“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In man, conscious thoughts are highly important as the directors of unconscious activity. You become more responsible, then, in a particular way for physical effects that, comparatively speaking, are “instinctive” in the animal. This gives you both a conscious and unconscious feedback system against which to test your experience and alter its nature.

Therapeutic systems are an important part of this interrelationship, and they operate constantly. In one way, a state of grace or illumination happens where there is the greatest poised balance of the conscious mind with other levels of the psyche and body — a biological and spiritual recognition of the individual’s wholeness within himself and his relationship with the universe at large.

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.

(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.

Music is an exterior representation, and an excellent one, of the life-giving inner sounds that act therapeutically within your body all the time. (See Chapter Five.) The music is a conscious reminder of those deeper inner rhythms, both of sound and of motion. Listening to music that you like will often bring images into your mind that show you your conscious beliefs in different form.

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.

You often avoid this natural treatment, however, and run from frightening conscious thoughts that would in their turn lead you to the source of “negative” beliefs, where they could be faced; you could then travel through them, so to speak, into feelings of joy and victory. Instead, for example, many of you accept the way of drugs, where such feelings and thoughts are thrust upon you, or forced out of you while you are denied the stabilizing comforts of the conscious mind.

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

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.

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).

You may feel unworthy or believe such a state impossible for you to achieve, in which case you are sending contradictory messages. Nor can you become concerned with the ways in which your conscious purposes will be unconsciously produced, for the inner workings are not aware phenomena.

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.

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.