“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

She always began with one of her fantastically funny sarcastic tales about someone she knew. She had an uncanny ability to sense people’s weak points and make fun of them. For all of that, when she was not sick she had a fine vitality, and a keen, native shrewdness. We played a sort of game: I liked her, but I wasn’t going to be besieged by a barrage of negative thoughts and pessimism for an hour, no matter how wittily presented—and she knew it. The worse part was that she really was funny and it was hard as the devil not to laugh at her, even when I knew I shouldn’t. And she knew this, too. So she would try to see how far she could go before I would call her on it and begin a “mini-lecture,” pointing out that her attitude toward other people was largely responsible for her difficulties.

Later he made a very good point: “If desire for health leads instead to an emphasis upon symptoms to be overcome, you would be better off to avoid all thoughts of health or illness and concentrate in other directions, such as work. Such an emphasis can lead to a focus upon obstacles that stand in the way, and this reinforces the negative condition.”

Now Seth comes to this point, very important in his theories: “This acquiescence to even painful stimuli is a basic part of the nature of consciousness. Action does not differentiate between pleasant, painful, or joyful stimuli. These distinctions come much later, and on another level [here Seth is considering personality as composed of energy or action].

“Unifying principles are groups of actions about which the personality forms itself at any given time. These usually change in a relatively smooth fashion when action is allowed to flow unimpeded. [See how this ties in with Seth’s advice to the students on the value of spontaneity and the difficulties of repression.] These impediments [illnesses] may sometimes then preserve the integrity of the whole psychological system and point out the existence of inner psychic problems. Illness is a portion of the action of which personality is composed and therefore it is purposeful, and cannot be considered as an alien force that invades personality from without. . . .

“In other words, an action cannot be judged as impeding without a thorough knowledge of the actions that result in the makeup of any given personality. This is extremely important. To overlook this point is to risk the adoption of a more severe illness.

“Such illnesses are the end product of a process of discovery. Inner problems are literally brought out where they can be faced, recognized, and conquered, using the symptoms as measuring points of progress. A trial-and-error system is involved, but the inner processes are reflected rather quickly by the physical condition.”

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.