“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery—or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.

Man does have an instinct and a desire to live, and he has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth. (Pause.) Physically speaking, man’s “purpose” is to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his “purpose” is to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the sources of his being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he is presently unaware. (Pause.) In his thinking, in the quality of his thoughts, in their motion, he is indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man is learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he has taken on many challenges.

(Long pause.) You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well—but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.

In the same fashion man is born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his dreams. In a fashion (underlined), you could almost say that he used language before he consciously understood it (quietly). It is not just that he learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about how the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his drawing was in the same way automatic. You might almost say—almost—that he used the language (pause) “despite himself.” Therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the “word” was seen as coming directly from God.

1. In a simplified account: When I was a youngster my mother took me to see our family optometrist. My parents had known him for years. With the best of intentions, that kindly gentleman put bifocals on me. They weren’t very strong—but once the habit was set I wore glasses without protest for the next 40 years or so. It wasn’t until Jane began coming through with the ideas embodied in the Seth material that I began to question my “need” for glasses. Without being concerned about what I was doing, I began to stop wearing them constantly. The glasses got in the way when I wrote and painted. I had to wear them when driving, though, because my driver’s licence bore an “x” opposite “corrective lenses.” Other than that, I usually put them on only when I felt tired. At the same time, I avoided giving myself the negative suggestion that my eyes still weren’t perfect, even with my improving beliefs.

“I must be doing something right,” I said to Jane as I explained the situation to her. And Seth addressed some very interesting comments to me in the private portion of tonight’s session:

“They [your eyes] have improved because you are indeed learning to relax about yourself more, and the improvement occurs first of all in that area of your main interest—your work—but it represents what is an overall time of regeneration. Your eyes do not exist alone in your head.”