“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As the creation of any art is intimately connected with the dream state, so is the living art of your body. Its breathing form is influenced by the great therapy of dreams. If there are chemical imbalances they are often corrected quite automatically in the dream state, as you act out situations calling up the production of hormones, say, that would be summoned in a like waking situation. (See the footnote about hormones in the 621st session in Chapter Four.)

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to begin with. Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension. By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree. So your flesh is affected by your dreams.

As you come to understand the nature of your own beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your conscious purposes. It is one of the most efficient natural therapies, and the inner framework in which much of your physical body building actually takes place.

Now: There is one point here that I would like to make. Some of the drugs given to “mental” patients impede the natural flow of dream therapy to varying degrees.

1. Just before giving the 861st session last week, Jane received from Seth some intriguing material on the idea that in psychological therapy, the good intents and impulses beneath the client’s emotional and physical hassles should be searched out by the analyst. [...] It was very promising material, she told me, and could help change conventional ideas of therapy. A book could actually be involved — Seth’s next — on “the therapy of value fulfillment.” [...]

[...] You know — that material I’ve been telling you about, on therapy and value fulfillment. [...]

“The therapy of value fulfillment will attempt to put individuals in touch with their basic instincts, to allow them to sense the impulsive shapes of their lives, to define their own versions of the ideal through the recognition of it as it exists in their own impulses and feelings and abilities, and to help them find acceptable and practical methods of exerting their natural power in the practical actualization of those ideals.”

[...] We will have some sessions dealing with dream therapy. Through such therapy actions would be allowed greater spontaneity, and channels would not be clogged by impeding actions to any great degree. Dream therapy would actually involve no more than lending a helping hand to a phenomena that already occurs.

[...] Dream therapy could offer great advantages, but here again it could be dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous or rigid personalities.

[...] Much seemingly erratic antisocial behavior could be avoided through such dream therapy. [...]

If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could indeed imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy, where wars were fought by the sleeping and not by the waking nations. [...]

(Monday evening’s session concerned the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, as therapy; no book dictation was involved. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The young man who came here described in some detail the way in which LSD is used in therapy work with patients. [...]

[...] Through such therapy, conscience is to be encountered and conquered once and for all.

[...] If you are in serious difficulty can LSD, with therapy, help you? [...]

[...] It is because you do not trust your own basic therapeutic nature, or really understand the conscious or unconscious mind, that you run to so many therapies that originate from without the self.

[...] On the other hand technology brings within your reach the great therapy of music; this activates the inner living cells of your body, stimulates the energy of the inner self and helps to unite the conscious mind with the other portions of your being.

[...] Left alone, it will flow through thoughts and images that provide their own therapy.

Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies, and one of your most effective assets as connectors between the interior and exterior universes.

It is always because you do not trust the natural self that you resort to such drug therapy. [...] There is, as Joseph (Seth’s name for me) said in our break, no magic therapy — only an understanding of your own great creativity, and the knowledge that you yourself make your world.

(A one-minute pause at 9:21.) In normal daily life, considerable natural therapy often takes place in the dream state, even when nightmares of such frightening degree arise that the sleeper is shocked into awakening. [...]

Nightmares in series are often inner-regulated shock therapy. [...]

Other dream events, though forgotten, may also cushion the individual to withstand the effects of such “nightmare therapy.” [...]

Under such therapy it sometimes seems that new, lesser personality fragments are uncovered, but it is very possible that these instead are created by the therapy itself. [...]

In the kind of schizophrenic behavior we have just been discussing, hypnosis is frequently used as therapy, often in an attempt not only to introduce the two levels of the personality to each other, but also to uncover the time they originally split off in such a fashion.

[...] The very fact that such a person considers any kind of therapy does mean that he or she is ready to tackle a considerable challenge. [...]

[...] Therapy in the symptoms, etc. [...]

Being a proper candidate meant that I would turn my life over to medical science in the hospital for at least a year: a year spent in therapy, surgical procedures, and more therapy, until I ended up having at least four separate operations. [...]

(Long pause at 9:02.) Being a proper candidate meant getting rid of those bedsores, for one thing, as well as taking extensive physical therapy. [...] I wanted to see how my body would react to the synthetic thyroid hormone and to therapy first. [...]

(Today we resumed the vitamin and cod-liver-oil therapies, which we’d let go last week, in the face of what I had taken to be Jane’s resistance. [...]

[...] Part of the reason we both felt better was that we had made some decisions that offered hope: the food therapy, the sessions, etc. [...]

[...] Jane’s hands and knees have, I think, showed considerable improvement since we began the vitamin therapy, even with all the interruptions that treatment has had. [...]

[...] I think the vitamin therapy is helping considerably here, and seems to be following the results listed in Dr. Van Fleet’s book. [...] My idea is that if Jane will continue the vitamin therapy—a term I don’t particularly like—that in a couple of months she might achieve some good results, for as I explained to her, I think the key to curing the decubiti lies in increased mobility, especially in the knees. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) Hal’s therapy is very good. [...]

(“The reason why some lose-weight groups succeed in their therapy, at least momentarily, is that belief in the worth of the self is stressed. [...] The therapy seldom has long-reaching effects because from then on any gained weight is even more negatively charged.

Dictation: The natural therapies of the body can be called upon with great effectiveness, as you will see in the next chapter. [...]

[...] The therapies begun are continuing in more concentrated fashion, and I want both of you to note improvements, to take it for granted they are occurring, and literally to say, as Ruburt did, “To hell with it, it is happening.”

[...] Such people often watched the animals and observed nature’s own therapies and treatments.

[...] It automatically begins its own therapy.

If you misinterpret the myths, then you may believe that man has fallen from grace and that his very creaturehood is cursed, in which case you will not trust your body or allow it its “natural” pattern of self-therapy.

(Jane said there was much more to the idea of natural therapy in animals. [...]

You may be interested in hearing some information about him, for he is working with art, painting, in terms of therapy. He is not only working with patients and using art as a therapy for them, not only having them paint as therapy, you see, but he is also working on the idea that some paintings in themselves have a healing effect. [...]

(For some of Seth’s earlier material on dreams, dream symbols and healing, nightmare therapy, etc., see sessions 639–41 in Chapter Ten.)

[...] He said that he was glad that he was forced to see the thing through, yet grave doubts brought him here, and will finally lead him into other areas away from such therapy.

In therapy using massive doses of LSD, a condition of chemically enforced insanity takes place. [...]

[...] Ruburt is quite right in thinking that this is far worse than any physical shock therapy.

In either case, if the therapy is effective you may give up your symptoms, if both you and the hypnotist implicitly believe in the situation and framework of those convictions.

[...] In this system, at least, the body is not insulted with a bewildering assortment of drugs for therapy. [...]

[...] On the one hand, you have a culture that publicly points out as common the often exaggerated dangers that can occur with drugs, and on the other holds out drugs as a method of therapy. [...]

[...] Take the idea of the book Seth mentioned on therapy and value fulfillment, and so forth, and what you said today about body consciousness. [...]

(See the brief references to the therapy of value fulfillment in the opening notes for Session 862, with its Note 1. Today I’d mentioned to Jane how I remembered Seth’s saying — perhaps a couple of years ago — that still untouched in his material is the whole question of the body consciousness, and its role in health and many other fields. [...]