“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation: There are natural feedback systems within the body and psyche that operate to set up optimum frameworks of balance, in which your growth and development can take place. There is some difference here, which was mentioned earlier (in the 636th session in Chapter Nine), between you and the animals and the particular way in which you create your reality….

These organizations then serve as awakeners or stimulation to inner portions of the self, always providing it with fresh experience. The inner self responds through the richness of its own psychic fabric, sending up, so to speak, ever-new particularized abilities to meet the exterior circumstances.

(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.

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.

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.

Your nature, beside possessing natural, general healing abilities, has its own unique and particular private triggers arising from your experience. They can be learned, recognized and utilized by you.

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 most rejuvenating idea of all, and the greatest step to any true illumination, is the realization that your exterior life springs from the invisible world of your reality through your conscious thoughts and beliefs, for then you realize the power of your individuality and identity. You are immediately presented with choices. You can no longer see yourself as a victim of circumstances. Yet the conscious mind arose precisely to open up choices, to free you from a one-road experience, to let you use your creativity to form diversified, varied comprehensions.

Let us make a clear distinction here: Your conscious beliefs direct the flow of unconscious processes which bring your ideas into physical reality, so while your thoughts cause your experience, you are not consciously aware of how this takes place (forcefully).

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.

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.

Now: Your body is your own living sculpture — not only the shape, structure and nature of its form, but the miraculous sense-knowledge of its being and the unique effect it has upon others. The sculpture itself is also endowed with the power of creativity given to it by yourself.

(Long pause.) Those innate bodily abilities also help sustain you as you continually create the image. (Pause.) The source for all of this creativity springs from your own inner identity, which is never completely materialized in flesh, and so you always have unused portions of creativity at your command. You react to the body even though you form it. In those terms there is a constant interaction between the creation and the creator, and in three-dimensional reality the creator is so a part of his handiwork that it is difficult to tell one from the other.

A painter puts part of himself into a painting. You put all of you of which you are aware into your body, so that it becomes you in flesh. An artist loves his painting. In physical terms it is completed when he puts down his brush — at least for him, though its effects continue. But you are creating your material image as long as you live, and manifesting yourself in it.

A painter does not look out of his creation’s eyes into the room upon whose wall the painting hangs. But you peer out through your own eyes at the universe. (Pause.) You create not only the body, then, but its entire experience, the context in which it takes place. You endow yourself with a three-dimensional existence. It is the framework in which you have your experience, created by you as the artist gives his paintings their dimension.

The trees in a landscape painting cannot physically move with the wind that may blow through the three-dimensional room. The head in a portrait cannot close its eyes if they are open, but you move within the framework of the temporal space that you have created for yourself.

(11:44.) The features in a portrait are painted on canvas or board, but your soul is not painted on your body. It enters into and becomes part of it. Physically, you cannot contain all of your identity, and that “free” portion unconsciously creates the flesh, in your terms. Again, you direct its form through your beliefs, but the unconscious part of you does the “work” of producing it.

(Actually it wasn’t quite the end. Seth returned to deliver a page of material in which he briefly discussed Jane’s own work with beliefs, her poetry, and her latest ideas about her psychic abilities; from there he went into our relationship with each other and with our parents.

(Assembling all of these elements into a psychological whole, he declared that “the sessions, among other things, were generated by your own experiences as creatures, and your desires to look for personal answers — but more basically, to seek out the answers [asked for] by all of your race.” End at 11:50 p.m.)