“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a fashion (underlined), it was a great creative and yet cosmic game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique. Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in your terms. Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being (intently). That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality—a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree (underlined) immersed.³ Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity (softly), the full capacity for the development of language—a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.

The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts. (Louder:) He will grow the flower of the intellect—a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

[...] He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements—a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. [...] He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

[...] He was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him toward his own greatest development, to his own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he also helped to bring about the highest potentials of all of the other species of consciousness (intently). His natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him in just such a direction, so that he sought what was the best for himself and for others.

2. Today is day 95 of the taking of the American hostages in Iran (on November 4, 1979). Any expectations that our country had of the hostages’ early release have long since dissipated. [...] Obviously, on an even larger scale of activity, the consciousnesses of all the nations of our world contribute to the challenges and dilemmas swirling around the Iranian situation.

[Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue—but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form. [...] He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge. [...]

3. At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. [...]

1. Yesterday Jane finished typing the final draft of Chapter 2 for God of Jane. All of her work on the book is still plastic, however. [...]

Personally, I like to have all the hard preliminary work done before I start typing a manuscript, so that I can race right through it with few changes.