“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob always enjoyed excellent health, but in 1963 he came down with severe back trouble. Certainly this frightened me and was probably partly responsible for the feelings expressed in the following poem — feelings, I think, that are quite prevalent during early adulthood:

Death came in and took my cat
And passed right by my dog.
He chased her through the living room
Over the woolen rug.
I sat right there and never knew.
I sat right there and never saw.

And when I looked around me, it seemed that for all of man’s good intentions, he only transmitted the errors of his race; that each man or woman unknowingly perpetuated the peculiar sins and failings of their families. I wrote one of my most pessimistic of poems:

Old hates lie in wait for the infant
As he grows into a man,
Then they leap upon him
When he puts his father’s coat on.
When the father’s bones drop into the grave,
The lice flock up as the dark earth falls
To feed on a son’s guilt love.

No man can look in his son’s face,
What was done to him he does in turn,
For he carries the hate in his blood.
Ghosts of days forgotten,
Tragedies unseen, unspoken,
Wait in the past’s proud flesh,
And nothing can shake them off.

Before Seth began a discussion of dreams, and as a preliminary, he explained the natural mobility of human consciousness and outlined the main features of the “interior universe” that could be glimpsed in both waking and dream states and which underlie physical reality. This introduction offers a natural pathway into the area of dreams (part of the interior universe) and to the other states of consciousness possible within the dream framework. The first portion of this book will therefore deal with this material and with our first explorations into that inner reality.