“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A man who makes a statue uses his conscious mind, his creative abilities, his physical body, and the inner resources of his own being.

Deliberately he decides to create a sculpture, and automatically focuses his energies in that direction. When you form the living sculpture of your body, which is far more important to you than any work of art, you should certainly follow the same course. In other words, direct your energies toward the creation of a healthy functioning body. You form your image constantly; as many of the artistic processes are hidden, so the inner mechanisms by which you create your material self lie beneath the surface of your conscious mind. They are highly effective, nevertheless.

(9:54.) Again, there can be a useful analogy in the field of art. While artists all use the same “material” — the human experience — it is still the brilliant uniqueness or individuality pointing out and riding upon that shared human performance that makes a work “great.” Afterward the critics may point out patterns, assign the work to a certain school, connect the images or symbols to those in other paintings — and then make the mistake of believing the symbols to be general, always apt, meaning the same thing wherever they are found. But all of this may have little to do with the artist’s interpretation of his own symbols, or with his personal experience, so he may wonder how the critics could read this into his work.

With dreams the same is true. No one really knows their meaning but yourself. If you read books in which you are told that a certain object always represents such and such, then you are like the artist who accepts the critic’s idea of the symbols in his own work. You will feel alienated from your dreams since you are trying to make them follow a pattern that is not yours.

Now. (Pause.) Mental “diseases” often point out the nature of your beliefs as they agree or conflict with those held by others. Here the belief systems are different than those of society to such a degree that obvious effects show in terms of behavior. There are crisis points here as with many physical illnesses, and left alone an individual may well work through to his own solution.

Even with so-called mental disorders, however, orientation with the body is very important, as are the individual’s beliefs about his own form and its relationship with others and with time and space. (Pause.) There will often be chemical imbalances in such a situation, unconsciously produced by the individual, sometimes in order to allow him to work out a series of hallucinatory events. Such sustained “objectified dreaming” necessitates a change, chemically, from the normal state of waking consciousness. It is important to note that regardless of the mental or physical illness adopted, it is chosen for a reason, and is a natural method that the individual himself knows he is physically and mentally equipped to handle.