“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is therefore some force to be reckoned with. If it were a primary reality, you would not escape from it even in the sleeping state. Those realities which are primary and basic you can never escape from. This should give you an idea, for those realities which run through all systems, and which are primaries, are those which exist for you in all conditions of consciousness and under any circumstances.

If ever in a dream experience you defy gravity, then gravity is not a primary reality, but only a manifestation within your own physical system. If clock time is escaped within the dream state, then clock time is not a primary. What you cannot escape within any range of consciousness, can be called a Primary Condition, and you may capitalize the term.

Incidentally, if it is not now known by your scientists, it will be shortly discovered that the physical organism does not age in sleep at the same rate at which it ages in the waking state. Aging, therefore, is not a primary. Again, this does not mean that secondary conditions such as aging and gravity and clock time, do not have effects within your system, obviously. It is only that these must be recognized as secondary conditions that do not therefore basically (underlined) affect the inner self, which is to a large degree independent of your system.

A recognition of the differences between primary and secondary conditions can however allow you to minimize the effect of the secondary conditions to some considerable degree.

Here now once more, let me repeat that thoughts are definite electromagnetic realities. Therefore, being actions, they affect all other actions, and if I repeat this in session after session, I do so, so that it will never be forgotten. Therefore these secondary conditions are strengthened through the very act, or misact, of thinking that they are primary rather than secondary elements in action.

Two men for example, of precisely the same physical age, of precisely the same physical condition, will be in completely different states of mind, of competence, of effectiveness and of strength, as a direct result of their inner beliefs as to their relative freedom within the framework of the physical system in which they exist.

He will be at all times a prisoner of clock time and of aging, for he will consider these the primary conditions under which he must operate. And the action, or actions involved in this belief will therefore act upon the physical cells of his body with vengeful force, because he has himself directed them to do so.

You will find it a most rewarding experience, once these experiments have been begun, for you will yourselves discover the difference between primary and secondary conditions. Obviously the secondary conditions are to some extent necessary for your survival as a physical organism, but you are more than a physical organism now, and you shall be other than a physical organism in your future.

And the conditions that are necessary, the primary conditions that are necessary for your existence as other than a physical organism, already exist, therefore, and can be perceived and studied with the equipment which is a part of every individual.

Identity of the inner self operates very well within primary conditions. It is dependent upon primary conditions. Its manipulation of primary conditions gives it the knowledge of itself. Identity is retained within the dream state, is it not?

Yet within the dream state the familiar physical props sometimes disappear. The inner I operates very well without them. In order to manipulate a physical reality however, the inner I needs a self that is acclimated to physical conditions; hence the ego.

Again, none of these issues are clear-cut, and the distinctions, many of them, are for simplicity’s sake. Many primaries will show secondary characteristics. For example, within your clock time there are definite primary characteristics of time as it exists in a primary condition.

Once more, even the word time is misleading, but within the boundaries of your clock reality every individual feels at times—but you see that the use of the word itself binds us—but every individual feels now and then the primary sense of existence that is not arbitrarily divided into moments and hours; and he therefore escapes from a secondary condition into the realization of a primary reality behind it.

A consistent, carefully recorded and extended examination of the dream state will, once more, permit you to compare those conditions and realities which show themselves in both the waking and dream states.