“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One night I had a frightening dream that seemed very real. I found myself in our bedroom, out of my body, and suddenly I realized that someone or something was directly above me. The next minute I was pushed down to the foot of the bed, off into the air, and then down to the dark corner of the bedroom floor. Above me was what I can only describe as a big black thing like a bloated, blurred human form, but larger and very solid.

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.

“Don’t panic,” I told myself, trying desperately to retain some semblance of calm. But the thing pressed down and was about to bite me again. This time I thought, “To hell with not panicking,” and I started to yell my head off. I knew it wasn’t my physical head, but I hoped that my shout would either frighten the creature away or attract some kind of help.

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.

Now that I was safe I was more than a little ashamed of myself for being such a coward, but I wasn’t so complacent that I felt like going right back to sleep, either! So I got up, drank a glass of milk, and thought of all the things I should have done—like saying grandly: “Get thou behind me, Satan,” or some such. The least I could have done, I thought, was bite back.

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.

“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.”

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.

“Consider, for example, a situation in which a personality needs to express dependency, but feels such expression inappropriate. If he is able to form a dream in which he plays a dependent part, then the problem may be solved within the dream state. In many instances, this is precisely what happens. The individual may never recall such a dream, but the experience would be valid and the dependency expressed.

“Much work has been done to interpret dreams, but little to control the direction of activity within them. Upon proper suggestion, this can be an excellent method of therapy. Negative dreams tend to reinforce the negative aspects of the personality, helping to form vicious circles of unfortunate complications. Dream actions can be turned toward fulfilling constructive expectations, which can themselves effect a change for the better.

When I first read this session I thought this was a great way to get rid of your repressions—dream them away! If you’re really furious at someone and don’t dare retaliate, then you can give yourself the suggestion before sleep that in a dream, you’ll really get even. But it isn’t that easy.

Consider this early passage from session 92, which I now accept as basic: “Each dream begins with psychic energy which the individual transforms not into physical matter, but into a reality every bit as functional and real. He forms the idea into a dream object or event with amazing discrimination, so that the dream object itself gains existence and exists in numerous dimensions. …

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.”

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.

“Dream locations are not superimposed upon, say, the bed and chest and chair. They exist composed of the very same atoms and molecules that in the waking state you perceive as bed and chest and chair. Objects, remember, are the results of your perception. From energy you form patterns which you then recognize as objects and use. But the objects are useless unless you are focused within the dimension for which they were specifically formed.

“In some dream states you form from these same atoms and molecules the environment in which you will operate. While dreaming you cannot find the bed or chest or chair; and awake you cannot find the dream location which was there only moments before.”

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.

“There is form within dream reality,” he said, “but form is first of all potential existing within psychic energy. The potential form exists long before its physical materialization. The house that you may live in within five years may not yet exist in your terms. It may not have been built yet, therefore physically you would not perceive it. Still, such a house does have form, and does exist within the Spacious Present.

“Now in certain levels of dream reality, forms such as this can be perceived. Within dream reality you can come into contact with many other kinds of phenomena with which usually you do not have to deal. With the projection experiments you have in mind, this information becomes highly practical. I would like to give you some idea, you see, of what to expect.

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. …

“The electric reality of a dream is decoded, so that its effects are experienced not only by the brain, but in the furthest reaches of the body. Dream experiences, long forgotten consciously, are forever contained as electrically coded data within the cells of the physical organism. … They exist within the cells [along with all an individual’s experience] … The cells form about them. These electrically coded signals form counterparts of complete experience, and the pattern is then independent of physical reality.”

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.”