“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(By 8:40 the guests had not arrived, and Jane was up from her nap. Before laying down she had instructed her subconscious to inform her as to whether we would have witnesses, but upon arising she still had no answer. Jane then expressed a desire to obtain in the future as firm a commitment from witnesses as possible, well in advance of the session in question. Since we do not have a telephone last-minute verification is difficult, and we may have a phone installed.

(After supper Jane had read the two dreams quoted previously involving my father. My dream notebook lay open on the table. As session time approached Jane no longer felt nervous. I could tell however that she was somewhat tired, and when she began delivery I thought her voice had a peculiar, flat, expressionless quality that could be the result of fatigue. She spoke very deliberately, in measured phrases, in a voice somewhat lower than usual, but not loudly, and as though she were giving a lecture before a number of people. Again her glasses were off, her eyes very dark. Her pacing was also quite slow.)

Dreams therefore cannot adequately be understood or probed into on an intellectual level. The results of another kind of investigation may be given to the intellect, which may then be able to register the facts involved, but only with some difficulty since the intellect is bound and determined to study facts in the light of so-called cause and effect, which appears so logical to the intellect, since it deals so often with appearances registered by the outer senses, then trying to interpret them into some kind of order.

The investigation of dreams, then, must be accomplished in or on a subconscious level. In order to study dreams properly you must indeed immerse yourself in that medium in which dreams occur. The intense but limited focus of usual consciousness will itself distort the true nature of dreams, and the ego will hold any such conscious examination of dreams within rigid bonds.

(Break at 9:28. Jane was dissociated as usual. She had begun the session without her glasses but now put them on.

(I would like to remind the reader here that when Seth uses the term “area,” he means what up until recently he has called a “level” of the subconscious. Actually, he states, the subconscious is not neatly divided into levels, but is marvelously intertwined, like a labyrinth. Seth has mentioned this at various times.

They will indeed burst through, or appear through, into the egotistical consciousness if given the opportunity; but the egotistical consciousness cannot go after them. The ego will always erect defenses, but intuitional understanding has always been able to pierce such defenses.

(True. See page 48. At this moment, there also popped to mind the fact that I have a collection of perhaps 30 books on old sailing ships, the sea, pirates, etc. I had not looked at them recently, indeed having begun the collection over ten years ago, before I was married, when I became interested in the subject while doing research for some artwork. But ever since I built up the collection, I’ve insisted on carting it about with us each time we changed location.)

Your dream began with this, but you quickly changed into a masculined interpretation. A ship is thought of as a she. The symbol changed then to a woman: she who carries men within her. Because of the originating area of the dream, you chose the Potter lad’s mother, and she was the connecting image from one area to another. Even in your dream, she carried you in a car from one location to another.

You found out later and felt somewhat at fault. In the dream the lad’s present mother is seen to comfort you, this being a way to relieve the past uneasiness that at a certain subconscious area still lingers. At the time the lad was in his very early thirties, but you were much younger.

You then found yourself, in the dream, wearing pajamas, first though deposited in front of your parent’s home, but not entering. This being a symbolic connection again, a transference not yet into this life, that is not into your parents’ home. But just immediately preceding birth you find yourself in the dream wearing pajamas, entering a theatre, looking for someone.

But though you met both the present Dick and Loren, neither of you knew what your relationship would be in this life. You intended a brother lifelong relationship with the man who is, instead, your father. Hence he passes you by, the bicycle being a symbol of youth. That is, because you imagined that he would be a contemporary in age, you saw him on a bicycle, a child’s method of transportation, but because he was born earlier the vehicle carries him past.

His nod however was a blessing upon you. It was of course the knowledge that he would necessarily die before you will that gave rise to his passing by, but the dream did not involve an immediate clairvoyant knowledge of his death.

Your mother sat in the dream before a higher bar, symbolizing your own inner conviction, based on early rather puritanical bases, that your mother and her actions should be judged, and a child’s natural but unfortunate vindictiveness: “She who has hurt me, particularly if my mother and a female, shall meet justice.” You have her in the dream before the bar of justice.

The other sons are present. On the childlike area of the subconscious you believe your mother mainly responsible for family difficulties. However her defense, which you recognize basically as insincere but superficially correct in this particular instance, was that your father hit her in the chest. You identified with your father, and could not permit, in this dream at any rate, an identification of this kind, since at this childish level you did not blame him and would have wished as a child, to have the power to do the same thing.

You will find such sequences often, and this should be expected. The dream also allowed you to see ahead of time beyond the surface of the situation which did arrive on Sunday, and you were much easier on your father Sunday because the dream tipped you off as to the tactics that your mother would use on one level, and also allowed you to punish yourself and your father symbolically rather than actually, for a violent tendency which is now apparent in him toward her, but is not as readily apparent, but repressed, in yourself.

Had the dream not so prepared you, you may well have struck out verbally at your father most forcibly, in an actual attempt to make him suffer for his own rather restrained violence, because you would have feared and not been able to face its somewhat weaker but still definite latent manifestation in yourself.

(Since Seth had not actually discussed the very beginning of my first long dream, Jane and I spoke of this during break. It was a mistake, for no sooner did the subject come up than Jane began again with but one minute’s rest. As it was, she remained seated at the table, sitting with her eyes closed and her glasses off. Her voice, surprisingly, was quite at ease.)

(End at 10:55. Jane was dissociated as usual. She said that while she was delivering the above material on one level, she also received the thought from Seth “on another level” that she should sleep for three-quarters of an hour after supper on session nights. She has reported this dual reception on a few occasions before, and as before she said she was able to give voice to but one level at a time.

(Thinking the session now over, I then brought up the thought that I suspected a distortion in Seth’s interpretation of the first dream, where he stated that before being born I saw my brother Loren as a woman. I thought I recalled Seth stating many sessions ago that Loren had been three times a man, but never a woman, and had a woman’s life ahead of him.

Because the entity has not expressed but withheld the basic femininity of its nature, it has fed back upon itself so that the overall identity of the entity appears as feminine simply because there is a backlog of those characteristics thought of as feminine.

An entity is composed of what you may call feminine and masculine characteristics, but when all energy is focused into masculine-oriented personalities then a backlog develops, so that the entity is left with only unused, unmanifested, so-far-denied feminine characteristics.