“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see. Quite literally you see what you want to see; and you see your own thoughts and emotional attitudes materialized in physical form. If changes are to occur, they must be mental and psychic changes. These will be reflected in your environment. Negative, distrustful, fearful, or degrading attitudes toward anyone work against the self.”

“Now, you are not speaking of basic issues,” he said. “You are flying paper dragons to be punctured, but these are not the real dragons. You must learn to listen to the voice of the inner self. It is hardly to be feared. You have allowed the ego to become a counterfeit self, and you take its word because you will not hear the muffled voice that is within it.

“True self-knowledge is indispensable for health or vitality. The recognition of the truth about the self simply means that you must first discover what you think about yourself, subconsciously. If it is a good image, build upon it. If it is a poor one, recognize it as only the opinion you have held of yourself and not as an absolute state.”

We had a new student that evening, and someone made the remark that Seth could be quite stern. Now he said, jokingly, “I have been drastically maligned this evening, and so I come to show our new friend here that I am a jolly fellow. That, at least, was my initial intention. Now it has changed. For I must tell you again that the inner self, acting spontaneously, automatically shows the discipline that you do not as yet understand.”

Again, Seth stared at “the Dean,” but now he spoke to the others in the group. “In the spontaneous working of your nervous system, what do we find? We see here the head of ‘the Dean’ that rests upon his shoulders, and the intellect that demands discipline. And yet all of this rests upon the spontaneous workings of the inner self, and the nervous system of which the intellect knows little. And without that spontaneous discipline, there would be no ego to sit upon the shoulders and demand discipline. . . . Now that I have proven how jovial I am, you may all take a break.”

“All illness is momentarily accepted by the personality as a part of the self, and here lies its danger. It is not just symbolically accepted, and I am not speaking in symbolic terms. An impeding action such as an illness is quite literally accepted by the personality structure, and once this occurs, a conflict develops. The self does not want to give up a portion of itself, even while that portion may be painful or disadvantageous. There are many reasons behind this.

“For one thing, while pain is unpleasant, it is also a method of familiarizing the self against the edges of quickened consciousness. Any heightened sensation, pleasant or not, has a stimulating effect upon consciousness to some degree. Even when the stimulus may be humiliatingly unpleasant, certain portions of the psychological structure accept it indiscriminately because it is a sensation, and a vivid one.”

“Action accepts all stimuli in an affirmative manner. It is only when it becomes compartmented, so to speak, in the highly differentiated consciousness that such refinements occur. I am not saying that unpleasant stimuli will not be felt as unpleasant and reacted against in less self-conscious organisms. I am saying that they will rejoice even in their automatic reaction, because any stimuli and reaction represents sensation, and sensation is a method by which consciousness knows itself.

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.”

He also has some fascinating comments on the relationship of various kinds of symptoms to the inner problems involved. “Do not forget that you are a part of the inner self. It is not using you. You are the portion of it that experiences physical reality. Now, physical illnesses that are not critical but observable—that do not involve, say, loss of a limb or organ— generally represent problems that are in the process of being solved, problems that are “out in the open.’

Seth suggests that self-hypnosis and light trance states be used as ways to uncover inner problems that are causing us difficulty. He also suggests that we simply ask the inner self to make the answer available on a conscious basis. If the inner problems are not discovered, we will simply exchange one set of symptoms for another. Various sessions include specific steps to be taken in these areas and others. Dreams are very important, both in uncovering problems and in providing solutions to them. In fact, I’ll begin the next chapter with Seth’s suggestions on the use of dreams as therapy. The instructions are simple and can be used by anyone.