“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Remember what I said earlier, that we form physical reality as a replica of our inner ideas. This is a major premise of the Seth Material. Joan literally disliked everyone with few exceptions. She was convinced, furthermore, that she was unliked and unlikable. She felt persecuted, sure that people were talking or gossiping about her when her back was turned—because this was precisely what she did. Daily life contained all kinds of threats for her, and she kept her nervous system in a constant state of stress. Her body defenses were lowered. She was tired of the constant battle, never realizing that much of the war was one-sided and unwarranted. She projected her ideas of reality outward, and they literally led her to destruction.

“If you think, ‘I have a headache,’ and if you do not replace this suggestion by a positive one, then you are automatically suggesting that the body set up those conditions that will result in the continuation of the malady. I will give you a commercial that is better than your Excedrin, you see, the short headache. I will tell you how to have none at all.” This was the only touch of humor in the whole session. In a session devoted to a particular person, Seth usually goes out of his way to make a few jovial comments to set the person at his or her ease.

“In this way you are no longer suggesting that the body reproduce the headache conditions. The exercise may be repeated.”

Now Seth, through my eyes, stared around the room. Someone picked my glasses up and put them on the coffee table. (As I mentioned before, when Seth comes through, he always takes my glasses off, and often flings them rather grandly upon the rug.) The lights were on, as always. He faced the group and said emphatically, “You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You have emotions. You have thoughts as you have eggs for breakfast, but you are not the eggs, and you are not your emotions. You are as independent of your thoughts and emotions as you are of the bacon and eggs. You use the bacon and eggs in your physical composition, and you use your thoughts and emotions in your mental composition. Surely you do not identify with a piece of bacon? Then do not identify with your thoughts and emotions. When you set up barriers and doors, then you enclose emotions within you ... as if you stored up tons of bacon in your refrigerator and then wondered why there was room for nothing else.”

“Each of you in your way contribute. For you can consider the body of the earth and all that you know . . . the trees, the seasons, and the skies, to some extent as your own contribution . . . the combination of spontaneity and discipline that gives fruit to the earth.”

All of nature operates spontaneously. Our bodies will be healthy automatically if we do not project false ideas upon them.

Over and over again Seth tells us that physical symptoms are communications from the inner self, indications that we are making mental errors of one kind or another. He compares the body in one session to a sculpture “never really completed, the inner self trying out various techniques on its test piece. The results are not always of the best, but the sculptor is independent of his product and knows there will be others.”

You can even continue some symptoms after death. For example, Miss C, who lived in our apartment house, finally died of hardening of the arteries. One night I found myself out of my own body in a strange house—strange because while it was extremely old-fashioned, somehow it looked brand-new. Miss C was just going out the door as I arrived. She was very distracted. Suddenly I “knew” that the house was an hallucination she had created, a replica of her childhood home, and I knew that she did not realize she was dead.

I’d read about such instances, but I have to admit that I thought they were highly imaginative accounts until I found myself guiding Miss C. The point is that she was so frightened of death, she didn’t realize it was all over. Since her physical body was quite dead, she was in her astral body; yet she was acting confused, and her mind was still unclear, as if she still had hardening of the arteries.

According to Seth, during our reincarnational existences we are to realize that we project our thoughts and emotions outward to form reality. When you realize, for example, that ill health is the projection of distorted ideas outward onto the body, then you work to clear up the inner problems. This realization can cure even illnesses that are related to past lives. Since Seth says these existences are actually lived spontaneously, then these “parallel” selves exist in us now, and we can reach them through therapy.

“You should desire good health because it is a natural state of your being. You should trust in the innate intelligence of your own being. Health is its natural state. Through your physical image the energy of the universe expresses itself. You, as an individual, as individualized consciousness, are a part of this, and you cannot express yourself fully, nor fulfill your purpose as an identity if you are not in good health. For the effects of the body are felt in the mind, and the mind’s effects are felt in the body.”