“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Upon the blackboard, in this homey analogy, would be written the soul’s earthly experiences. With the eraser the “evil hand” would try to rub out all of the good, and at the same time the “good hand” would be trying to erase all of the evil. In such a case all of your experience becomes suspect. You will have a tendency to consider the body with its natural appetites wrong, and deny them, while at the same time the physical part of you will look upon your “good intents” as wrong, and infringements upon its own existence.

In any case, in your private life you may hardly ever encounter your belief in your own unworth, or evil. You will not realize that you actually consider yourself the enemy. You will be so convinced that your projection (onto others) is the enemy that there will be no slack to take up, for all of your feelings of self-hate or self-fear will be directed outward.

If you take your own world view with you all of the time, however, as you travel, even in your own world, then you never see the “naked culture.” You are always a tourist, taking your homey paraphernalia with you and afraid to give it up. If you are American or English, or European, then when you visit other areas of the world you stay at cosmopolitan hotels. You always see other cultures through your own eyes.

In your sleep, however, your consciousness slips out of your body and returns to it frequently. You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it. You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed. The unknown reality, you see, is not really that mysterious to you. You only pretend that it is. Sometimes you have quite clear perceptions of your journeys, but the actual native territories that you visit are so different from your own world that you try to interpret them as best you can in the light of usual conditions. If you remember such an episode at all it may well seem very confusing, for you will have superimposed your own world view where it does not belong.

Many people, however, remembering a dark dream, become frightened. You even structure your dreams, of course. For that matter, your dream world is as varied as the physical one. Each physical photographer has an idea of what he wants to capture on film, and so to that extent he structures his picture and his view. The same applies to the dream state. You have all kinds of dreams. You can take what you want, so to speak, from dream reality, as basically you take what you want from waking life. For that reason, your dream snapshots will show you the kind of experience that you are choosing from inner reality.

2. When I come across material that puts down the physical body, I sometimes try to counter such negative projections by turning to one of the technological accomplishments of our “degraded” species: I study photographs of minute portions of the human body, taken with a scanning electron microscope. Then I experience a series of steps in thinking — not all of them good, I’m afraid — and I’d like to mention each one in turn.

After tonight’s session, Jane told me that his Practice Element 13 was one of the two she’d had insights on during the night preceding the deleted 717th (James-Jung) session. Practice Element 14 didn’t seem at all familiar to her, though. See Note 1 for Session 718.

5. All in Volume 1: Note 1 for Session 698 contains quotations from the dream material Seth gave in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964. Then see the equally interesting information on dreams in Session 699; I especially like Seth’s statement that “In a way, one remembered dream can be compared to a psychological photograph….” Jane’s poem, My Dreaming Self, is presented in the notes following that session, along with references to other dream material.