“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to begin with. Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension. By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree. So your flesh is affected by your dreams.

(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.

In any case, interpretation involves but one part of the task as you try to consciously assess a dream’s meaning. The real work of the dream is done during the event itself, on deep psychic and biological levels.

The dream’s happening affects your entire physical condition, and so has this constant therapeutic effect. This result stems from the psychic situation set up within any dream drama (pause), and in it the problems or challenges of your existence are worked out. Many probable actions are taken; these are then projected into the probable future.

There is another consideration involving medicine; though as I mentioned earlier (in the 624th session from Chapter Five), if you accept Western medical beliefs I am not suggesting that you suddenly forsake all doctors. But naturally and left alone, any chemical upsets in the body will right themselves after the inner problems causing them are worked out through any of a variety of innate healing methods.

(10:49.) The same applies to mental conditions, which have a way, sometimes, of working themselves out better without your professional therapies than with them — often cures happen in spite of your best-intentioned treatment. One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances. Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease. Your beliefs about the nature of your own reality do. If medication of that sort improves the immediate situation, the inner problem of beliefs must still be worked out. Otherwise other illnesses will be substituted.

It is extremely difficult to work with yourself in the natural manner when you are surrounded everywhere by the belief that certain drugs, or foods, or doctors will provide the answers. So, in the barrage of mass ideas to the opposite, those who try to allow themselves the benefit of their own innate healing must usually face the stress of wondering whether or not they are right.

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.