The "Reading Guide" and "Key Points" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the block quotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter revolves around the dream world, dream artists, and the purpose of dreaming. The content points out that every reality has its own blueprint of activity, but the blueprint is not easily seen and often can only be perceived after consciousness idealizes it. Humanity has forgotten the ancient art of dreaming, causing waking experience and dreams to be separated. Dreams can bring inner order, heal the body, and influence cells and hormone release. Dreams are a byproduct of the relationship between the inner self and the physical body, not merely chemical reactions. All consciousness involved in matter dreams and participates in the construction of the dream world.
Key Points of This Chapter
- Every reality has its own blueprint; the blueprint itself is active and not easily seen, and it can be perceived only after consciousness idealizes it.
- The ancient art of dreaming can familiarize people with the inward order of events and the seedbed of probabilities, but this art has largely been lost.
- Healing in dreams affects the cells, altering hormone release and bodily states.
- Dreams are a natural byproduct of the relationship between the inner self and the physical body, not merely chemical reactions or conscious reactions.
- All consciousness involved in matter dreams; atoms, molecules, and trees also participate in the construction of the dream world.
Main Text
Today we continue sharing Session 698 of Volume One of The "Unknown" Reality, titled "Dream World, Dream Artists, and the Purpose of Dreaming." This session began at 9:28 p.m. on Monday, May 20, 1974.
It opens with a note written by Rob: Last Friday, while Jane was in an altered state of consciousness, she tuned in to material about the Tances dreams and other families of consciousness, which she called "magical works." She placed an excerpt of the content in Appendix 11. This content actually resonates with what this session is going to discuss. Rob placed it here to show you how strong this kind of synchronicity can be.
Dreams and Magical Synchronicity
In this session Seth is talking about dreams, and during this period Jane recorded 33 dreams one after another. These dreams were very interesting and solved many of her real-life problems, showing relevance to her actual issues. She even healed herself in the dreams, reaching an extreme state of relaxation. Because by this time, Jane's body had already begun to show some uncomfortable reactions, with some restricted movement in her joints, so she had already begun to heal herself through dreams.
While awake, her state of consciousness was different from usual, but also different from the state in which she transmitted the Seth material. In this state of consciousness, she transmitted some material she called "magical works," and Rob only excerpted a portion of it for Appendix 11.
The Blueprints of Reality
Seth began by saying:
The blueprints for these realities are not easily seen, because you have allowed yourselves to forget their existence.
Every reality has its own blueprint; remember this. Every reality, every probability has its own blueprint; it is not just that there is one master blueprint and that is all. But the blueprint is not so easily seen. Often it can only be perceived by you after the consciousness in that reality has idealized it. You cannot see the blueprint itself; what you see is the state after it has been placed in your heart and become your ideal. The blueprint itself is larger and broader than you think, but it will not easily let you see it, and the blueprint itself is also active, alive, not fixed.
He said:
In pursuit of certain goals, you pretend that those blueprints do not exist.
Because when you move toward a goal, for certain goals you deliberately ignore these blueprints. However, the present global situation of humanity requires the reacquisition of those ancient arts. What are these arts? They are the arts of dreaming, the way of gaining a partial insight into the blueprints through dreams. He said these can help you become aware again of the idealizations that form your private reality and your mass world.
Why does he say "aware again"? Because in ancient times we actually knew this. In that remote period before the development of human ego consciousness, we knew it. But later, when ego consciousness became very strong, humanity selectively forgot these things, so he used the phrase "aware again."
These ancient arts can make you familiar with another inward order of events. The outward connections of events, the outward links—such as one event causing a new event—these you can all see. But what you have not seen is that events also have inner connections, and that your specific existence is drawn from the rich seedbed of probabilities within it.
A seedbed is a nursery, the image of cultivating a nursery. The events in our real lives are all cultivated from the nursery of probabilities.
The Art of Dreaming and Forgetting
These ancient arts are useless if they are not practiced. This ability has always been there, but we never use it, because it has not been brought into the outer framework of our world. The outer world basically does not acknowledge or recognize dreams; mainstream science considers dreams to be merely the reaction of fragments of daytime experience, without meaning.
To use these ancient arts of dream analysis, one must first know that beneath the world you know there is another world. Beneath the material world there is a nonmaterial world, an inner world; alongside the focus of consciousness you are familiar with, there are other equally valid focuses.
We all dream, but there are very few great dream artists. Some people do hypnosis, and some scientists study dreams, but their way of studying has nothing to do with art. Many of the true purposes of dreams have been forgotten; we do not know what dreaming is for, but even so those purposes are still being fulfilled—you do not know what dreams are trying to do, and we have forgotten this, but it does not prevent them from fulfilling their purposes.
The conscious art of creating, understanding, and utilizing dreams has been largely lost.
No one knows how to control dreams, create dreams, or utilize dreams; this ability seems to have become rare. In the movie Inception we have already felt the magic of the dream world. Is there not a dream architect in that movie? Someone who creates dreams, utilizes dreams, controls dreams. That movie is very profound, so you can understand why it caused such a sensation worldwide, because people's subconscious knows that what it says makes sense. That movie brought this ability vividly back to life, but it used machinery, science fiction, and exaggeration to express it.
In our daily lives, the close relationship between world events and dreams has also been almost completely ignored. The future of humanity is planned in the private and collective dreams of its members, but this has never been taken into consideration. We have always wanted to explore or study the future of humanity, and the answers to these things can all be found in dreams, yet we humans have never seriously studied it, whether individual dreams or collective dreams.
The Dream Art of the Ancient Egyptians
Members of some ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, knew how to become conscious directors of dream activity. The ancient Egyptians knew how to utilize dreams; they dived into various levels of dream reality, all the way to the creative source. By diving through layer after layer of dreams, they reached the deepest place, attained that creative source, and then were able to use in the material world the material obtained from that creative source.
Today we marvel at this and do not know how it was obtained. The Egyptian pyramids are one aspect, but there is much, much more. Let me give a simple example: In Egypt there are many pyramids, temples, and ancient shrines. Along the banks of the Nile, if you take a cruise ship along the Nile, there are several important sites. On some of the temples there are stone carvings and stone inscriptions dating back thousands of years. For example, one of them is very interesting. If you photograph it, you may not understand what it is for, but an obstetrician can tell at a glance—those are all the tools used in modern artificial abortion, almost identical to the tools used today1. The ancient Egyptians thousands of years ago had already mastered this technology, manufactured such tools, and knew how to perform such surgery. This is something humanity simply cannot understand. So Seth pointed out that it was because they utilized dreams.
Creativity in Dreams
Among contemporary humans, the one who used dreams best, and used imagination best, was Tesla. When Tesla was inventing the alternating current motor, he said that he solved the problem in the world of imagination, in the world of dreams2. Also, when Mendeleev discovered the pattern of the periodic table of elements, it was also through a dream3—in his dream he saw a snake with its head and tail connected, the snake biting its own tail and spinning, and he suddenly understood that the periodic table was cyclical. Madame Curie as well: after years of studying radioactive decay without deep results, she had basically given up, then went back to sleep and had a dream4, in which she received that understanding, and immediately got up to write it down. The next morning when she saw what she had written in the dream, she had already forgotten the matter, but it was exactly the answer she had been seeking. These things are recorded in the biographies of famous people.
Healing in Dreams
The life of the cells is affected by our dreams, and therefore healing can occur in the dream state. Events in another order of existence change the cells themselves. Dream existence and our waking existence are two different kinds of existence. In that existence there is a sequence of events, and the events that occur according to that sequence are like giving our cells a treatment, stimulating the cells and causing them to change. While we sleep, the body releases different hormones, different chemical messengers to make adjustments, and the body receives healing and curing during sleep. Many illnesses are cured in this way.
Ruburt has been exploring the reality of the dream dimension, because he has recently been recording dreams. And in doing so, Ruburt began to glimpse their importance, because in dreams he can relax extremely deeply, something he cannot do in ordinary life. We know that Ruburt's main problem is with his joints, and the joint problem is related to his inner tension. He is a person who extremely dislikes wasting time and insists on using time effectively, so he is very tense and cannot truly relax. Seth suggested many times that they take vacations and travel, but you find that in these entire 20 years of transmission, the number of times they took vacations and traveled can be counted on one hand. In the early period it was for economic reasons; in the later period there were no longer economic problems, but they still did not go. Jane could not relax, but in dreams she truly could relax, so that relaxation was good for her body, and her body improved greatly.
Every reader can also try this private journey. He said:
These dream adventures will make the nature of personal daily experience very clear and plain, and they also provide personal knowledge of how probabilities work.
Dreams play out one probability after another. In real life you cannot see what happens to those probabilities afterward; only in dreams will they be acted out for you.
The Unpredictability of the World
Seth had previously said in this book:
The world that you know is born of a basic unpredictability.
This world that seems to have order is built upon an unpredictable, disordered world. Meaningful order emerges from it precisely because of the focus of our consciousness. The reason this world has order is that our consciousness considers it to have order; all that which has no order is ignored by you.
No system is closed. What you call official experience—the experience we consider historical, real in the material world—is a specific series of probable actions, and it does not just hang suspended in space and time; it is interwoven with those other actions that you do not recognize.
An action skein is a stream of actions, or a combination of actions. It is like a group of thin ropes forming the skein of a large rope. In other words, the actions in your present material world, the reason they can emerge and become events that actually happen in your real life, is that some invisible actions behind them are exerting force together, influencing together, and finally forming an event that actually happens.
The Single Focus of the Conscious Mind
In the waking state, the conscious mind must focus quite singly upon that particular point of concentration you call reality, because only in this way can it properly direct your activities in your earthly life. If you do not pay attention to this material world, you cannot even get food into your mouth; how would you live? This is necessary.
However, when it does not need to bear the clear responsibility of survival—at night when sleeping in a safe environment—it also possesses the ability to direct you in other nonmaterial realities. It is not only able to function in this material world.
But in the past you convinced yourselves that the conscious mind was of necessity cut off from inner reality, that it must be estranged from dreams, and should focus only on the outer world, otherwise it would be detrimental to your life. After being suggested in this way for a long time, we separated that inner aware portion of the conscious mind. Along with such a belief, you treat dreams as chaotic, irrational, and completely divorced from normal conscious direction, purpose, or function.
Sleep often seems almost like a small death, because in that state it is completely beyond the control of your consciousness. Psychologists have compared dreams to controlled insanity. You have so isolated your waking and dreaming experience that you seem to have two separate lives. There is very little connection between your waking and dreaming states; you have cut them off from each other and do not allow them to connect. And the rich knowledge of probable actions from which you choose your official life has likewise become invisible—which is quite unnecessary.
Jane's Healing Process
There was a break here, at 9:56 p.m. After the break Seth returned to discuss the reasons for Jane's recent excellent state of relaxation. His material here was mostly deleted, because it involved many private matters of Jane's. But I can say that her situation was inseparable from wanting to solve the challenges manifested by her physical symptoms. When Jane discovered that her body's problems were caused by her belief system, she began to change, but very slowly.
In the personal portion of this session, Seth explained how her very deliberate state of relaxation began in last night's dream, then accelerated further this morning, and became even more relaxed before the session began. Those recent dreams also provided additional comfort. While dreaming, the state of the body is altered, and these are things that doctors have not recognized.
Seth's point is this: In the dream state, hormones are also automatically released into the body's system, and according to the entire healing process, specific portions encourage a period of activity or a period of quiet—with appropriate tension and relaxation, allowing you to relax in dreams.
Dreams provide a stable mutual area between conscious and so-called unconscious activity. Conscious is daytime activity; unconscious is your dream activity. In dreams it lies between the two, both conscious and not entirely conscious; this is a moment of very deep unconscious creativity.
This session ended at 10:43 p.m.
Dream Material from the Early Sessions
Below are some notes by Rob. Eleven years earlier, when Seth began these sessions, Seth began to talk about dreams and related topics, and his material led Jane to begin some experiments of her own. For example, in Chapters 4 and 5 of Jane's book The Coming of Seth, she talks about some experiments she did; and in Chapter 14 of The Seth Material, she also talks about some dream experiments Jane did herself.
The material of Seth and Jane on dreams is spread throughout all aspects of their collaboration; Seth talks about the issue of dreams in almost every book. Session 92 is a session in the early sessions that is a basic lesson on dream material. If you want to understand it, you can look up Session 92 in the early sessions, in Book 3 of The Early Sessions. Jane revealed different portions of it in the chapters just mentioned.
The following material is some continuing dream material given by Seth in Session 97. If you are interested in the content of this session, you can go look through the early sessions.
Dreams as a By-Product
He said:
The dream world is indeed a natural by-product of the relationship between the inner self and the physical self.
This point is very important: dreams are a by-product of the relationship between the inner self and the physical self. Is there not a relationship between the physical self and the inner self? The by-product produced by their relationship is the dream. So it is not a reaction; many people think dreams are a reaction of consciousness—not so. He again emphasizes that it does not merely involve a chemical reaction—many modern scientists think dreams are just a chemical reaction, that the brain secretes some chemical substances that stimulate the brain. Seth directly refutes this here, saying no. The form it ultimately manifests may be through the release of hormones and the production of chemical reactions, but it is not only this; more deeply it is energy being converted from one state to another. I discussed this in the previous two sessions as well—death is the conversion of a person's energy from one state to another, and dreams are the same, just a change in the state of energy.
In certain respects, all planes or realms of existence are indeed by-products of energy conversion. Seth says that from certain angles, what we now call the interface of existence—is there not a boundary between death and life? We often speak of the two realms of yin and yang—these so-called two realms are just different forms of energy; it has been converted. Regarding "planes," I explained this before; I gave the example that people in two airplanes are equivalent to being in two planes—the English word "plane" and "level" are the same word.
For example, if it were not for the peculiar spark ignited by the interrelationship that exists between the inner self and the physical body, the dream world would not exist. The connection between the inner self and the physical body necessarily produces a spark—whether discordant, conflicting, or harmonious—the collision of the nonmaterial world and the material world within this body produces a spark, and this spark is the root of the dream world's existence. But conversely, the dream world is also necessary for the continued existence of this physical individual. Without this dream, the physical existence would not work either. So this is very interesting; they are mutually dependent.
All Consciousness Dreams
You all know that animals dream; anyone who has raised a cat or dog knows this. But what you do not know is that all consciousness dreams. We have said that to a certain degree even atoms and molecules have consciousness, because they are all composed of units of consciousness. Every tiny consciousness forms its own dreams; even atoms and molecules dream—just as, in another respect, each forms its own material reality. Here you should not understand his dreams in the same way as your dreams; his dreams are different from yours, but he has his dreams.
Just as individual atoms in the material world combine into more complex gestalts for their own benefit, forming molecules, so in the dream world they can also combine such gestalts. In real life, atoms combine into molecules, into metals, into diamonds; in their dream world, they also combine into various gestalts, though with slightly different properties.
Seth said:
I have said that the dream world has its own kind of imagery and permanence.
It is matter-oriented; remember this. Dreams have form; they are a kind of existence in a form that humanity cannot yet understand. Although not to the degree that exists in your ordinary universe, dream images are built up in exactly the same way that an individual physical image is built up. Your body is built up by beliefs, by consciousness; dreams are also built up by consciousness. The pattern of construction is the same for both, only the degree differs. If we speak in terms of energy, their energy states are different—measured against the material world as the standard, the energy state in dreams is not strong enough, not strong enough to form material form, but the pattern of construction is the same.
The dream world is not a formless, haphazard semi-structure; it has its own form, its own process of materialized generation. Its existence does not have great volume, but it does have shape, and this is not a contradiction or distortion.
The dream world as an independently existing realm of existence—its true complexity and importance have not yet been recognized by you. Although your world and the dream world are basically independent, they exert pressure on and influence each other.
It is important to understand that the dream world is a by-product of your own existence. Does our own existence not include physical existence, and also the existence of the inner world, the existence of the inner self? There is a connection between these two existences, and the by-product of the connection is the dream.
Because it is connected to you through chemical reactions—when dreams occur, there are indeed some chemical reactions in the brain that are different from usual—so in both animals and humans, the pathways of interaction are kept open, keeping the pathways of the brain connected during dreams for humans and animals.
Since dreams are a by-product of any consciousness involved in matter—your inner self is consciousness, but you have a physical body, so it is involved in the material world, and this physical body is also formed by this consciousness—this leads us to a correct conclusion: trees also have their own dreams. All specific matter formed by units of consciousness of various degrees of individualization also participates in the unconscious construction of the dream world. All matter participates in it to varying degrees, because at their foundation they are all composed of units of consciousness. They not only participate in the construction of the material world, but also unconsciously participate in the construction of the dream world.
Teacher Xiyu's Interpretation
注释与核实
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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Source: Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions III - My Later Endeavors," 1919 (https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/my-inventions-iii-my-later-endeavors) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩