“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But the problem ran deeper than this, as we discovered in class discussion. Like many people, Mrs. Taylor was brought up on a combined emotional porridge of orthodox religion and Freud. In her mind, Freud’s ideas of repressed subconscious material merged with religious teachings of hell and the origin of sin. Actually, she was afraid that dreams would reveal her “lower” instincts. I personally think that these distorted ideas about the nature of the inner self represent the main impediments to dream recall or to any real study of the subjective personality.

Unknown characters within the dream action, persons unknown to you in daily life, should be given careful attention also, and the roles which they play within the dream drama. The primary colors should be noted. It goes without saying now that all dream events should be checked against physical reality so that any clairvoyant elements are clearly checked and recorded. …

With the method I have just given you, you will be able to capture as much of the whole dream experience as any investigators manage to do (in dream-labs) when the awakening is done by a mechanical device or by another person. You will also be gaining excellent discipline and training over your own states of consciousness and this, in itself, will be an important yardstick of progress for you both. …

Now, mankind uses but a portion of its capabilities. When you are well along in these experiments, you will find that you handle them very well, with no draining of energies. Your sleeping hours are already productive. We shall also use them to give you training in the utilization of various stages of consciousness. Added to this, the training will give you valuable insight into the nature of dreams in general, the stages of the subconscious and the inner life of the personality when it is dissociated from its physical environment to some considerable extent.

Peg and Bill Gallagher, friends of ours, attended the next session in which Seth continued with his suggestions for our dream experiments. He started out in a jovial manner: I am indeed glad to see that you are all in such high spirits. For a spirit, I am in a rather high mood myself. Of course, I welcome our Jesuit and cat-lover, as always. (Seth always referred to Bill as “The Jesuit” because of his quick, inquiring mind and to Peg as “the cat-lover,” humorously, because of her strong dislike for cats.) After a few more personal remarks, he launched into the discussion.

All layers of the personality are ‘conscious.’ They simply operate like compartments, so that often one portion of the self is not aware of other portions. As a rule, when you are awake you do not know your sleeping self; you know your neighbor far better, so your sleeping self seems mysterious indeed. When you are awake, as Ruburt himself has written, you cannot find the dream locations that have been so familiar to you only the night before.

There are connections between these two conditions, and there are definite realities that exist in both states, and these are what you are looking for. Only by finding these can you discover the nature of human personality and the nature of reality within which it operates.

If you are thinking in terms of secondary personalities, you can prove nothing one way or another. A secondary personality would also use different gestures. Either way, this would be no proof of my independent nature, but I’m glad to see you’ve been thinking about it.

My answer is that I am an energy personality essence, momentarily in contact with your physical system, in that I am able to operate through Ruburt.

As to facial expression, this again works in the same way, for in this case, matter does matter! Physical expression is again the result of the personality’s characteristic method of manipulating the physical organism. When I operated as such, I had my own way of doing so.

Now and then with Ruburt, to a greater or lesser degree, my own habits therefore show through, for I use his muscles in a different way than he does. But scientifically, this would not be proof of my existence as an independent personality who has survived death. Not that this concerns me, for it does not.

Bill laughed, and shortly later, the session ended. By now I sat down during sessions, and changes had taken place in my trance state so that the personality change was very marked. Rob was used to this, but Bill and Peg attended sessions only infrequently, and to Bill it was a constant source of amazement. Peg took it for granted.

And the ego must have its feet upon solid earth. It is naked and out of its element outside of the normal environment of physical existence. To some extent, its distrust of the dream experience is necessary for the overall balance of the personality. Physical reality is, after all, a rock to which the ego must cling; from it, the ego achieves its prestige and reason for existence. … This provides necessary balance and control, and results in the sturdy anchorage of the personality in the environment in which it must presently survive. You have here one of the main reasons why you must request the subconscious to enable you to recall dreams. The ego would see no reason for such a memory and on general principles attempts to repress them.

This will then allow us to procede into the relationship between the waking and sleeping personality and discover the many ways in which the personality’s aims and goals are not only reflected but sometimes achieved in and through the dream condition.

Usually the dream state is considered from a negative standpoint and compared unfavorably with the waking condition. Emphasis is laid upon those conditions present in the waking state but absent from the dreaming experience. We shall consider those aspects of consciousness which are present in the dream environment and absent in the physical one. No study of human personality can pretend to be thorough that does not take the importance of dream reality into consideration.