“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE EVENTS OF “NATURE.”
EPIDEMICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

THE NATURAL BODY AND ITS DEFENSES

(“There is a power of growth and value fulfillment within each individual that must be satisfied. It is the power that makes physical growth possible, the power that is behind the fetus. You know ahead of time the nature of the period into which you will be born. You [Jane and Rob, or Ruburt and Joseph] were both born with certain abilities, and you knew ahead of time that you would have to enlarge the framework of conventional concepts if you were to have room to use those abilities. In a way, they gave you both a second life, for in the old framework there was no satisfying [underlined] or creative way to go.

(“Think of yourselves, in important ways, as almost having been born in 1963 [when these sessions began]. The two of you — for you are both involved — have not only initiated a new framework from which you and others can view the nature of reality more clearly, but you also had to start from scratch, so to speak, to get the material, learn to trust it, and then to apply it to your own lives — even while ‘the facts were not all in yet.’ At no point did you have all of the material to draw upon, as for example, your readers do at any given point. So tell Ruburt not to judge himself too harshly, and in all of this have him try to remember his sense of play….”

(“All creativity is basically joyful. It is play in the highest sense of the term, and it is always alive with motion. The sessions and our work can help bring about a new mental species of men and women. Ideas change the chromosomes, but the sessions and Ruburt’s books, and so forth, must first and foremost be joyful expressions of creativity, spontaneous expressions that fall into their own order…. You paint because you love to paint, and forget what an artist is supposed to be or not to be. Have Ruburt forget what a writer or a psychic is supposed to be or not to be. Ruburt’s spontaneity lets all of his creative abilities emerge. It is foolhardy to try and apply discipline, or secondary order to a spontaneous creativity that automatically gives you the finest order that nature could ever provide.”

(It wasn’t until I was checking the page [or printer’s] proofs for Volume 1 last week that I realized Seth hadn’t followed through on his promise. I’d also forgotten to remind him to do so. I asked Jane if Seth could devote the next session to that subject matter so that I could insert it in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality as a note or an appendix, since I had plenty of work to do yet for that second volume. She agreed; we thought some very interesting material would result. We also thought it was a good time to pose questions for Seth — for just two weeks ago, in the 800th session, he’d finished dictating his own fifth book, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression.²

You cannot begin to understand the nature of mass events of any kind unless you consider the even greater framework in which they have their existence.

The vine of experience in this analogy is formed in quite a natural fashion from “psychic” elements that are as necessary to psychological experience as sun, air, and water are to plants. (Loudly and humorously:) I do not want to get too entwined (underlined) in this analogy, however; but as the individual’s personal experience must be seen in the light of all of these issues, so mass events cannot be understood unless they are considered in a far greater context than usual.

I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual was to be stressed, and his power to form his private events. Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.

Give us a moment… In a way the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of, say, inoculation. But the body’s chemistry is also confused, for it “knows” it is reacting to a disease that is not “a true disease,” but a biologically counterfeit intrusion.

Give us a moment… Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events. Man cannot disentangle himself from the natural context of his physical life. His culture, his religion, his psychologies, and his psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur. (Loudly, then whispering so softly that I could barely hear:) This book will, then, be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.

What is the relationship between the individual and the gigantic mass motions of nature, of government, or even of religion? What about mass conversions? Mass hysteria? Mass healings, mass murder, and the individual? Those are the questions we will devote ourselves to in this book.

It will be called: “The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events.”

(Jane had started doing some typing on the final manuscript for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression a couple of days ago. She was also working on her own The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. Yet I thought she needed the stimulus of Seth having something underway. There was more than a little irony in the situation, for I was the one who’d told her flat out, back in July 1975, that she was going to start Psyche, just so that she’d have a Seth book to play with. [I’d also wanted to see what she and Seth would come up with on demand.] But this time Seth fooled me and started Mass Events only a couple of weeks after finishing Psyche. I was all for it, though, I told Jane enthusiastically. It’s always a pleasure to work on a Seth book, to explore with him his unique view of reality, and to try to put at least a few of his ideas to use in our everyday, “practical” world. I repeated my thought that it didn’t matter how many Seth books she piled up ahead of contract, or publication: That was certainly a more creative and exciting position to be in than if one didn’t have anything ahead. Jane agreed, while still worrying about what we were going to do with all of the material as it accumulated year after year. At this time there’s no way we’re going to see it all published.

(10:39.) We have begun Part 1, to be called: “The Events of ‘Nature.’ Epidemics and Natural Disasters.”

(Then a moment later:) Chapter 1: “The Natural Body and Its Defenses.”

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.

The desire for life has been most flaunted, yet human psychology has seldom dealt with the quite active desire for death. In its natural form this is not a morbid, frightened, neurotic, or cowardly attempt to escape life, but a definite, positive, “healthy” acceleration of the desire for survival, in which the individual strongly wants to leave physical life as once the child wanted to leave the parent’s home.

(11:44.) I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.

(Long pause, one of many.) I will have more to say about suicide, but I do not mean here to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life. In many such cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases.” Period. Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents’ intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.

Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to reexperience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.

1. In the order of their publication the five previous Seth books are: Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul; The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book; Volumes 1 and 2 of the “Unknown” Reality: A Seth Book; and The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression. All of Jane’s books, whether produced with or without Seth, are listed in the frontmatter of Mass Events, with publication dates.

Beginning in June 1974, then, while writing notes and appendixes for Volume 1 of “Unknown”, and taking Seth’s dictation for Volume 2, I spent eight months producing the art work for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness and for her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time; I finished all of those drawings in January 1975. In the meantime Jane completed Adventures in August 1974, and started Psychic Politics that October. In March 1975 we took time out to move from the apartment house in downtown Elmira to our “hill house” just outside the city. Jane finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” for Seth in April 1975, and I started my notes and appendixes for it. In July 1975 Seth began The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, and in December of that year Jane initiated work on her own The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation. She finished Politics in February 1976, and Cézanne in September; Politics was published that September also. I completed my own writing for Volume 1 of “Unknown” in October. Our 16-year-old cat, Willy, died early in November, and two days later we obtained a kitten, Willy Two (or Billy, as we soon came to call him), from an area humane society. I finished typing the manuscript for Volume 1 late in November, spent December checking it, and mailed it to Prentice-Hall early in January 1977.