“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Now as to the York Beach images. Here aggressive and destructive energies were unconsciously projected outward, given a pseudo-reality and temporary physical validity. The emotional charge provides the pattern and impetus for such creations. According to the extent of physical reality to be achieved, the physical body of the originator transfers or transposes portions of its own chemical structure. Proteins are used, and there is a high carbohydrate loss.

“In the same way that the body’s proteins and chemicals can be used to form various kinds of images, they may also be utilized to form an ulcer, goiter, or to affect other changes [in the body itself]. Here particular emotions are denied, dissociated. The individual does not want to accept them as a part of the self. Instead of projecting them outward as you did in the York Beach images, they are directed to a specific area of the body, or in other cases allowed to wander, traveling troublemakers, so to speak, through the body’s physical system.”

By the time Seth gave us this information, we had the background to understand it. In his discussions on health, Seth has always maintained that illness is often the result of dissociated and inhibited emotions. The psyche attempts to get rid of them by projecting them into a specific area of the body; in the case of ulcers, the diverted energy goes into the actual production of the ulcer itself. If really large areas of the self are inhibited, a secondary personality can be formed, grouped about those qualities distrusted and denied by the primary ego, and usually opposed to it. In other instances, the inhibited emotions can be projected outward into other persons, or as in the case of the York Beach images, very charged repressed energy can actually form pseudophysical images which present the personality with the physically materialized image of his fears.

Then, however, all of this was new to us. For all I knew, Seth was a secondary personality himself, and at this point we could have dropped the sessions. Though we found them intriguing, we certainly weren’t convinced that Seth was someone who had survived death. Most likely, we thought, he was a very lively portion of my own subconscious. By now we’d done enough reading to worry about the secondary personality angle. There was no evidence of excessive emotionalism in the material, though: no repressed hates, prejudices, or desires. Seth made no demands of any kind upon either of us.