“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Reasoning, as you are familiar with it, is the result of mental or psychic processes functioning in a space-time context, and in a particular fashion. To some extent, then, reasoning—again, as you are familiar with it (underlined)—is the result of a lack of available knowledge. You try to “reason things out,” because the answer is not in front of you. If it were, you would “know,” and hence have no need to question.

The reasoning mind is a uniquely human and physical phenomenon. (Long pause.) It depends upon conscious thinking, problem-solving methods, and it is a natural human blossoming, a spectacular mental development in its own framework of activity.

Your technology is one of the results of that reasoning mind. That “reasoning” is necessary, however, because of the lack of a larger, immediate field of knowledge. Thoughts are mental activity, scaled to time and space terms so that they are like mental edifices built to certain dimensions only. Your thoughts make you human (underlined).

(Still slowly at 8:59:) Other creatures have their own kinds of mental activity, however. They also have different kinds of immediate perceptions of reality. All species are united by their participation in emotional states, however. It is not just that all species of life have feeling, but that all participate in dimensions of emotional reality. It has been said that only men have a moral sense, that only men have free will—if indeed free will is possible at all. The word “moral” has endless connotations, of course. Yet animals have their own “morality,” their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. (Pause.) They have loving emotional relationships, complicated societies,³ and in a certain sense at least—an important one—they also have their arts and sciences. But those “arts and sciences” are not based upon reasoning, as you understand it.

(Long pause.) The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative (underlined) psychological face that you use for the purposes of your life’s drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that you mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play’s formal structure. You cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past.

Without the reasoning mind the artist would have no need to paint, for the immediacy of his mental vision would be so instant and blinding, so mentally accomplished, that there would be no need to try any physical rendition of it. So nowhere do I ever mean to demean the qualities or excellence of the reasoning mind as you understand it.

“Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man likes to believe that this is so. Art is above all a natural characteristic. I try to straddle your definitions—but flowers, for example, in a fashion see themselves as their own artistic creations. They have an esthetic appreciation of their own colors—a different kind, of course, than your perception of color. But nature seeks to outdo itself in terms that are most basically artistic, even while those terms may also include quite utilitarian purposes. The natural man, then, is a natural artist. In a sense, painting is man’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his own reality—and by extension to create a new version of reality for his species.”