“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Whether or not Seth actually spoke to Sue in the dream is beside the point here. What is important is that symptoms disappeared as a result of a dream. She had worried about the condition and had requested help from her inner self; the dream was her answer. It’s possible, of course, that Sue’s unconscious adapted an authority figure to get the information about aggression through with greater impact, using Seth as a figurehead. (If you want to believe that Seth is an unconscious production of mine, then you must admit he lends himself rather well to the unconscious purposes of others and possesses a reality to them quite independent of his relationship to me. Later examples will make this clear.)

(And here Seth explains something that many people often wonder about: If illness is detrimental and we know it, then why does poor health linger at times?)

At times, illness is momentarily accepted by the personality as a part of the self, and here lies its danger. It is not just symbolically accepted, and I am not speaking in symbolic terms. The illness is often quite literally accepted by the personality structure as a portion of the self. Once this occurs, a conflict instantly develops. The self does not want to give up a portion of itself, even if that part may be painful or disadvantageous. …

Here we have action knowing itself and realizing its basic indestructability. It has no fear of destruction, for it is also a part of the destruction from which new actions will evolve.

These must be understood not as something apart from the personality, but as a part of the changing personality. Often, they point out the existence of inner problems. Often, they serve temporary functions, leading the personality from other more severe areas of difficulty. I am not saying here that illness is good. I am saying that it is a part of the action of which any personality is composed, and, therefore, it is purposeful and cannot be considered as an alien force that attacks the individual from without.

Here I stopped, dead still. The storm had come. It was pouring outside. Everything inside was strangely silent. The voices suddenly ceased. The whole room seemed to be in a state of waiting — but for what? Completely puzzled, I looked around, trying to get my bearings. And it took some doing. There was no denying the fact that a door had replaced our middle bay window. Curious, I approached and finally threw it open.

Here I found a table and chair set of fine dark wood, and beyond, another spacious apartment. Again I paused: Where had the apartment come from? Then it seemed to me that I had known about it in some dim past and forgotten. Indeed, as I hurried down the hallway I seemed to remember other such apartments also.

The hall opened into a large center area that was used as a clothing store. Preparations were being made for a sale. I recalled that the people here were friends of mine from that same remembered past and that I had visited them before in this same manner. The people saw me, recognized me at once and welcomed me with great joy.

I won’t go into the out-of-body implications of that experience until later in this book; here, I’d like to emphasize, instead, the mood-changing elements of the “dream” and what it meant to me. In the next session, Seth explained it and showed how reincarnational background, present problems and personal symbolism were all used in the dream drama. Portions of the experience were dreams. Others were valid subjective events of a different kind, and the entire production was in response to my suggestions for a mood-changing dream.

He tries again, discovering another radio on your bookcase, Joseph, where our manuscripts are kept. The connection is obvious, for he knows that the Seth Material comes from the same system as the voices. Here he reaches out to turn the radio off and gets a shock; the shock is his realization that the Material itself would cease were he to shut off his abilities. The connection with you is also obvious, since your room is involved. Were he to shut off his abilities as one can turn off a radio, then you would also be deprived.

We are not attempting to substitute dream action for physical action, generally speaking. Here we are speaking of potentially dangerous situations in which an individual shows signs of being unable to cope with these psychological actions through ordinary methods of adaption. No one can deny that a war fought by dreaming men at specified times would be less harmful than a physical war — to return to my flight of fancy. There would be reprecussions, however, that would be unavoidable, [for again, basically, the personality does not differentiate between sleeping and waking events].