“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When massive doses of LSD are used, you are artificially creating a disaster area from which you hope to salvage an efficient working self. It is true that the old interactions between an associative pattern of thought and its habitual action may be broken down, but it is also true that the inner-ordered structure has been shocked psychically and biologically.

(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. The individual’s conscious mind is then forced to face the charged situation — but after the event, in retrospect. The nightmare itself can be like a shock treatment given by one portion of the self to another, in which cellular memory is touched off much as it might be in such an LSD session.

But the self is its own best therapist. It knows precisely how many such “shocks” the psyche can take to advantage, which associations to animate through such intense experience and imagery, and which ones to leave alone.

Nightmares in series are often inner-regulated shock therapy. They may frighten the conscious self considerably, but after all it comes awake in its normal world, shaken perhaps but secure in the framework of the day.

Other dream events, though forgotten, may also cushion the individual to withstand the effects of such “nightmare therapy.” In the same way that some LSD treatment finally results in a feeling of rebirth (that is often only temporary, however), so a period of such nightmares often leads quite naturally to dreams in which the self finally makes new and greater connections with the source of its own being.

When large doses of chemicals are used, the conscious mind is confronted full blast with very potent experiences that it was not meant to handle, and by which it is purposely made to feel powerless. (Pause.) Faced with the exterior nightmares of wars and natural disasters, the conscious mind is still directed outward into that world with which it knows it was formed to cope. In periods of great physical stress it draws upon the powers of the body and inner self to perform remarkable feats of heroism — that leave it wondering afterward at the power and energy of the self in crisis.

Its own stability and awareness can be vastly deepened and strengthened. In times of seemingly calamitous encounters with nature, individuals may find themselves amazed at their capacity to relate with other people, but in the artificially induced psychic disaster area of massive LSD therapy, the situation is reversed. Consciousness finds itself in a crisis situation; not [because of one coming] from the exterior world, but because it is forced to fight on a battleground for which it was never designed and cannot understand, where basically counted-upon allies of association, memory and organization, and all the powers of the inner self, are suddenly turned into enemies.

Within their happening there may be a distorted — to it — grotesque duration in which action may be seemingly impossible. No separation between self and experience may be allowed. Even an exalted experience can be an assault upon consciousness if it is forced. The price paid is much too high as far as the entire personality is concerned.

The feelings that are often realized in later sessions, say of rebirth, are indeed that. The old organizations of the self have fallen, and the new structures do indeed rejoice in their oneness and vitality.

A strong suicidal base frequently exists here. The knowledge is present that the “old self” did not make it — so what assurance does the so-called new self have? (Pause.) Again, the body is a living sculpture. You are in it and you form it, and it is to all intents and purposes you while you are physical. You must identify your material being with it. Otherwise you will feel alienated from your biological identity.

This identity is your physical self through which now, in your terms, all expression must come. You are more than your temporal being alone. Your life as a creature is dependent upon your alliance with flesh. You will exist when your body is dead, but practically speaking, you will always be working through an image of yourself.

(Smile:) I am quite aware of the distorted religious connections made here: Die to yourself and you will be reborn; you will not kill yourself. What you think of as the self dies and is reborn constantly, as the cells of your body do. Biologically and spiritually, new life relies upon these innumerable changes and transformations, deaths and births that occur naturally both in the seasons of the earth and those of the psyche.

It is always because you do not trust the natural self that you resort to such drug therapy. The individuals who seek out treatment fear the nature of their own identity more than anything else. They are then only too willing to sacrifice it. (Pause, then smiling:) Your thoughts and beliefs form your reality. 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.

(“I’d been working all day,” Jane wrote, “on my book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. Working like crazy, really on a creative ‘high.’ Just before supper time I’d been writing about the single yet double universe of self and soul, and the last line had quoted the mortal self:

The mortal self,

Under enforced annihilation, there is a frantic attempt at reorganization as the inner self tries to “send up” alternate egos to handle the situation — and in those terms, the more egos you kill the more will emerge.

(11:40) To some extent there is also an assault upon simple creaturehood. Its images and experience, furthermore, are seldom forgotten, and the so-called new ego is born with the memory of their imprint. Some psychologists like to say that you cry out unconsciously against the natural method of your birth.⁴ But here you have the situation where a self is faced with its own annihilation, while another “self” arises after conscious participation with its death.