“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For a minute I was afraid to open my physical eyes. “Boy, if it’s still here, I’ve had it,” I thought. But it was gone. At least it was in another level of existence. I thought of waking Rob to tell him, but decided not to interrupt his sleep.

“The energy behind his ‘black thing’ was the energy of hidden fears, but such a thing could be formed by anyone, since there are fears in any man. Ruburt tried to isolate them, give them form, and fight them all at once. The thing was actually a rather clumsy lower-dimensional animal, a provoked dumb dog of other dimensions who then attacked him, symbolically enough, by biting. Any ‘thing’ so created entirely of fears would be frightened and particularly angry at its creator. It could do nothing but attack to protect whatever reality it had, for it knew Ruburt created it only to slay it, if possible.

“It did have reality, therefore. Ruburt leapt back to safety and normal consciousness. The thing then dissipated [as far as Ruburt was concerned]. For when Ruburt ‘ran home’ he automatically withdrew the energy [of his attention] from it. … Ruburt tried to separate from himself all those elements he considers negative, and fight them at once, almost as if in so doing he could remove evil from the universe.

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.

“But this fact is Ruburt’s safeguard in his out-of-body travels—as long as he remembers it. The words ‘May peace be with you’ will get him through any difficulty in other layers of reality—for as he formed that image, others also form images and he could encounter them. To wish them peace will give them some comfort, for they do have a kind of reality. To fear them is to put yourself into their realm of reality, and then you are forced to fight on their terms. There is no need for this.”

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.

He starts off by saying: “The personality is composed of energy gestalts. As the personality is changed by any experience, it is changed by its dreams; and as an individual is molded by his physical environment to some extent, so is he molded by the dreams which he himself creates. … The self is limitless. When your perceptions fail, it seems to you that boundaries appear. For example, it seems to you that dreams cease when you are no longer aware of them. This is not so.

“Many illnesses could largely be avoided through such dream therapy. Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could be given freedom within the dream state. Suggestions would be given that the individual involved would experience, say, aggressiveness, within a dream. It would also be suggested to him that he learn to understand his aggressions by watching himself while he was dreaming [watching the dream as he would a play]. If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy where wars were fought by sleeping, not waking, nations.”

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.

“Although the dreamer creates his dreams for his own purposes, selecting only those symbols which have meaning to him, he projects them outward in a value fulfillment and psychic expansion. The expansion occurs as the dream is acted out. A contraction occurs as the dreamer is finished with the dream events, but energy cannot be taken back.”

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.”

Each dream object is actually double- or triple-decked, a symbol for other, deeper data. A dream involving reincarnational information, for example, may also serve to help us face a present-day problem by reminding us of other unused abilities inherent in our personalities. I’ve had two particularly vivid reincarnational dreams. One, occurring shortly after our sessions began, really frightened me because I was afraid that it might be precognitive, I dreamed that I was an old woman in a very poor hospital ward of some kind. I was dying of cancer and knew it, but wasn’t a bit frightened. An old man beside me was also about to die. I told him not to worry, that I would be there to help him. Then I died, but there seemed to be no break in consciousness. I helped the old man out of his body and kept telling him that everything was all right.

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).

In this dream Rob and I were both men in our late twenties and partners in the episode. I knew very well that we would “later” end up as Rob and Jane in this life, even though there was no physical resemblance. Rob, for example, was dark and swarthy, although now his skin and hair are both light. We wore long billowing trousers, bound tightly at the ankles, Turkish-style. I do not remember our names.

I stated my case, while they listened politely. Their spokesman told me that their dead leader had promised them that on his return he would perform one particular feat for which he was known to prove his identity. He asked me, then, to show by my actions that I was this personality, ready to take over his rightful position. Rob and I both smiled, having anticipated the test.

Then, in my astral body I went flying through the hall, which had a high-domed ceiling. Laughing at what I considered a great practical joke, I swung low above each man in turn and whisked off his turban. My partner handed me a feather—apparently he could see me clearly, and I could manipulate physical objects. Waving the feather through the air, I flew back and forth again several times so that, watching the feather, the men could follow my progress above them.

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.

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 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.”