“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.

(Long pause, then very intently:) We will return to the subject of war later on. I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics.” He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival—but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experiences with it, in that fashion.

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.

“You wanted some affirmation of your body’s vitality, of its resilience and recuperative energies. You also wanted some reassurance that you could operate as an artist as long as you chose in this life. You used the incident of the optometrist’s notice to give yourself a very fine lesson, for in the back of your mind you did indeed worry and wonder that your eyes were becoming tired. Under usual circumstances, those “symptoms” would be interpreted as signs of difficulty. You discovered instead that the so-called symptoms are signs that your glasses have become too strong because your eyesight has not simply held its own, but most remarkably improved, and in a way this is medically demonstrable.