“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Even though I said yes, at first break I checked the dictionary definition for oversoul, just in case it might lead me to ask Seth for more clarification. The dictionary discussed the oversoul as the spirit infusing all living things, resulting in the perfect realization of an ideal nature. This is a concept in the nineteenth-century transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson⁵ and others.)

All of this material, I understand, is complicated. It is also difficult to explain. It becomes highly pertinent, however, in many instances of your lives, and affects your daily being and experience. I gave the information [in this chapter] purposely when I did, knowing that our visitor from the psychiatric clinic would be here.

The material that I have just given you is necessary for any understanding of the ways in which massive doses of LSD can affect the individual. Here we are dealing with an artificial and forced method of, hopefully, bringing about physical, psychic and spiritual illumination. Such enlightenment is supposed to lead to better health, self-knowledge, and provide an inner state of peace. Through such therapy, conscience is to be encountered and conquered once and for all.

(9:29.) A discussion involving LSD, conscience, the “death and birth of the self,” mental health and spiritual illumination, may not seem applicable to those of you who have not taken drugs. But all of you do hope for illumination, greater vitality and understanding in one way or another, and wonder what methods might help you achieve these ends. Much of this book will be devoted to various techniques that will help you change your own reality for the better.

He had been working with the drugs in a therapeutic framework for some time. Before this he had wandered through India, finally following a guru. He left the guru to follow the doctor. Like many young men all through the ages he was on his individual journey, looking for truth, overturning all stones in an effort to find those methods that would help him discover — in capitals — THE WAY.

The experience was so shattering that he pleaded for a counter drug, knowing as he did so that this was against all the rules. The drug was refused him in any case. 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.

Many have come to me, or written after “bad trips”; the young especially, always great searchers after truth, and very tempted to look to the chemical, LSD now,¹ as the latest method of finding it. I am not speaking of marijuana at all, which is a different thing altogether and is a natural product of the earth. I am talking about a chemical that is a result of your technological knowledge.

The landscape of the psyche is indeed revealed, bringing good data to the psychiatrist. But the experiences undergone by the patients — and all of this applies to massive doses — represent the enactment, through terrible encounter, of the species’ birth into consciousness, and its death as consciousness falls back annihilated; followed by its rebirth as the individual patient struggles to emerge again from dimensions not native under those conditions.

The new ego is quite aware of the conditions of its birth. It knows it was born out of the death of its predecessor, and for all its feelings of transcendent joy, natural enough at its birth, it fears that annihilation from which it sprang.

Now: Such self-changes happen naturally as life progresses, and when the self modulates at any given time, it is different from what it was. When this occurs “all by itself” it is an innate reflection of the psyche’s creativity and happens with its own rhythm — connected to seasons of the mind and blood and consciousness and cells in ways that you do not as yet understand. But the whole structure and its subsidiary relationships change together, and the conscious mind is able to assimilate what is happening.

You grow and live through deaths that happen in you constantly, and travel through births within your lifetime that you do not comprehend. (Jane leaned forward for emphasis:) Such massive doses of LSD chemically activate all levels of cellular memory to such an extent that in certain terms they are no longer in charge of themselves, and the memories can then emerge unpredictably when the system is under stress. The fine biological and psychological alliance is now weakened.

They also share other beliefs, for example: That the inner self is a repository for repressed fears, terrors, and uncivilized savagery; that the inner self must be forced to get rid of such material before it is possible for it to express its power, energy and strength in creative, positive terms; and that, therefore, the self must first encounter and deal with all those terrors of its past before it can be free of the fears of the present.

Worst of all, there is no need for it. All of this treatment rests upon the idea that the conscious mind is highly inadequate, that deep problems are unknown to it, that it is meant to be simply analytical, and is unable to handle very intuitive or psychic material. Your beliefs alone make this so.

They become part of All That Is — as they should — without dying as they are. They are able to assimilate their knowledge, to purposefully direct it into both their individual lives and their social structure. They also use it within their own system of beliefs, of course, in which their creaturehood is understood and taken for granted. The conscious mind is seen as a complement, rather than a detriment, to biological being.

One believes that the conscious mind and the intellect have all the answers, but to this school this means that the conscious mind is analytical above all, and that it can find all the answers through reason alone. The other school believes that the answers are in feelings and emotion. Both are wrong. Intellect and feeling together make up your existence, but the fallacy is particularly in the belief that the aware mind must be analytical above all, as opposed to, for example, the understanding or assimilation of intuitive psychic knowledge.

(End at 11:55 p.m. “Now I’ve got all this energy left over,” Jane said, after quickly coming out of trance. “I feel it going through me. I could go for a long walk or play badminton — or even have a session,” she joked.