“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Ever since she began dictating Mass Events for Seth, Jane has felt like having book sessions but once a week — on Monday nights — and doing other things in between. So she’s been working on her own James, writing poetry, painting, and helping me out with Seth’s Psyche by doing some of the work I usually do when he’s finished a book: typing sessions for the manuscript, checking my rough notes, rewriting some of them and making suggestions about others. But with all of this, she’s been refreshing her physical and creative selves by simply enjoying the day-by-day magical ripening of another spring.)

Give us a moment… Your sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to you to have no reality outside of their relationship with you. Those organs are themselves composed of atoms and molecules with their own consciousnesses. They have, then, their own states of sensation and cognition. They work for you, allowing you to perceive physical reality.

You perceive your body as solid. Again, the very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh. All other objects that you perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.

The physical world that you recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are “plastic,” in that while they exist, their final form is a matter of probabilities directed by consciousness. Your senses perceive these patterns in their own ways. The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions. There is something out there (humorously emphatic) to observe.

(As he had during the 801st session, our cat, Billy, roused himself from a snooze and walked over to Jane. This time he jumped up into her lap, then positioned himself with his forelegs against her chest while examining her face. Jane, as Seth, petted him. I called Billy to me. He perched briefly on my own lap, then curled up on the cushion beside me.

Now: The physical planet is obviously also ever-changing while it is operationally or realistically or pragmatically relatively stable. The physical matter of the planet is also composed of literally infinite hordes of consciousnesses — each experiencing its own reality while adding to the overall cooperative venture.

The sculptor’s creation is pragmatically realistic, in that it exists as an object, and can be quite legitimately perceived, as can your world. The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities. These patterns are not themselves inactive. They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized (with a hyphen). Behind all realities there are mental states. These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those you recognize.

It is easy for you to see that seeds bring forth the fruit of the earth, each [of] their own kind. No seed is identical to any other, yet generally speaking there are species that serve to unite them. You do not mistake an orange for a grape. In the same way ideas or thoughts form general patterns, bringing forth in your world certain kinds of events. In this respect your thoughts and feelings “seed” physical reality, bringing forth materializations.

That identification often brings about in death — but not always — an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience,” where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time.”

(Long pause.) In that regard also, the activities of the inner environment are too fast for you to follow intellectually. Your intuitions, however, can give you clues to such behavior. A country is responsible for its own droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes — and for its own harvests and rich display of products, its industry and cultural achievements, and each of these elements is related to each other one.

Excellence will show itself through the arts, cultural creativity, technological or sociological accomplishments. The species tries to fulfill its great capacities. Each physical body in its own way is like the world. It has its own defenses and abilities, and each portion of it strives for a quality of existence that will bring to the smallest parts of it the spiritual and biological fulfillment of its own nature.

But nowhere do we see anything about any spiritual dilemmas that may be involved with all of this, or about the enormous social problems — challenges, to be sure — that could soon begin to manifest themselves if anything even approaching “eternal life” comes within the reach of numbers of people. Think of the legalities alone involved. (People might even have to change their marriage vows!) Science-fiction ideas abound. What about population control? What about those who want to live on, but can’t afford to? How will decisions be made about who receives the favored treatment and who doesn’t? Will families qualify, or just individuals? Geniuses or dolts? If the services necessary to extend life are free — paid for by the government, that is — will government decide that certain families simply cannot be allowed to have children, that they’ll be left to die out? In view of our present world challenges, it might even be said that there are already too many people in the world. And what about animals and other forms of life? Perhaps in their own collective wisdom the animals will look upon us as though we’ve altogether given up our powers of intuitive understanding.

Right now I’d bet that man will most certainly try with all of his might every technique he can devise in order to prolong physical life as long as possible — so great is his conscious fear of death as the consummate extinction for all time to come. Through all of his recorded history, man has created that fear, that belief, with the greatest tenacity imaginable.

As for Jane and me, we really don’t think it necessary that we live forever physically, or even to be 200 years old — an attitude that may be no more than a sign of our own conditioning. We may even be a little sad and jealous that we chose to be born a few decades too soon. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the age of 100, though, if I were in good shape,” Jane said as we discussed this note. Those of approaching generations, we thought, may have no hesitation at all about opting to live as long as possible. At least for a while, consciousness would accommodate them very well. The final irony of all may develop, however: Jane added that the suicide rate would rise considerably after the many implications associated with extended lifetimes began to penetrate human consciousness. People, she said, at last openly recognizing the great necessity and desirability of biological death, would in many instances simply “turn themselves off.”

2. Seth and Jane have both referred to faster-than-light effects in earlier books. Seth did so while discussing his CU’s, or units of consciousness, for instance. Albert Einstein, in his special theory of relativity, demonstrated that nothing else in the universe can quite reach — let alone surpass — the speed of light. Some physicists have theorized about certain faster-than-light “particles,” however, that by some unknown process are created traveling at such enormous velocities; thus in that way they try to get around the limits set by Einstein. There have also been recent astronomical observations of several far-distant objects that appear to be “superluminous,” or traveling considerably faster than the speed of light. These effects have yet to be satisfactorily explained.