“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For one thing, while pain is unpleasant, it is also a method of familiarizing the self against the edges of quickened consciousness. Any hightened sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, has a stimulating effect upon consciousness to some degree. It is a strong awareness of activity and life. Even when the stimulus may be extremely annoying or humiliatingly unpleasant, certain portions of the psychological framework accept it undiscriminatingly because it is a vivid sensation. This acquiescence to even painful stimuli is a basic part of the nature of consciousness and a necessary one.

A few weeks after the dream, on May 12, 1970, Sue had another therapeutic experience that straddled dreaming and waking reality. She was reading a book on the life of Edgar Cayce when her shoulder began to ache. Suddenly she had the urge to leaf through the book to a paragraph she’d noticed earlier on yoga exercises for bursitic shoulders. As she read this, she heard a loud voice say: ‘Put wet tea bags on it.”

At this point, I began to feel sleepy. ‘Relax,’ the loud voice said. ‘Relax the forefingers. Relax the legs. Allow circulation. Breathe in life. Breathe out poison.’

With that realization, my senses became super-alert. The yard and everything within my vision was significant, alive, super-real — seemingly more real than at any other moment of my life. At the same time, it occured to me that I had lain down at 10:30, and, surely, it was past the half-hour I had given myself. For some reason the clock hadn’t awakened me. I would have to return. All the while, I stood fully conscious and alert out in the yard. Only then did I remember the suggestions I had given myself before lying down. I decided to return to my body at once.

The second dream is one of expansion. The most meaningful level was one in which the many rooms and apartments represented psychic areas of development, endless possibilities that continually open, but possibilities that were based on previous life experiences. There are many aspects of reincarnational data in the dream, all reinforcing the healthy elements of Ruburt’s personality.

Seth’s interpretation was continued in the next (200th) session. He said that the green jacket represented a new ability that had been mine in a past life but which I misused, this new ability was now waiting for me to claim. The people were all persons with who I’d had past life connections. This caused the feelings of rediscovery and joy. Seth said,

If this solution fails, the impeding action will then materialize as a physical illness or undesirable psychological condition. If an individual has strong feelings of dependency that cannot be expressed in daily life, he will express these in dreams. If he does not, then he may develop an illness that allows him to be dependent in physical life. If he is aware of difficulties, however, he may request dreams that will release this feeling.