“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Pause.) While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree (underlined) as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. 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 must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. 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.

But man looked out and felt himself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness. Now he must find food, where before his dream body did not need physical nourishment. Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. Man has to physically procreate. Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division. By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.

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.

(Long pause in a steady, rather fast delivery.) Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can—as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing. The dream body does not die. It exists before and after physical death. In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived—and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

[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. When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge. He became more and more aware of his physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant and some were not. Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

(9:58. After giving a few notes for Jane and me, Seth ended the session at 10:13 P.M. “I can’t remember the session now, but I think I covered everything I got from him yesterday and today,” Jane said.)

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. I can only hint at the enormously complicated situation involving the whole Middle East these days. The generally explosive predicament in Iran, for example, has been considerably aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan over the recent Christmas season: Now the unbending revolutionary government of Iran, following its own fanatical interpretation of the Moslem religion, must contend with at least an implied threat on its eastern border as the godless Russians occupy Afghanistan. Jane and I find it fascinating to think about—to attempt to trace—some of the ways by which the overall consciousness of the United States continually becomes involved with—entwined with—the consciousnesses of adversaries like Russia and Iran: Such consciousnesses, once created, continue to grow and to complicate themselves in new ways within our concept of “time.” 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.

As for the nuclear power generating plant on Three Mile Island, engineers have not yet been able to enter the contaminated containment building housing the reactor—Unit No. 2—which came so close to a meltdown of its uranium fuel rods on March 28, 1979. Such an entry, to gather radiological data, is now planned for this April (1980). To insure the safety of workers, however, over 55,000 curies of radioactive krypton-85 gas will first be vented from the containment building into the atmosphere.

This prospect has already aroused much opposition—it’s another example of the psychological stress placed upon the population of southeastern Pennsylvania. Studies involving the psychology of the fear of nuclear power, irrational and otherwise, are growing, so once again consciousness proliferates and explores itself in new ways: When will a meltdown happen? people ask, even though some of the more than 200 nuclear power plants around the world have operated for more than 20 years now, without a single death caused by radiation. These studies are accompanied by the horde of challenges surrounding the still unresolved, unglamorous disposal of a constantly growing accumulation of nuclear waste products.