“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Part One of the book is to be called: “Where You and the World Meet.” The heading that you asked about is for Part Two of the book (“Your Body as Your Own Unique Living Sculpture,” etc., given in the 637th session in Chapter Nine). The heading referring to the soul in chemical clothes is for the next chapter (Ten), which is the first chapter in Part Two.

All of your physical experience must, of course, be pivoted in the corporeal reality of the body. The energy that moves your image comes from the soul. Through your own thoughts you direct the body’s expression, and it can be of health or of illness. Out of a knowledge of the contents of your own conscious mind you can definitely heal most maladies of the body, within conditions to be given later.

Your ideas themselves follow certain laws of creativity. They have their own rhythms. The associative processes of your mind, working through the brain, have great connection with the minute behavior of your cells. As you learn to use your thoughts, or even as they naturally change, resulting alterations take place within the cells. There is an orderly progression, an intimate relationship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He was filled with joy as he observed this reality. He knew that in the physical world the puddle was flat, but that he was perceiving another just-as-solid reality; a larger one, in fact, in which that rain creature had its being.

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.

In physical life the soul is clothed in chemicals, and you will use the ingredients you take into your body to form an image that is in line with your beliefs. Some of these ideas will undoubtedly be accepted by you from your culture. Others will be your own private interpretation of yourself in flesh. Your beliefs about any chemical will affect what it does to you. Under LSD therapy you expect a drastic reaction and are told to prepare yourself. Your experience will follow your beliefs and your therapist’s, communicated verbally and telepathically.

(Now here are excerpts from the account she wrote for me of her experiences involving the rain-puddle creature and the light on the evening of February 2. Jane’s narrative and poetry supplement Seth’s own words, and show how she became consciously aware of the unique transformation of her original poetic ideas into visual reality — and how she then carried the creative process another step by converting her new perceptions into more poetry. We think these bleed-throughs between realities are common, if largely automatic in most cases, in any area of “life.” In the arts they’re often called inspiration.

(“With the puddle creature I saw both realities — the puddle in physical terms, and the creature in larger than physical terms — and could switch from one reality to the other if I wanted to, I think. But the light didn’t have a physical counterpart. I think it came … from that other reality directly here, because I had my ‘windows’ open.”

Ideas form reality, so the body is used to reacting to some “imaginary” situations in which, for example, the mind conjures up dire circumstances which do not physically exist; but these still force the organism into an over-activation, setting up a state of stress. In massive drug therapy the body feels in greatest threat, for it is forced to use all of its resources while its own signals tell it that the messages it is getting do not have a correlation — and yet they are of the most urgent nature.

(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.

Give us a moment… The cat would have died that winter. In your terms it was a probable death. In a part of his reality he did die that winter. In your reality, you kept him alive. He had been closed up in that house over there, and went wild and terrified.

Ruburt was somewhat afraid of the cat, considering him wild and caged originally, as his own mother had been in his interpretation. Ruburt therefore felt obligated to help Rooney, who did not really have any love for him — just as in his earlier years he [Jane] had felt obligated to help his mother.

He was also symbolic of Ruburt’s own harsh childhood, and to some extent then conquered simply through the natural passage of events.