“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you suspect that abundance is somehow spiritually dangerous,⁴ then the king might be captured and punished. All kinds of other events might be involved: groups of people, for example, representing bands of “rampaging” desires. The entire drama would involve the “evolution” of an emotion or belief. In the dream state you set it free and see what will happen to it, how it will develop, where it will go.

The king, for example, may be at one time the symbol of great inner wealth. He may be kingly but poor, signifying the idea that wealth does not necessarily involve physical goods. He might at another time appear as a dictator, cruel and overbearing, where he would represent an entirely different framework of feeling and belief He might show himself as a young monarch, signaling a belief that “youth is king.” At various times in history the same image has been used quite differently. When people are fighting dictatorial monarchs then often the king appears in dreams as a despicable character, to be booted and routed out.

In greater terms, these experiences all occur at once. The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts (and very vividly, too). I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own — but (louder) the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama. You can observe the play, take a role in it, or move in and out of its acts as you prefer. You will use your own private symbols. These represent your psychic shorthand. They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol. Symbols themselves change. If you had before you your entire dream history and could read — as in a book — the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes. The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

(“Well,” I said to Jane after class, as we discussed the Chinese-American situation cited by Seth, “I don’t know about counterpart relationships in other kinds of realities, but it’s certainly obvious that at least some physical counterparts can hate each other …” So the larger self, I thought, would be quite capable of seeking experience through its parts in every way imaginable. [...] Within its great reaches it would transform its counterparts’ actions in ways that were, quite possibly, beyond our emotional and intellectual grasp. [...]

[...] And if an individual strongly disliked a counterpart in another land, wouldn’t this quality of emotion be detrimentally reflected in the person doing the hating?

(In Chapter 19 of Personal Reality, I found this line of Seth’s in the 667th session for May 30, 1973:) For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

Quite literally, the “inner” self forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts …