“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(3. “It would be nice if Seth would say something about the dream I had the night before last, in which I think I contacted my [deceased] mother for the second time.” Yesterday I wrote an account of the experience for use in the book I’ve started on my own: Through My Eyes. Seth broached the idea of Through My Eyes in Chapter 6 of Personal Reality. I enjoy working on the project, and have had particularly strong urges to do so since the death of my mother three months ago. In writing about my parents, I discovered that I wrote about my own childhood. See the notes preceding the 679th session; the questions I asked then helped initiate this series of sessions.

(Pause, eyes wide, staring at me.) Now for your dream. You are of course making contact with your mother. She is beginning to stir, as you surmised. Ruburt’s (written) comments about the dream are also pertinent, showing your own caution. None of these encounters have been normally emotional ones, for example, but glimpses in which there was no communication in ordinary terms.

You have the assurance that your mother continues to exist. As far as a relationship is concerned, however, you are looking at her from a distance. She is still wondering — that is, she is able to identify with other portions of you than she was during life. She does not want to frighten you, now, with an emotional display, so distance is being used on both of your parts.⁵

5. This “margin of safety” between my mother and me is beautifully illustrated in my dream of two nights ago. And as if to further reassure my conscious mind, I saw my mother with people who were still “living”; this has been the case in other recent dream experiences I’ve had with her. Here’s the relevant portion of the description I wrote for Through My Eyes: “Then I saw my mother [Stella] between my brother Linden and his wife, all separated each from the other a little bit, all walking obliquely toward me across a featureless plain. Everything was in brilliant color. The three figures were cut off at their waists, as though I saw them on a screen. My mother didn’t speak to me or look directly at me; like the others, she faced just past my left shoulder.

“Linden and his wife were close to their present physical ages in the dream, a year or so younger than I am, at 54, but Stella looked to be a few years younger than she should have been [she died at 81]. I know I created my dream image of her to make our communication understandable to me — yet I felt that she was alive, in our terms and in hers. My mother was obviously in control of her faculties, even though she appeared to be a little distraught … The fact that she looked past me speaks of some sort of barrier, or distance, between us even in the dream state. This could be for my own protection, I think….”