“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.’

In closing, Sue added: “Of course, the dream itself was only the impetus. My inner self knew what to do all along. Maybe it had just forgotten how to keep a neat file!”

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.)

But beneath the sophisticated gestalt are the simpler foundations of its being and, indeed, the very acceptance of all stimuli without which identity would be impossible. Without this acquiescence, the physical structure would never maintain itself, for the atoms and molecules within it constantly accept painful stimuli and suffer even their own destruction. They are aware of their own separateness within action and of their reality within it.

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.”

We have not spoken about the inner senses in some time. By now, you should realize that they have an electromagnetic reality also and that the mental enzymes act as sparks, setting off inner reactions. In the dream state, these reactions are easily triggered. This is the result of the lowering of egotistical guards, for the ego sets up controls that act as resistances to various inner channels [during the waking state]. …

I lay there, aware of a growing disquiet. Suddenly I realized that I was hearing voices, but they seemed to come from inside my head. They grew steadily louder and louder. I was certain that I was still awake. The voices rose. I felt as if a radio was turned on full volume in my head, but with stations scrambled — for I could make no sense out of what was said. Instead, I seemed to hear fragments of conversations. Really frightened, I shook my head and looked about the room.

Everything was normal. The morning was still dark and dismal, the gray light of outdoors visible through the blinds. But the voices were definitely booming now. Desperately I tried to find their source. Then I realized that a transistor radio was blaring from the bedside table. I turned it off. It didn’t occur to me that in reality, we had no such radio in the house. To my complete bewilderment, the voice continued. Then I “remembered” that there was another radio in Rob’s studio. Surely the voices were coming from there! I leaped out of bed and rushed to the studio. There was the radio. Quickly I reached to turn it off and received a bad electric shock. Not only that, but the voices had actually doubled in volume.

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.

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:

In the dream, then, he goes into his own room. He has consciously forgotten this part, covering it with a vague reference to an electrical storm. In the dream itself, however, he discovers that his ability is as much a part of him as breath and can’t be turned off and on at will. There is an electric storm. He stands in the middle of the room, touched by vibrating currents. Though he is afraid, he realizes that he is part of the storm — it is not destructive but creative and, most of all, a simple elemental part of reality. This second realization makes the second dream possible, with its therapeutic elements.

In dreams, you give freedom to actions that cannot adequately be expressed within the confines of normal waking reality. If the personality handles his dream activities capably, then problem actions find release in dreams. When the ego is too rigid, it will even attempt to censor dreams, however … and freedom of action is not entirely permitted, even in the dream condition.

When the aggressiveness is released through a dream, there will be no need for a victim. We do not want an individual to suggest a dream situation in which he is attacking another person. There are several reasons for this, both telepathic realities which you do not yet understand and guilt patterns which would be unavoidable. …

Again, if the personality is fairly well balanced, then his existence in dream reality will reinforce his physical existence. You are involved in a juggling of realities. It is necessary to see the personality as it operates within both, if you are interested in understanding its whole experience.