“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In dismay, I heard Rob snoring. In any case, I wasn’t in my physical body, and he probably wouldn’t know anything was wrong anyhow. And where was Seth? Where were all those “guides” who were supposed to come running to your aid when you got in predicaments like this? All these thoughts went scurrying through my mind as I tried to fight this thing off. I was very conscious of the creature’s weight, which was really amazing, and its intent—which was to maul me up as much as possible, if not to kill me outright.

The next night we had our regular Wednesday night Seth session. Before I tell you what Seth had to say about this incident, a little backtracking is in order. I’d been depressed for several days before the incident, brooding (though I should know better) on the negative attitudes that sometimes seem to surround us. Worse, I recognized many of them in myself: resentments, fears, and anger.

Now Seth said: “Our friend [meaning me] attempted to choose a different battlefield last night. He decided to think of all negative feelings as enemies, and to give them form in another plane of reality where he could do battle with them. This was not an astral plane, but a lower one.

Seth went on to say: “The evil that Ruburt imagined he was projecting outward does not exist, but because he believed it did, he formed the materialization from his fears. It was the shape of his recent depression. In larger terms, there is no evil, only your own lack of perception, but I know this is difficult for you to accept.

In a sort of backhanded compliment, Seth asked Rob to tell me that my abilities were improving—it was a well-made thought-form. Now, I don’t propose for a moment that any of my readers attempt such a foolhardy venture. But I do suggest that perhaps some of them have already done so without knowing it, waking only with the memory of a particularly bad nightmare.

Seth offers some evocative suggestions as to how dreams can be used as direct therapy, and some of his concepts could be of great aid in self-help programs and in psychotherapy.

Seth says quite firmly: “There are other considerations that must be understood. … When aggressiveness is the problem, for example, the preliminary dream suggestion should include a statement that the aggression will not be directed against a particular person. In all cases, it is the intangible element [aggressiveness, here] that is the problem, and not the person against whom the individual may want to vent it.

Over and over Seth says that a dream or imaginative experience is as real as any waking event. If you have a period of depression, you are apt to have depressing dreams during the same period. But Seth suggests the following exercise as a dream therapy: before sleep, suggest to yourself that you will have a pleasant or joyful dream that will completely restore your good spirits and vitality. Unless the depression is very deep-seated, it will be broken or greatly weakened when you awaken.

While all of this is of practical interest, Rob and I are even more intrigued by Seth’s explanation of dream reality. Since I’ve had many out-of-body experiences from the dream state, I was rather concerned about the reality of the environments in which I found myself. Seth began his discussions on the nature of dream reality very soon after the sessions began, and they still continue. Until I learned from Seth to “monitor” my own dreams, and awaken my critical faculties, I was simply astounded by some of his statements.

Seth calls dream-created personalities (such as my “black thing”), dual-hybrid constructions. In my case, the “expansion” he’s speaking of occurred as I formed it with my own psychic energy. The “contraction” took place as I withdrew the main energy of my attention from it; but I could not take back the energy that I had given it that resulted in its existence. The creature continued to exist, but not in my dimension; it was set free on its own.

Still speaking of dreams, Seth says: “Energy projected into any kind of construction, psychic or physical, cannot be recalled, but must follow the laws of the particular form into which it has been for the moment molded. Therefore, when the dreamer contracts his multi-realistic objects backward, ending for himself the dream he has constructed, he ends it for himself only. The reality of the dream continues.”

The energy, as Seth explains it, can be transformed, but not annihilated.

Seth has answered many questions that were in Rob’s mind, and are probably in your own. How is it that ordinary daily life seems much more real to us than any dream existence? And if such a universe is valid, why doesn’t it intrude on our daily life even more? At least we all more or less agree on what happens physically, but dreams are highly individual. How can there be any continuity to a dream universe? Within such a universe, how could anyone possibly agree with anyone else as to what was happening?

“First of all,” Seth said, “the physical universe itself is a conglomeration of diverse individualistic symbols, none of which means precisely the same thing to any two individuals, and in which even so-called basic qualities like color and placement in space cannot be relied upon. You merely focus upon the similarities. Telepathy could be called the glue that holds the physical universe in precarious position, so that you can agree on the existence and properties of objects. …

One reason, I think, that dreams seem so chaotic and meaningless at times is simply that we only remember dim fragments of them and forget the unifying factors. Another reason is that dreams have an intuitive, associative “logic” that has to be interpreted, and in which time, as we know it, has little meaning. According to Seth, some dreams are simple enough, dealing with unresolved present problems or events. Even in these, however, the dream event may also represent events from past lives.

We asked about the dream in the next Seth session. Seth told me that it referred to my death as a medium in Boston in the last century. He had given us some information about this life in previous sessions, and now he told me that I wouldn’t again die of cancer (a mistake in tactics on his part, since he had long ago told me to give up cigarettes, and I haven’t complied. He has never tried to bully me into giving up the habit, merely saying that it didn’t help my overall health or development).

The other dream was even more vivid, and really enjoyable. I don’t know when I’ve had such a great time—certainly not in waking life. On Seth’s suggestion, I told myself before sleep that I would have a dream that would give me further information about my own reincarnational past. At this time I really didn’t believe in reincarnation, but I said to Rob, “Well, what have I got to lose? I’ll try it.” Then I gave myself the suggestion several times and fell asleep.

Early in our sessions, Seth said that he once had a Turkish existence, but we have no information on one for us. We have all kinds of gaps to be filled in on our own past lives, however, because as long as I refused to accept reincarnation, I asked Rob not to ask for reincarnational material. Also, I became so upset when Seth gave such data that he probably thought it best to discontinue it for a while. When Seth is involved with a block of sessions on one subject, we hate to upset the continuity of the material by asking him to go into something else, and besides, we’ve learned that Seth eventually answers as many of our questions as possible.

The Turkish life was the only colorful past life I’ve had to my present knowledge. The Boston life was ordinary enough, according to what Seth said. I made no big splash as a medium, and gave sittings in order to help others and help pay the rent. I was quite undisciplined, however, and flighty—personality defects that I am trying to correct in this life. This dream, I believe, was to remind me that I had once been in a position of authority, and should not now be afraid of responsibility, or of my abilities. Seth insists that many people have dreams that give them information about past lives, but often they do not remember them simply because they do not realize the importance of dreams in general.

But what about that location, the Turkish hall? How real was it? How real are the places we seem to visit while we sleep? Here’s what Seth has to say: “You think that you are conscious only when you are awake. You assume yourselves to be unconscious when you sleep. The dice are indeed loaded on the side of the waking mind. But pretend for a moment that you are looking at this situation from the other side.

This does not mean that we do not sometimes leave our bodies and travel in our dream or astral bodies to other physical locations. According to Seth we do so often, whether or not we remember. Some of my students, for example, have frequent out-of-body experiences from both the waking and the dream states, and on several such occasions we seem to have met in my living room.

Seth told us that this was possible long before I had any such experiences on my own and before I had read about them. But his ideas of the interrelationship between waking and dream reality are fascinating.

Seth is not saying here that the Crucifixion was “just a dream.” He is saying that though it did not occur historically, it did happen within another reality and emerged into history as an idea rather than a physical event—an idea that changed civilization. (According to Seth, of course, an idea is an event, whether physically materialized or not.)

Seth goes on to say: “The Ascension [of Christ] did not occur in time as you know it. It is also a contribution of the universe of dreams to your physical system, representing the knowledge that man is independent of physical matter. …

Some Seth sessions tell us precisely how we form dreams, what chemicals are built up during waking consciousness and then released in dream-making, and others deal with the electromagnetic composition of dream reality. But all through is the insistence upon what we would call, I suppose, the “objectivity” of dream life.

Seth gave us instructions first in dream recall. Following this, he told us how to awaken our critical faculties while we were dreaming, and how to project our consciousness out of our bodies, using a dream as a sort of launching pad. I was always delighted to try any experiments Seth suggested, and I still am. The resulting personal experience gave me subjective evidence of the validity of many of Seth’s concepts; besides, I like to do things on my own.

Naturally we asked Seth about the experience. He was giving us general information about the conditions we could expect to meet in projections from the dream state.

Whole blocks of sessions deal with the methods used and the conditions that can be met in projections of consciousness from the dream state. Seth says that he has personally assisted me in some of my own projection experiments, but that I have not been aware of his assistance. I’ve never dreamed of Seth, and I find this rather strange. I’ve often awakened, fully alert, in the middle of the night, suddenly conscious that I’ve been giving a kind of Seth session. I can hear Seth’s words going through my head like signals. It’s as if I’m tuning in on a radio broadcast that I’m not supposed to be hearing, because when I start to listen there is a clicking sound in my head, and the “station” turns off. On two occasions I heard enough to know what was being said and to whom the sessions were directed. Later the people involved told me that they dreamed that Seth was speaking to them through me on the same nights as my experiences. I had said nothing to them; they volunteered the information.

According to Seth, we do have shared dreams or mass dreams. These actually act as a stabilizing force in our daily lives. Are our dreams private? Apparently not nearly as private as we suppose. In the 254th session Seth had this to say: “In certain areas of mass, shared dreams, collective mankind deals with problems of his political and social structure. The solutions he reaches within dream reality are not always the same as those he accepts in the physical world.

In this session Seth also mentioned John F. Kennedy, and had some comments to make connecting racial problems with dreams. “As you know, many people dreamed of Jack Kennedy’s death in advance. On one level the knowledge was available to the man himself. This does not mean that the death had to occur. It was a vivid possibility. It was also one of many solutions to several problems. While it was not the most suitable solution, it was the closest man could come at that particular time in physical reality. …”

Seth went on to say that the emotional intensity of a dream is very seldom recalled in its full strength. Then, briefly, he mentioned mass dreams as a way of bringing about historical change.

I could write several books dealing with dreams alone, as Seth explains them. According to the Seth Material, our psychic development and growth, learning processes and experience, are all involved with our dream life. In it we visit other levels of existence, and even gain needed skills. There are definite electromagnetic and chemical connections that unite our stages of consciousness at such times, and he goes into detail about them.

According to Seth there are many other systems of reality in which we operate, all unknown to the waking ego. Not only are there universal systems composed of matter and antimatter, but there are an infinite variety of realities in between. Apparently there are also “probable realities,” in which we follow paths we may have taken, but did not, in physical life.

Seth says: “The dream experience is felt directly by the inner self. Dreams have an electric actuality, as I told you. In this [electric actuality] they not only exist independently of the dreamer, but they have what you might call tangible form, though not in the form of matter as you are familiar with it.”

Seth told us many times that all experience is electrically coded within our cells but not dependent upon them. And this also applies to dream experience. He goes on to say: “A man’s thoughts and dreams are far more reaching than he knows. They exist in more dimensions; they affect worlds of which he is unaware. They are as concrete, in effect, as any building. They appear in many guises within many systems, and once created cannot be withdrawn. …

In other words, our dreams attain a certain immortality of their own, along with our personalities. Seth makes this clear: “Each individual from birth forms his own counterpart from built-up, individual, continuous electrical signals that include his dreams, thoughts, desires, and experiences. At physical death his personality then exists detached from its physical form.”