“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:45.) When your body and mind are working together then the relationship between the two goes smoothly, and their natural therapeutic systems place you in a state of health and grace. I told you earlier (in the 614th session in Chapter Two, for instance) that your feelings follow the flow of your beliefs, and if this does not seem true to you it is because you are not aware of the contents of your conscious mind. You can close your physical eyes. You can close the eyes of your conscious mind also, and pretend not to see what is there. It is because you do not trust your own basic therapeutic nature, or really understand the conscious or unconscious mind, that you run to so many therapies that originate from without the self.

It seems that technologies and inventions have done a lot of harm, and so they have. On the other hand technology brings within your reach the great therapy of music; this activates the inner living cells of your body, stimulates the energy of the inner self and helps to unite the conscious mind with the other portions of your being.

The natural healing of sound can happen also when you do such a simple thing as listen to the rain. You do not need drugs, hypnotism, or even meditation. You only need to allow and direct the freedom of your conscious mind. Left alone, it will flow through thoughts and images that provide their own therapy.

Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies, and one of your most effective assets as connectors between the interior and exterior universes.

Usually they are not analyzed according to your [own] current beliefs. You have been taught to interpret them along the lines of very ritualized procedures. You are told, for instance, that certain objects or images in your dreams have a definite meaning — not necessarily your own, but following whatever psychological, mystical or religious school of thought in which you happen to be interested.

Some of these systems do touch upon legitimate portions of reality, but they all overlook the great individualistic and highly private nature of your dreams, and the fact that you create your own reality.

Fire has one meaning if you are afraid of it, another if you consider it a source of warmth; and either of these two meanings will also be colored by any of the endless variations of personal events that any individual might have encountered with it. Your own knowledge of dream symbols and their personal meaning is so opaque simply because you are not used to examining them with your conscious mind. You have been taught that it cannot understand. The great interconnections between waking and dreaming experience then escape you. You do not realize the many physical problems that are solved for you, and by you, in your dreams.

This happens very frequently when you consciously set the problem before yourself, state it clearly, and then drift into sleep. The same thing happens, however, even without such a conscious set. Dreams give you all kinds of information concerning the state of your body, the world at large, and the probable exterior conditions that your present beliefs will bring about.

The dream state provides you with a trial framework in which you explore probable actions and decide upon the ones you want to physically materialize. Not only nightmares, as mentioned earlier (in the last session), but many other dreams follow rhythms of a therapeutic nature far more effectively than any that are drug-induced. Sleeping pills can interfere with this activity.

I will have quite a bit to say in this book concerning the creative and healing nature of dreams, and the easy methods that can be used to help you utilize those conditions more effectively. Here I merely want to point out some of the natural doorways to self-illumination and states of grace. These can be alternative courses to those who believe that there is no other way but to browbeat the ego — either through the use of chemicals or by other methods calculated to strip it of its powers at least momentarily, rather than teaching it to use those great abilities of assimilation that it does possess.

In this area certain events really matter. Singular circumstances, meaningless to others, can be used to open your own storehouse of energy and inner strength. These will include both waking and dreaming events. If you remember having certain dream experiences and waking refreshed, then before sleep consciously think about those dreams and tell yourself they will return.

(10:42.) Enjoyment of an art is also very therapeutic, and its creation springs from an exquisite wedding of the conscious and unconscious minds. I will try later to explain the deep interweaving that exists between dreams, creativity, and the nature of the reality of your experience.

The framework of sex is another natural therapeutic system if you have not already hampered its effectiveness by contrary beliefs. Natural “mystical” experience, unclothed in dogma, is the original religious therapy that is so often distorted in ecclesiastical organizations, but it represents man’s innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own being, and of his own experience.

Your dreams and the physical events of your lives constantly alter the chemical balances within your body. A dream may be purposely experienced to provide an outlet of a kind that is missing in your daily life. It will mobilize your resources and fill your body with a rush of needed hormones, creating a dream state of stress that will bring the organism’s healing abilities into combat and result in an end to particular physical symptoms.

Another dream might provide a “dreaming” peaceful interlude in which all stress is minimized, with the overactive output of certain hormones and chemicals quieted as a result.

Such dreams will be greatly effective, but only for a short period of time unless the conscious mind faces the beliefs that have been causing the imbalance. The heavy doses of chemicals introduced from the outside, however, give you an entirely different kind of situation and add new stresses. These dilemmas condition consciousness to believe its position to be even more precarious than it was before, and its sense of power and effectiveness is greatly reduced.

Consciousness’s experiences following such therapy may be those of elation, but it feels that any of its adventures rest on issues that it cannot understand, and its capacity to deal with physical reality is less secure than before. This is not the case with natural inner treatments that are carried on in individual behavior. These are the ones that should be understood and encouraged, say, by the psychologists.