“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.)

Environmental questions are being raised about man’s effects upon the world in which he lives. There is, however, an inner environment that connects all consciousnesses that dwell upon your planet, in whatever form. This mental or psychic — or in any case nonphysical — environment is ever in a state of flux and motion. That activity provides you with all exterior phenomena.

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.

All elements of the interior invisible environment work together, and they form the temporal weather patterns that are exteriorized mental states, presenting you locally and en masse, then, with a physical version of man’s emotional states. Period.

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.

A chair is a chair for your purposes. As Ruburt speaks for me he sits in one. As you read this book you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench — all quite sturdy and real. The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though you do not grant them the quality of life. When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air. In that game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles. The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that you perceive as a chair.

You perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion. [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set,” though it appears to be. No one perceives the same chair [all of the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

The dance of the atoms and molecules is continuous in your area. In greater terms, any given chair is never the same chair. All of this must be taken into consideration when we discuss mass events.

Each person’s thoughts flow into that formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all of their variety and effects. You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. You are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles. No one can be born for you, or die for you, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates. In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.

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.”

What grandiose claims these are, however — at least at this time — for Jane and I also read that in the last three-quarters of a century science has managed to bring about an increase of only four years in the life expectancy of the adult white male: from 69 to 73 years. Granted that the medical establishment has learned a lot since 1900, still it’ll have to move awfully fast now to make all of those predictions come true before the year 2000, say.

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.

There’s much irony involved in the whole idea of living indefinitely. If such a possibility is ever achieved, I think that on conscious levels the members of the species will come to fear the chance of accidental death more than anything else, and that this powerful concern may seriously circumscribe behavior. For who, knowing that for all practical purposes he or she is “immortal,” will want to risk that most precious gift of all — life — by doing anything that could rudely take it away? Even contact sports, let alone activities like air, sea, or space travel, or any dangerous occupation, could be abhorred. Disease of any kind, as well as aging itself, would have to be controlled absolutely.

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.”

Of course, when one leaves the realm of “particles,” no matter how small they may be, or how they behave or how tenuous their “physical” construction, then all restraints could well be off. As in the case of his CU’s, Seth’s “subjective motions and activities,” his “simultaneous events,” would easily be the rule in the basic nonphysical universe.