“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In dreams you often personify portions of the self. And meet them as if for the first time. Your Mrs. Patterson represents your own love for your fellow men and fellow women (with gentle emphasis), and expresses a deep compassion for the situation of your species at this time.

Those characteristics are set in the form of an elderly woman whose pace bespeaks wisdom. She has no arms. However, her concern, her love and understanding, are seen only in the expression of her eyes and face. She cannot embrace the world, and so she is armless. Her concern and understanding also have a mental quality, as your own deepest feelings in those regards are expressed through art or writing indirectly, rather than through direct contact with others.

Then give us another moment.... Ruburt’s chain of association gave the name Patterson because of an old song. The [name] Johnson brings in the woman’s sense of strength, and yet says that she is of ordinary heritage—a person of the earth, a powerful person in her way—and the connections with your associations have to do with the late President Johnson. Behind all of his carryings-on there was a strong quality of compassion that he found most difficult to express.

It was created and interpreted according to your own individuality, but it will also remind others that within themselves they possess, each of them, the wisdom, compassion and understanding that exists, whether or not it is expressed in usual terms through physical acts.

(Pause.) Give us a moment.... When the dream gives you such an image, and the image becomes objectified, then you are of course showing a new part of yourself in the physical world, and bringing into expression through your physical hands the emotions that otherwise could not be expressed.

I have just interpreted for Joseph a dream of his, in which he was able to express emotions of a rather profound nature, and I want to stress here that you are above all an expressive (underlined) species.

Your mental world is full of ideas and feelings that surge toward actualization. You have a need to express your self—and I am repeating the word “express” quite purposefully (with a smile). You must feel that you are a self, and that you can express that self in the world that you know.

(A note: I must write that not only was I surprised that Seth opened the session with an analysis of the dream, but that I was even more surprised with the generous connotations he ascribed to it: I may love my fellow man, but often times feel that that feeling is compromised by events in our world, even though I fully acknowledge my own part in helping create that world in the most intimate detail. Seth’s interpretation of my feelings may be too generous. He may also be taking the larger view, as Jane often says he does. On that basis his material may very well express the content of that dream; from that wider viewpoint, I would feel the compassion he describes more openly. Perhaps it’s all another reflection of that curious dichotomy I’ve often felt: One may rail against the world in general, and the behavior of its individuals in particular. Yet as one gets to know each of the individuals in his or her world in particular, it becomes more and more difficult to blame them for the state of the world, or much else for that matter: One becomes too enmeshed with their individuality and humanness. An understanding on a more personal level of the forces in their lives that push and pull them in often conflicting directions makes it very difficult to actively blame people for very much on an individual basis....)

In closed mental environments such expression is vigorously denied, and the very foundations of selfhood are attacked. I will use my own definition of a cult here, saying that a cult exists whenever a group forms a closed, emotionally charged mental environment in which the foundations of individuality are systematically and purposefully undermined.

In such situations you are taught that the self you have is not only flawed, but a facade—a fake self that cannot be trusted, and whose expression must be largely denied. You are told to give up the self to the leader of the group—the guru, the master, the father, the authority by whatever name.

The fundamentalist Christian groups, for all of their fanaticism, at least offer some kind of temporary relief for their believers; they are “saved” through prayer and good works. Many other sects, however, offer no such comfort, as for example the Guyana group. The concentration upon self-betrayal and worldly corruption offers no escape. Expression becomes meaningless under such conditions, not trusting the structure of the self, then the self’s expression is denied. It is feared. Yet the new self never comes—not the promised, overly idealized self that feels a godly love without distinctions. And all good works appear meaningless in the terribly exaggerated picture painted of social and world events.

(Pause.) The concentration upon self-righteousness and evidence of corruption leads to its own fulfillment, and in that dark light the expression of the good appears powerless.

Such groups frown upon the questioning mind. They stress love of mankind, while at the same time cutting down on strong personal affiliations of a loving nature, so that love itself cannot seek its expression in concrete terms. Yet human love specifies, makes distinctions. It focuses with uncanny brilliance upon one individual. Such groups try to defuse that new [true?] focusing. They preach of love while allowing any given individual to love no particular person, and by forcing each individual to cut any bonds of love previously established.