Session 87

SESSION 87 SEPTEMBER 14, 1964 9 PM MONDAY AS SCHEDULED em>(On September 7 Jane had an odd dream. In it she was aware of an old woman, but not of her personal presence, of 83 or 85. The old woman had just died, yet her last day was filled with activity and work. She was a medium, and she passed from life to death with a smooth transition, continuing her work almost without interruption after death. Jane envied her greatly.

(Then, Jane in the same dream found herself in an old persons’ home. She opened the door into a room containing one full-sized bed and another adult, though smaller, bed. Jane’s friend Dee Masters, who had once been director at the gallery where Jane works, and who has been dealt with by Seth at various times, was doing something at an agitator-type washing machine. Jane also fussed with the machine, and a small quantity of water dropped from it onto the floor. Jane then had the feeling that somehow she, Jane, was the old woman who had died.

(On September 9 Jane dreamed that she spoke to two sick men, saying to them, “Don’t worry. The material says I have cancer too.” Meaning the Seth material, of course. Jane said the puzzling thing about this little dream was that in spite of its unpleasant content she felt no sense of alarm or danger or worry, that indeed she spoke to the two men quite cheerfully. She is concerned, though, wondering if the dream might be precognitive.

(Jane was also concerned because of what she considers the poor session of September 9, when she was so affected by outside conditions. She was not nervous before tonight’s session, however.

(Over the weekend Jane’s father and his companion, Midge, stopped by in Elmira on their way to Florida for the winter. Jane wondered if the session tonight might deal with them, yet had no idea of its content to come. She began dictating in a voice somewhat stronger than usual, while pacing briskly. Her eyes were dark.

May I wish you a hearty good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

I have several items that I would like to cover this evening. And first of all, may I mention that I was ready to have a brief session last evening, because of the conditions, and because of the woman’s need.

She would have been helped, and I could have shocked her into dispensing with her self-pity. The woman desperately needs help, and I could have handled her condition.

She would have benefited. I understood the reasons why neither of you wanted such a session. I was not calling one, but was willing to have one in answer to the woman’s need.

I would also have greeted Ruburt’s father, but indeed I was not invited to join the graceful family circle. I would not be one to upset such a quiet gathering. The woman, seriously, has found some comfort with Ruburt’s father, but the personality is in sore trouble, and explosive. I will not devote any more time to this subject now.

Instead I would like to give you some more material dealing with mental enclosures. These are in some respects a different sort of camouflage, a self-formed, artificial and only partial enclosure, a beneficial psychic device within which the inner self momentarily and temporarily gathers and holds and collects as much psychic energy about it as it is capable of receiving, utilizing, and also withstanding. The mental enclosure in most cases is self-limiting then, since it represents a setting up of barriers on all sides but one. But it is limiting only for the ultimate purpose of intense concentration of energy, resulting in a burst or expansion of this energy that has been transformed and pressurized, so to speak, into new patterns.

The side which is open allows free flow of energy from the inner self, but momentarily the outlet for this energy is blocked up. This holding back, this gathering and collection without instant outlet, is one of the natural and constant processes involved not only in the construction of energy into matter, but in the construction of energy into any other form, and it is closely allied to the pause and pulsation that I have mentioned, as atoms and molecules appear and disappear imperceptibly, even while they seem to give continuity to any particular object.

You may consider a mental enclosure in its simplest terms to be somewhat like a cube. The dimensions may vary within, but the furthest side will be represented as open or transparent, the line itself being drawn only for convenience’s sake.

Into the cube then pours psychic energy. The front or foremost line of the cube, like a gate, can open or close; and it points toward the outer world of physical matter. As energy pours into our cube it is momentarily held within it. Mental enzymes help transform the energy into incipient patterns, from which matter, physical matter, can result.

The front gates of our cube then open, freeing the transformed energy. But these front gates represent our subconscious and the signal to open, the permission for the construction of matter and its form, are dependent upon these subconscious gates. Even as incipient matter flows through, the final form is given by the way it brushes through these subconscious gates. It must be born and even shaped, finally, here.

The properties of matter have been given it, that is been given the energy, within the mental enclosure, as indeed the physical properties have been given. And a child is formed in the womb, but may be damaged in the act of passing out.

I suggest your first break.

(Break at 9:30. Jane was fairly well dissociated, and had no sense of being bothered by outside stimuli. However, since it was a cold evening our windows were closed, and the house itself was very quiet. She resumed in the same slightly heavier voice at 9:34.)

Now. Such enclosures are the innermost basis of any consciousness, regardless of the type of consciousness. They could be said to represent the inner psychic form even of the most minute cell.

They represent the necessary pause, though this pause understand on the physical plane is imperceivable. Nevertheless, the mental enclosures allow for a psychic duration in which energy, which is forever flooding, may be shaped to some extent and transformed, either into the properties of matter or into other forms.

We have to some extent touched upon the various ways by which this process is carried out. The process is carried out so quickly as to seem simultaneous on your plane, but the pause and resulting pulsation is always present. This mental enclosure is arbitrary, necessary again, a device used by the self. It would seem to limit the extension of consciousness, and yet it does not.

The dimensions of such mental enclosures are governed by the particular ability of the particular consciousness to receive, withstand and utilize energy. This ability is more or less elastic; that is, the ability can expand, and no rigid rules apply to it in a limiting manner.

Within it will be found the capsule comprehension of which we have spoken earlier. This is an attribute of energy itself in its pure form, and even when it is, so to speak, broken down or individualized, the capsule comprehension is in no way either lessened or simplified.

This point is extremely important. All consciousnesses, therefore, either of a complicated psychic gestalt such as a man or animal, or of simpler gestalts such as an individual cell or molecule, nevertheless operate in and form about themselves mental or psychic enclosures, within which is naturally contained the capsule comprehension which is an attribute of all energy.

And in this mental enclosure, also, the energy which is received is then momentarily held and transformed, either into matter or into other aspects. For the record, you realize that when I speak of consciousnesses I do not refer to that conscious ego, but rather to inner consciousness, that then helps form the material image.

I suggest your break.

(Break at 9:55. Jane was dissociated as usual. She resumed in the same slow manner; her voice was normal now, her pacing very slow. Resume at 10:01.)

This capsule comprehension I call capsule comprehension, since innate comprehension of itself and its workings is part of what you may think of as the fiber or makeup of all energy, regardless of any given particular form that it might take, or regardless of the camouflage it might form of itself.

The comprehension of itself and its workings, being an attribute and everywhere a part of energy, cannot be therefore pointed at, and is in no way distinguishable from energy itself, being a part and not an addition. It is distributed therefore throughout energy, or within it, in much the same way that creative ability is distributed throughout or within, say, a particular personality.

The results of it can be perceived in the actions carried out by a given personality, but as you cannot separate creative ability, or take it out of an individual for examination, so you cannot separate comprehension of itself from energy.

Now. This comprehension, latent in all energy, is not broken up and distributed piecemeal within individualized consciousnesses, but completely contained within as if it were condensed; and indeed it is condensed into a capsule form.

The comprehension is condensed, but the term capsule is merely one that I have chosen. All units of individual consciousness contain this capsule comprehension, and it represents the most minute unit of consciousness about which a mental enclosure, or self, can be constructed. There is no smaller unit , and cannot be, than this.

It is the ability of such a unit of consciousness to utilize or create other forms and dimensions of itself that regulates the dimensions of the mental enclosure and of the effective self. You understand that about this mental or psychic enclosure the other elements of self are constructed, the physical image and its extensions into physical environment. This process, in various fields, continually goes on.

The entity, each entity, was formed in this manner, it in turn sending out its creations in terms of other personalities, and these personalities sending forth their own psychic as well as physical constructions. When I spoke of energy being transformed within the mental enclosure, I mentioned that it was transformed into matter, but also into other constructions.

Certainly all energy does not go into the construction of physical matter, even on the physical level, as you should know; and I have mentioned in the past that dreams are not sterile, but also construct according to the nature of their own properties.

I will here mention Ruburt’s dream, in which he spoke reassuringly to two men who were ill with cancer by telling them that this material said that he too had cancer.

This dream is a sequel to another, in which Ruburt was aware of the death of an old woman who was a medium, and I will need to explain the first dream, that is the earlier one, to make the other dream comprehensible.

In the first dream Ruburt remembered his earlier death. He was a woman medium in Boston, dying at 82 or 83 of cancer. He was not, then, afraid of death, knowing its true nature, and in the surrounding rooms there were other old people. Two in particular were men, dreadfully afraid of death, and both dying of cancer.

(See the details of Jane’s dreams, detailed on page 5. For more data on the immediate past lives of Jane and mine in Boston, before the Civil War, see the 59th session, Volume 2, page 140. Our relationship with Dee Masters, mentioned by Seth in this session, is also dealt with briefly in the 59th session.)

In Ruburt’s second dream he experienced no feeling of dread when he spoke of having cancer, because at the time he was not afraid. He reassured the two. One was a shipyard worker. One was a lawyer in his younger days but due to trouble he died poor.

The second dream was brought on by the memories subconsciously released in the first dream, and the whole memory block, oddly enough, was released by the fact that Ruburt had in the present some difficulty with his monthly periods. It had been on his mind, brought to his consciousness once the possibility of the difficulty as being a cancer symptom.

He threw this thought back to his personal subconscious, but by association it triggered memory of a previous death by cancer, which was then played back through the dream. But even then the reassuring dream came first. In the first dream, he was aware that the woman worked and was constructive until the last, and also that she passed the transition with little personal jolting.

It was only after this dream that the knowledge that the woman had died of cancer was allowed to emerge. The fact that Ruburt experienced in the dream, or following it, no sense of either fateful predestination or even fear, was a tip-off that the dream was not clairvoyant in terms of a future prediction.

He became worried about the dream only much later, because many other dreams have been clairvoyant in that fashion, and he wondered then what distinguished this dream from the others.

I—do you want a break?

(“Yes.”)

I will continue this after.

(Break at 10:40. Jane was fully dissociated—once again far-out, as she says. My writing hand felt little fatigue but I asked for the break because I thought Jane might want it. She said she felt fine. She resumed in the same normal voice at 10:47.)

The men, reassured by Ruburt in the dream, appeared without being old, although the original event of the past life involved men in their 70’s. This was a distortion of the personal subconscious, to add to the seeming separateness of the two dreams.

On a conscious level, even though Ruburt remembered them, there seemed to be nothing to connect them. This is in keeping with the sometimes necessary inclination of the subconscious to block out such knowledge.

A point here: It is not understood at all that the uppermost or personal layer of the subconscious is concerned with maintaining the autocratic control and position of the conscious ego . Its inhibitions always are intended to protect the ego.

I will not extend this session for any length of time. You will find that an analysis of your dreams will further your inner development, and also make your way easier in the outer world. I suggest you keep track of your dreams, Joseph, when possible; and that copies of dreams for which you would like analysis be left on the table before sessions.

There is also a reason why Ruburt saw the former gallery administrator in the old woman dream, immediately after he perceived the old woman dead. I had mentioned that this woman was known to you in previous life. It is for this reason that Ruburt saw her. However, the elements of the dream were disintegrating, and he saw the woman in the form with which he is familiar with her in this life. The washing machine that he saw is an excellent example of subconscious knowledge distortion and fabrication.

He was bound up with you in the past life and what he did not know then, and he knew much, he has picked up telepathically from you, since the washing machine was a visual distortion of the idea of a ship, which he interpreted as a tub. And from tub he leaped to washing machine, filled with water.

This referred to a ship instead on the water, at a time when you crossed the Atlantic and came to Boston. In the dream the tub or washing machine leaked, but only briefly. This referred to a time when a leakage was discovered on the ship. This event, you notice, is even further back in time; and the cancer dream was also, though not so far back in time.

The dream sequence for that group of days involved perception, first, of Ruburt’s actual previous death, and then leaped that same evening back further to much earlier events. The purpose of the whole sequence was reassuring, and in overall nature had to do with the personality’s inner reaction to the season of an approaching winter and the ever symbolic death that it suggests.

On one level then Ruburt was psychically anticipating winter with its symbolism, and he involved you in his concern. The dream said that Ruburt died once and yet lived again, and that as you survived a leaky old ship at one occasion, so would the basic selves always survive.

At the same time the more nearly conscious worries present in everyone were felt by Ruburt in his cancer concern, and the dream said “You have already died of cancer, it will not happen again.” So the dream had meanings on several levels.

There is no point in giving you a superficial analysis, since dreams usually impart knowledge that can be utilized by several levels of the personality; though consciously the information perceived and brought into meaningful context by the subconscious may not be at all comprehensible to the ego, it is nevertheless utilized by the whole personality.

I will here close the session, and wish you pleasant dreams.

(“Good night, Seth.”(End at 11:15. Jane was once again far-out, losing track of the content of the material. We had barely begun to discuss the dream material when she abruptly began dictating again while sitting across from me at the table. Resume at 11:18.)

I would add one remark. In the dream Ruburt said the material told him that he had cancer, because in a previous life he did have clairvoyant knowledge, through his psychic ability, of his future disease; and since his psychic ability has only lately come to light with this material, you can see the connection.

(End at 11:20.)