“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your condition following your first exercise bout should have showed you how badly you were in need of the treatment. When I suggested that you dissociate I didn’t mean that you should break up in pieces.

At times the ego can hold you in a tight vice, which the dissociation breaks. This is what happened after your exercises. You have been doing very well, for you, in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp and some effects of this nature were starting up again. This is why I suggested that you begin these exercises now. The fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the subconscious vitality like a glacier, and these exercises melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears.

This is an unbending conscious pose of the ego, and not to be confused with the lithe subconscious detachment which is actually warm, flexible and expansive. That is, it can contain within it many elements, acknowledge them but be not affected by bad or negative suggestions or elements.

If you will remember what you know of the trance state, you are for example in a light trance, able to maintain awareness of yourself, your environment and your place in it. You simply behave somewhat differently, not bestirring yourself in any direction unless the suggestion to do so be given you.

The awareness of plant life lies along these lines. In a deep trance there is oblivion afterward, that is the subject though fully aware of what is going on while in deep trance, can remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also like the awareness of a subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not bestir itself in other directions. But like the subject in trance, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time and latent, but they are present.

The awareness is focused along certain lines. The energy is likewise focused. Much of the ability again is suspended as for a subject in a trance, but consciousness is present. Your hybrid plants merely demonstrate this susceptibility to new suggestion which your plant, like your susceptible trance subject, will gladly follow. I will have more to say along this road of thought, but am detoured for just a moment as to which fork to follow.

I suggest that you take a break. I always like to get you well worn in first.

You have already opened up. This does not mean that you became dishonest in your relations with people, merely that you became large enough to contain the knowledge of good and evil in people, and to observe it as part of what is. If you have no objection I will continue, or you may take a break if you suggest.

I would suggest that you keep up a closer correspondence with your younger brother on a personal basis, and I suggest this rather strongly. I would also suggest that you visit your younger brother much more frequently than you have in the past, and indeed that you do not let more than two months go by before you visit him for a weekend. Unlike you and Loren, he does not have a strongly developed ego core to protect him. He is somewhat like a snail without a shell, and could benefit strongly by your affection, shown in a more practical manner.