“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After the last session, I told Jane that I was most intrigued by Seth’s assigning two headings to Chapter Ten, but the dilemma was hardly very complicated.)

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.

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.

But when the conscious mind is forced to face far less pleasant encounters, and is robbed of its power to reason at the same time, then you do indeed insult the basis of its being.

A moment later the line from his poem came to him, and he made the proper connection. The conscious mind was disturbed for a moment but it assimilated the data. The meaning of the light will become even clearer through Ruburt’s dreams,³ the intuitive continuation of the poem, and physical example.

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.

(10:42.) If you identify with your body alone, then you may feel that life after death is impossible. If you consider yourself a mental being only, however, you will not feel alive in the flesh, but separated from it. Think of yourself as a physical creature now. Know that later you will still operate through another form, but that the body and the material world are your present modes of expression.

(“After supper Rob went out to get groceries. I don’t know the time but it was dark and raining hard, with flashes of soundless lightning. It was quite warm for February. I thought about going for a walk, but didn’t…. Immediately after the two experiences that Seth describes in this session, involving the rain creature and the light, I added this section to Dialogues:

but just began to rise

not a ball of fire, but a silent

but no flash leapt out

but if that light came

But, dear soul,

(“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.”

As mentioned earlier (in the 610th session in Chapter One), what you call the ego is a portion of the inner identity that rises to face the world of physical existence. In the regular course of events it will change into another ego, but while losing its “dominant” status it will not die to itself. It will alter its organization as a part of the living psyche.

In all of this the body’s situation is highly agitated, and the physical organism is forced to respond as best it can to a series of disastrous events — which, however, it realizes it cannot be experiencing physically. It knows a “mock” battle is going on, but cannot stop itself from sending forth those chemicals and hormones necessary to a physical situation of like degree. There is a great wear and tear on the body, and an inexcusable exhaustion of its native energies.

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.

The cat was aware of this in its terms. It became heavy like Ruburt’s mother, but no longer threatening. You finally had it fixed. If Ruburt’s mother had been unable to bear a child, then Ruburt would have had a different mother and a different background, granting that Ruburt had come alive.

The cat was a male. You and Ruburt originally called it Katherine, however, when it was still a kitten, and before you finally succeeded in coaxing it into your house. Rooney got into neighborhood scrapes, as Ruburt’s father did in bars in various parts of the country. The cat knew of the identification but was willing to trade this for several years of additional physical life, in which he also learned to relate to gentleness for the first time.

(12:08. Jane didn’t remember any of that material. Seth had referred to probabilities and hinted at reincarnation in connection with Rooney, I realized as I scanned the notes, but before I could ask about such relationships he returned with a page of information for Jane on a different subject. Then when she came out of trance again, Jane said, “He’s got stuff on Willy, too,” but she was tiring. The session ended at 12:21 a.m.)