“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Tonight, Seth suggested that “portions of this session can be appended to the book,” meaning Dreams, but I found it easier to offer most of his generalized material verbatim while eliminating his information on one of my dreams.)

Your beliefs tell you, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism—a most amazing machine, but a machine (louder), without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion. Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive—or rather, a will-less instinct to survive. To that extent it does admit (underlined) that the machine of the body “intends” to insure its own survival—but a survival which has no meaning beyond itself. And because [the body] is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage.

(To me:) You spoke today, or this evening, about some [world] statesmen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve (pause), but who open new horizons in their later years. They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world’s needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not.

Some in your society feel that the young are kept out of life’s mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily. As a consequence some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable. They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology’s offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father’s footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life’s mainstream. He was needed.

(9:34.) The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming (underlined) exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture. Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality—activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in your society many people never reach that point—or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons….

Your Olympics,² on television, present you with evidence of the great capacity of the young human body. The contrast between the activity of those athletes, however, and the activity of the normal young person is drastic. (Pause.) You believe that the greatest training and discipline must be used to bring about such activity—but that seemingly extraordinary physical ability simply represents the inherent capacities of the human body. In those cases, the athletes through training are finally able to give a glimpse of the body’s spontaneous abilities. The training is necessary because it is believed necessary (all with emphasis).

(9:53.) Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes—that it has a face-saving quality in your society—so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, Jane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal—that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a great-great-grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.

First: “In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze you today—many living to be several hundred years old. This was indeed due to the fact that their knowledge was desperately needed, and their experience. They were held in veneration, and they cast their knowledge into songs and stories that were memorized throughout the years. Beside this, however, their energy was utilized in a different fashion than yours is: They alternated between the waking and dream states, and while asleep they did not age as quickly. Their bodily processes slowed. Although this was true, their dreaming mental processes did not slow down. There was a much greater communication in the dream state, so that some lessons were taught during dreams, while others were taught in the waking condition. There was a greater and greater body of knowledge to be transmitted as physical existence continued, for they did not transmit private knowledge only, but the entire body of knowledge that belonged to the group as a whole.”

Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”

“In brilliant, limpid color: I dreamed that a ship—a freighter colored a warm gray and a rust-red-orange—sank in the ocean. I was underwater, to one side, and viewed everything as an observer. I watched the ship sink on an even keel through the blue-green water to the smooth yellow and tan and brown sandy ocean floor—but instead of settling motionless there the ship began to ‘sail’ or plow its way across the ocean bottom, almost as though it were a car moving along a road. I saw waves of sand gracefully rise up from the bow of the freighter. I saw no people or fish—just the ship, the ocean, and its floor, which was free of obstacles to the ship’s easy passage. The fact that the ship could navigate that way underwater was a revelation to me, and I knew that in some way this boded well for my future. I was very pleased. The colors were beautiful. I’d really like to do a painting of this dream.”