality is the creative source of the physical reality—our outer world is created by the inner world. But to a certain degree, the laws of matter, the laws of physics, are also not to be violated. When you manifest the outer world, you must conform to the physical rules and the limitations of time and space in the outer world. You cannot depict in your mind something that cannot be formed in the material world.

For example, suppose you want to summon your other half into being. You do not know how it will appear, but in the three-dimensional world, you will certainly meet on a train, on a plane, on the subway, at a friend's gathering, at a company, or in some real physical world. You cannot, as in a dream, simply think of him and have him appear, without him even needing to buy a plane ticket. I use this example to tell you that in the inner world you can completely disregard the laws of the physical world, but in real life, the laws of the material world definitely exist and cannot be violated. In whatever world you are, speak of the matters of that world; otherwise, would you not be making a mess of things?

Expanding Perception, Rising to the Challenge

You can learn to greatly increase your own experience. In theory, you can even have some degree of awareness of other existences—of other reincarnational selves or other probable selves, you can also have some degree of awareness. In dreams you can travel to other levels separate from your own level of reality, and you can learn to use experience and time in new ways: from an experiential standpoint, you can obtain knowledge from other portions of your own existence, learn things from other reincarnational selves; develop the resources of your psyche, your spiritual resources, and treat everything you have learned within your psyche as precious resources to be developed.

You can improve the present world you inhabit, as well as the quality of your life. But while you have a physical body, you still must experience birth and death, dawn and dusk, and the privacy of each segment of time, because this is the experience you have chosen. You must walk through this life independently. Your other portions cannot participate with you; you can only draw upon their experience and potential to a limited extent, but no one accompanies you on the journey. So you cannot form a team and say, bring all of my entity along, let us form a party to do quests—impossible. This reincarnation of yours is a choice to solo, a solo character. Do not complain about why there is no helper to assist me; you chose this yourself. You came into the three-dimensional world just this bravely.

Although in the three-dimensional world you are frail and fragile, in the nonphysical world you summon the wind and call the rain, roaming the nine heavens. But in this three-dimensional world, you must obediently follow the laws of the three-dimensional world—when you are hungry, you must drink milk. This is what you chose; you chose to experience this thing.

Yet within such a framework, there are still surprising and fascinating things waiting for you. Do not feel that such a life is dull, that such a life is meaningless. As long as you learn to expand your perception—not only exploring dreams, but also using more adventurous methods to explore your waking reality.

You must dare to take risks in life. You are an immortal being anyway, so what are you afraid of? You came here to experience; your ending was written long ago, and you cannot possibly be wrong. You are a part of the divine, so how could you be wrong? However you thrash about, it is all right; there is no such thing as wrong. Use more adventurous methods to explore, face life more actively, rather than saying, well, I am just here as an extra, and once I collect my boxed lunch I will leave. If you have seen Stephen Chow's King of Comedy¹⁷, even a bit player can put on a brilliant performance—in life there are no small roles; every person is unique. In Seth's words, this is called "rising to the challenge." Never be content with mediocrity; this is our guiding principle in physical life. Now see how Seth stays tightly on theme:

The psyche that dreams is awake.

Most of you often let your waking consciousness become blurred, comparatively inactive. He is now scolding us: our consciousness while awake is actually drowsy and half-asleep. Most of us live lives like robots, going with the flow, without much conscious judgment—others say you should go to college, so you go to college; others say you should find a civil service job, a state-owned enterprise, or a stable job, so you go. You have completely lost your own judgment and consciousness. Like the assembly-line worker in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times¹⁸, living the same three-point routine day after day. Do you think you were awake at that time? Looking at you from an outsider's perspective, you are like a puppet or a robot, seemingly conscious, but in Seth's words, half-aware and muddled—to put it harshly, like a walking corpse.

Many people ask why I have to reincarnate again and again, and how to break free from the cycle of reincarnation. Think carefully: why did the soul send you down here? To let you explore, to let all its potentials unfold and create. But you came down and lived a robot-like life, decades of the same routine, creating nothing, experiencing nothing—then of course you have to come back again. For example, in a game, you should explore all the possibilities. But you enter the game and go nowhere; every day you kill a few small monsters in the wilderness outside the city to exchange for some coins and some health, and then lock yourself in the city, doing no quests, joining no teams. Playing for a hundred years would still be meaningless.

You Are a Living Expression of Spirituality

You are, right now, a living expression of your spirituality. What your soul is actually like depends on how you live. If you live brilliantly, you let your soul reveal its radiance; if you live a plain, unremarkable life, then your soul also feels plain and unremarkable. Whether you can live out the true splendor of your soul depends on how you express it in your everyday reality. The manifestation of your spirituality in human form -- the kind of person you are represents the materialization of your soul in the three-dimensional world. If you do not understand what the soul is, just look at yourself. You yourself are a materialized manifestation of your soul in the three-dimensional world.

Yet you often allow yourself to ignore the many splendid layers of your own existence. You think you are a mediocre person, born no better than this, just scraping by from birth to death, men die for wealth and birds die for food, and that is how you spend your life -- what is the point? Then there is no essential difference between you and other animals. Seth wants to tell you: you need to see how brilliant and magnificent your soul is on other levels, and this round is your turn. This time it is your turn in reincarnation, your turn to display your brilliance and magnificence -- so why are you backing down? Your other reincarnational selves are all outstanding and brilliant, whether in lives on Earth, on other planets, or in other physical and nonphysical layers of reincarnation. They all have brilliant performances, so why is it that when it comes to your round, you perform so timidly? Greedy for life and afraid of death -- you clearly cannot die, yet you say you are scared to death of dying. The reason you dare not do anything is fear of death: fear of starving to death, fear of dying poor, fear of falling to your death, fear of all kinds of death. You have already arranged this life of yours yourself, and you will not die in a way you did not arrange. To put it more bluntly, the tasks of this life of yours are not yet complete, so even if you wanted to die, you could not.

Rob's Brother and the Hints of the Psyche

Back to Rob's dream, his brother's features carried a certain Eastern flavor, yet Rob knew that his brother was alive as himself. In that reality, he was alive as an Easterner, something Rob in this life did not know. He had mentioned before that his brother had once been an Eastern monk. If Rob had seen two people at a gathering -- an Easterner and his brother -- he would not have recognized the stranger, for that Easterner was also his brother. So in the dream, his brother could only let the appearance Rob already knew take precedence, so that he could be recognized, while the Eastern connection was only slightly hinted at.

In your life, you will use this kind of psychic shorthand, or use symbols, in which you try to explain a larger dimension of reality through a known reality. You will use this kind of psychic shorthand of yours in our three-dimensional world. For example, among several brothers in a family, you may find that one of them looks especially like a mixed-race person or a foreigner, yet you know perfectly well that it is impossible -- check the genes or whatever, his father and mother are both Chinese, his grandparents are also Chinese, but after this child is born, everyone who sees him thinks he looks mixed-race. There are actually many things hinted at in this, only we do not understand them. That is, you once had a reincarnation as a foreigner, and then through this reality you know -- that you are mixed-race -- it hints at your background from other reincarnations.

This dimension of your psyche must be experienced. No matter to what degree you experience it, whether deep or shallow, it does not matter, but you must understand that you cannot live only in a physical world. The life you are living now is precisely the experiencing of your psyche's actualization in the three-dimensional world. The psyche cannot be defined; it can only be experienced. You ask what exactly your soul is? Your soul is an energy body that is forever uncertain, still changing from moment to moment, depending on what you do next, forever in a state of becoming. That requires you to experience it, not to define it -- what is the point of defining it? It changes every second.

Seth said that in the next chapter he would suggest some exercises, so that you can have a direct experience of certain portions of your own reality, things you had never been able to figure out before. Saying this, he laughed, and Chapter Two ended here.

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia, "Zhou Gong's Dream Interpretation" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%91%A8%E5%85%AC%E8%A7%A3%E6%A2%A6) ↩

2. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Star Trek | Cast, Characters, Synopsis, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Star-Trek-series-1966-1969) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "George Floyd" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Floyd) ↩

4. This claim could not be verified. ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia, "Pandora – The World of Avatar" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_%E2%80%93_The_World_of_Avatar) ↩

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

7. This claim could not be verified. ↩

8. Source: Wikipedia, "Ring (film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(film)) ↩

9. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Yijing" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yijing) ↩

10. This claim could not be verified. ↩

11. This claim could not be verified. ↩

12. According to Mike's original words, "Tesla restricted the power of this car's motor at the factory because they were afraid it would compete with higher-end cars like the Model S, so they limited the performance of the Model 3's motor; actually the motors are all the same." Upon verification, it should be: "Tesla does use software to limit the output of some Model 3 motors (such as the paid Acceleration Boost unlock and a 110 kW soft power cap in the firmware), but that is an internal pricing/tax-bracket differentiation within the Model 3 lineup, not to avoid competition with the Model S; the Model 3 and Model S motors are also not the same unit—the Model 3's main drive (rear motor) uses an interior permanent magnet synchronous reluctance motor (IPM-SynRM), while the Model S long used an AC induction motor." (Source: Wikipedia, "Tesla Model 3," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3) ↩

13. This claim could not be verified. ↩

14. Source: NPR, "Hilary Swank Goes On A Voyage To Mars In Netflix Series 'Away'" (2020) (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/06/910194934/hilary-swank-goes-on-a-voyage-to-mars-in-netflix-series-away) ↩

15. According to Mike's original words, "Whether Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive, the conclusion at the time was that it was both dead and alive, with both states existing." Upon verification, it should be: "In his 1935 paper 'The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,' Schrödinger proposed the idea of a cat that is 'both dead and alive' not as a conclusion reached at the time, but as a reductio ad absurdum—he used this absurd scenario to criticize the Copenhagen interpretation's extension of superposition to macroscopic objects, and he himself did not believe the cat was actually in a state of being both dead and alive." (Source: Wikipedia, "Schrödinger's cat," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat) ↩

16. This claim could not be verified. ↩

17. Source: Wikipedia, "King of Comedy (film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Comedy_(film)) ↩

18. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Modern Times" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Modern-Times-film) ↩