The Ancient Dreamers
Session 893 January 7, 1980
(With a surprising heartiness :) Good evening.
(“Good evening, Seth. “)
Dictation, to begin: New chapter (four); “The Ancient Dreamers.”
Give us a moment…. For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. The slept long hours, as did the animals—awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and, later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imaginings the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.
These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and the environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.
The species—from your viewpoint—lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins [and arteries], the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.
In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as yet firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He was aware of himself in a different way, so that, for example, his identification with the self did not stop where his skin stopped: he could follow it outward into the space about his form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal sense-experience that you have forgotten.
During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, it’s constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CU’s translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into the physical form.
Then in your terms man began, with the other species, to awaken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man still sleeps and dreams and that state is still a firm connective with his own origins and with the origins of the universe as he knows it as well.
Man dreamed his languages. He dreamed how to use his tongue to form the words. In his dreams he practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he could and would complete it.
All languages have as their basis the language that was spoken in dreams. The need for language arose, however, as man became less a dreamer and more immersed in the specifics of space and time, for in the dream state his communications with his fellows and other species was instantaneous. Language arose to take the place of that inner communication, then. There is a great underlying unity in all of man’s so-called early cultures—cave drawings and religions—because they were all fed by that common source, as man tried to transpose inner knowledge into physical actuality.
The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams—and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of consciousness contributes to the health and the stability of all other portions. Far from the claw and dagger your universe, you have of one whose very foundation is based upon the loving cooperation of all its parts. That is given—the gift of life brings along with it the actualization of that cooperative nature; and those exist at your birth (most emphatically), when you are innocent of any cultural beliefs that may be to the contrary.
If it were not for this most basic, initial loving cooperation, that is a given quality in life itself, life would not have continued. Each individual of each species takes that initial zest and joy of life as its own yardstick. Each individual of what ever species, and each consciousness, what ever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself—not only for itself but for all of reality as well.
This is a given characteristic of life, regardless of the beliefs that may lead you to misinterpret the actions of nature, casting some of its creatures in a reprehensible light.
In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, and dreamed all life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presence, and futures—that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization. Even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All That Is.
All possible amenities they can ever be actualized always exist. They have always existed and they always will exist. All That Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence—and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of your world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and the psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of your world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In those terms those entities are your ancestors—and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world.
Pages 192-195
A Seth Book
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume 1
Jane Roberts/Seth
Prentice Hall Press