“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.)

(Long pause, one of many, at 10:04.) Your sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however. The mass world rises up before your eyes, but your eyes are part of that mass world. You cannot see your thoughts, so you do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do. There are currents of thought as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of men’s feelings and thoughts rise up like flames from a fire, or steam from hot water, to fall like ashes or like rain.

(10:20.) It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because otherwise you would overpopulate your world into extinction, but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment. This is everywhere apparent in nature itself. (Pause.) If there were no death, you would have to invent it (smile) — for the context of that selfhood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone (with quiet dramatic emphasis).¹

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.

(10:42. Jane’s trance had been good, but she remembered Billy climbing into her lap, and how he’d put his face close to hers. “Seth thought it was great,” she said. Resume at 11:14.)

Not one idea will be discovered residing in the brain cells. You can try to convey an idea, you can feel its effects, but you cannot see it as you can the chair. Only a fool would say that ideas were nonexistent, however, or deny their importance.

You operate quite nicely politically, living in villages, townships, countries, states, and so forth, each with certain customs and local ordinances. These in no way affect the land itself. They are designations for practical purposes, and they imply organization of intent or affiliation at one level. They are political patterns, invisible but highly effective. There are, however, far more vigorous invisible mental patterns, into which the thoughts and feelings of mankind are organized — or, naturally, organize themselves.

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.”

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.