“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A session had been mandatory Monday evening, February 5, since we’d scheduled it for an out-of-state visitor some time ago, but we didn’t feel much like it when the time came. Jane and I were saddened Monday morning to discover that our black cat, Rooney, had died unexpectedly during the night. We’d taken him in as a stray kitten some four years ago. I buried him in the garden. As far as we knew, this neighborhood had been his home territory.

(Seth had already given the heading for Chapter Ten, but as we sat for the session now I reminded Jane of her questions about group souls, as described at the end of the 637th session. It was another unusually warm night; we had a window open, and were aware of traffic noise. Jane’s delivery was comparatively fast to begin with.)

(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.

Naturally, left alone, you will at various times spontaneously experience such states of grace or illumination, though you may not use those terms. You will feel at peace with yourself and your world, or you will surpass yourself, suddenly feeling a part of events and phenomena usually considered not yourself. But to one extent or another such experiences are natural and a part of your heritage.

In therapy using massive doses of LSD, a condition of chemically enforced insanity takes place. By insanity, I mean a situation in which the conscious mind is forced into a state of powerlessness. There is a literal assault made not only upon the psyche, but upon the organizational framework that makes it possible for you to exist rationally in the world that you know. The ego, of course, cannot be annihilated in physical life. Kill one and another will, and must, emerge from the inner self which is its source.

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.

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.

(11:38.) Assaults upon your consciousness in such a manner challenge the stability of your species, and insult the integrity of your creaturehood. You may say that such chemicals are natural because they exist within the reality that you know, but the body is equipped to deal with ingredients that come from the earth. Great doses of such “artificial” drugs are not easily assimilated, and bring about biological confusion.

Within their native framework, some American Indians use peyote in their own way — but not as gluttons, stunning and annihilating their systems. They accept it as a natural ingredient belonging to their earthly structure. They do not try to blast themselves out of existence. They use it to increase the innate perceptions that they have.

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.

— but then (smiling), I knew about it, you see.²

I can do everything but the typing.