“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The situation can be serious in varying degrees, according to the impetus and intensity of the original cause behind the illness. If the impetus is powerful, then the impeding action will be of more serious nature, blocking huge reserves of energy for its own purposes. It obviously becomes part of the personality’s psychological structure, the physical, electrical and chemical structures, invading to some extent even the dream system.

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.

In this particular session, Seth is describing illness as a part of action, but, as he makes clear, this is not meant to imply any negation of psychological or psychic values. The nature of action, however, is important, for Seth states,

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.

The individual would not necessarily remember such a dream. Psychologically, however, such an experience would be valid, and the dependency expressed. I cannot stress this too strongly: To the inner self, the dream experience is as real as any other experience.

Both psychological and physical illnesses could largely be avoided through dream therapy. Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could also be given freedom in the dream condition. Through such therapy, actions would be allowed greater spontaneity. In the case of the release of aggressiveness, the individual involved would experience this within the dream state and hurt no one. Suggestions could also be given so that he learned to understand the aggressiveness through watching himself while in the dream state.

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].