“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

(9:32.) If scientists studied the body and the mind in terms of natural healing abilities, they could learn how to encourage these, for such processes — and I have mentioned only one of them — are continuous through your lifetime.

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.

It is made vulnerable to all those forces it was meant to lead, while being stripped of its natural logical abilities — indeed, of its very sense of identity. (Intently:) There is nothing exterior against which it can work, and no framework in which it can get balance.

These attitudes are highly important. In a strong drug experience you take physical demonstration out of its natural framework, presenting it in such a way that its usual reactions make no sense. A world may be tumbling down upon you, for example, yet there is no adequate physical defense or retaliation possible.

(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 know the puddle was natural,

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.

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

With the death of Ruburt’s mother last year, Rooney’s purpose was fulfilled for Ruburt. Rooney even did a final service, for through his death Ruburt faced the nature of pain and creaturehood that his mother’s life had so frightened him of.