“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Do you mean ‘conscience’ or ‘consciousness’?”)

1. A note added a little later: For more on Dialogues, altered states of consciousness, creative processes, etc., see the notes following the 618th session in Chapter Three, and those for the 639th session in Chapter Ten.

4. I’ve always thought Seth’s term, “value fulfillment,” a particularly evocative one. He was using it not long after these sessions began. In the 44th session for April 15th, 1964, I find him saying, in part, “Growth in your camouflage [physical] universe involves the taking up of more space. Actually in our inner universe … growth exists in terms of the value or quality expansion of which I have spoken, and does not — I repeat— does not imply any sort of space expansion. Nor does it imply, as growth does in your camouflage universe, a sort of projection into time.

“I am giving it [this material] to you in as simple terms as possible. If growth is one of the most necessary laws of your camouflage universe, value fulfillment corresponds to it in the inner-reality universe.”

When you are fairly happy and content in your daily life, you can be said to be in a state of grace. On those occasions when you feel at one with the universe, or come upon an exceptional experience in which you seem to go beyond yourself, you can be said to be in a state of illumination, and this has many degrees and levels. In any such state your physical health benefits, generally speaking, though there may be some beliefs blocking in that direction.

Any event of your life is written in the memory of the universe, for example, as you think of it. (Pause.) So in a state of illumination private cellular memory may be animated, and beyond this, a deeper level of knowing in which your own birth and death may or may not be explained.

Your conscious mind, again, is a part of your inner self, and ever-changing. In terms of species consciousness it is a development of great significance. It draws strength from such sources of vitality and rejuvenation. They come naturally up to consciousness. Psychologists usually see people who are already in difficulty. The happy man has no need for such a visit. Few studies have been done to discover why the happy man is happy, yet his answers would be highly pertinent.

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.

Now: Under such enforced conditions, you are literally facing egotistical consciousness with its own death in an encounter that need not occur — and while the physical body is fighting for its own life and vitality. You are bringing about a dilemma of great proportions.

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 deepest biological and psychic structures are altered. I did not say they were damaged, though they may be according to the situation. Consciousness is assaulted at its roots. When periods of transcendence are felt under such conditions, they represent the psychic birth of a new personality from the sources of the old, and from the death, psychically, of the old. In some cases the genetic messages have changed, in that they are different. (Strongly:) This is psychic slaying in a technological framework.

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.

It is just because individuals are not aware of the resiliency of their own consciousnesses that they agree to such proceedings. So patient and therapist share the belief that the conscious mind does not have easy access to the needed knowledge.

Now this is simply another system of belief in which patient and therapist operate. The spontaneity of such sessions do indeed seem to present psychiatrists and psychologists with a map of the psyche. Statistically the individual experiences, while different, will of course follow a pattern — the pattern of beliefs consciously acknowledged and telepathically reacted to.

Beneath this a definite, though distorted, landscape of the psyche can be glimpsed in symbols. These [symbols] are consciousness’s attempt to portray cellular memory. Psychic motion always excites the molecules. The latent, easily flowing innate “knowledge” of the molecules builds up the “knowledge” of the cells (smiling). They work smoothly together. Under the enforced psychic assault of massive doses of LSD, the very comprehension of the molecules tries to split open. Now this is not something you can physically perceive. Cellular integrity itself can be threatened. Ruburt is quite right in thinking that this is far worse than any physical shock therapy.

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.

(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.

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.

Neither school understands the flexibility and the possibilities that are inherent within the conscious mind, and mankind has barely begun to use its potentials.