“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I came into Rob and Jane’s apartment and walked into a Seth session. I sat next to Rob, who was transcribing notes, as usual. Seth (as Jane) turned toward me at once. His voice was almost angry, but not without compassion. ‘Now then, I will tell you what to do,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be communicating with the part of you that uses words.’

Seth would call Sue’s dream a therapeutic one, and he has devoted many sessions to dreams and health and the relationship between them. Before we go into therapeutic dreams, however, it’s necessary to understand the reasons why we adopt symptoms. Are there definite reasons for illnesses? According to Seth, the answer is “yes.”

(Excerpt from Session 164, June 23, 1965)

(This has serious implications. Obviously, the easiest time to cure an illness is before it is accepted as a part of the self-image. Seth goes on in this session to explain some of the other deeper reasons for the continuance of symptoms and our acceptance of them.)

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,

Again, it makes little difference whether Sue’s voices belonged to definite incorporal spirits or whether they were therapeutic hallucinations adapted to impress her conscious mind. The directions and instructions that they gave her worked. We were discussing this in a recent class session when Seth came through and said that he had communicated with Sue during the dream episode.

Seth first spoke of therapeutic dreams in the 198th session for October 13, 1965 — though he insisted from the beginning that the inner self had the ability to cure the body. In this session, he explained exactly how such a dream acted upon the physical system.

Though it was still raining when I got up, I felt great. All I remembered at first was the second part of the experience, and only when this was written down did I recall the frightening earlier episode. I felt so vibrantly alive that there was no doubt in my mind of the “dream’s” therapeutic nature. But how could the first, unpleasant portion be therapeutic? What did it mean? As you’ll see, Seth explained this in the next session and used the opportunity to explain more about health and dreams.

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.

This is what Seth said in Session 199 for October 18, 1965:

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,

Not all dreams of ill health should be taken literally. Often they are symbolic interpretations of your state of mind. You can request another dream that will make clear to you the symbols in the first one. In Session 173, Seth said,