“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

what did it touch

what that reason is.

(“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.

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.

(Long pause.) I am aware that many psychologists and psychiatrists feel that they are charting the course of the psyche with these methods. It is one thing, and unfortunate enough, to dissect a frog to see what did make it live. It is triply dangerous to dissect a psyche, hoping to put it back together again.

(Our cat, Rooney, died a week ago, as described at the beginning of the 638th session. This material is included because many correspondents have asked us about the roles pets can play in family groups and their belief systems. Seth’s data proved to be unexpectedly penetrating and intimate — so much so that what follows is edited to some degree. Enough remains, however, to show that such relationships can be complicated indeed.)

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.