“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Such states lead to a condition of mental, psychic and physical health and efficiency. The aware mind’s great leeway through the intellect, and its connection with the senses, makes it possible for any singly insignificant event to trigger such experience. Intense focus is a characteristic of the conscious mind, and you can call it narrow because it includes only the physical dimension; but within the scope of that corporeal field it has great freedom to interpret the given dimension in any way it chooses.

The conscious mind can, for instance, see a rose as a symbol of life or death, or joy or sadness, and under certain conditions its interpretation of a simple flower can trigger deep experiences that call up power and strength from the inner resources of being. Since the attributes of egotistical consciousness have been so misinterpreted, you usually consider it only in its analytical breaking-down functions. These are very important as it separates larger fields of perception into smaller ones that can be physically understood. But the conscious mind is also a great synthesizer. It brings together diverse elements from your experience and unites them in new patterns.

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.

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.

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.

The soul is not only dressed in chemical clothes, but wears the apparel woven from all of the elements of the earth. As physical creatures you will be partially changed by any chemical or element, or food or drug that becomes part of your living system, but those effects will follow the nature of your beliefs.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)