“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s birthday was yesterday, and a couple of events that made pretty nice presents revolved around that date. Two days ago, she worked on our new front porch for the first time; she sat in the slanting sunlight and wrote down the information she psychically picked up from the “world view” of William James, the American psychologist and philosopher who lived from 1842–1910. She now has considerable material for her book on James. [In the note she’s making for her Introduction to Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche, Jane describes a world view as “…a living psychological picture of an individual life, with its knowledge and experience, which remains responsive and viable long after the physical life itself is over.”]

The individual body is what it is because it exists in the context of others like it. By this I mean that a given present body presupposes a biological past of like creatures. It presupposes contemporaries. If, for example, one adult human being were perceived by an alien from another world, certain facts would be apparent. Even though such an alien came upon a lone member of your species in otherwise uninhabited land, the alien could make certain assumptions from the individual’s appearance and behavior.

While each individual springs privately into the world at birth, then, each birth also represents quite literally an effort — a triumphant one — on the part of each member of each species, for the delicate balance of life requires for each birth quite precise conditions that no one species can guarantee alone, even to its own kind. The grain must grow. The animals must produce. The plants must do their part. Photosynthesis,¹ in those terms, reigns.

(Long pause at 10:05.) Cells possess “social” characteristics. They have a tendency to unite with others. They naturally communicate. They naturally want to move. Period. In making such statements I am not personifying the cell, for the desire for communication and motion does not belong to man, or even animals, alone. Man’s desire to journey into other worlds is in its way as natural as the plant’s urge to turn its leaves toward the sun.

Man’s physical world, with all of its civilizations and cultural aspects, and even with its technologies and sciences, basically represents the species’ innate drive to communicate, to move outward, to create, and to objectify sensed inner realities. The most private life imaginable is a very social affair. The most secluded recluse must still depend upon the biological sociability of not only his own body cells, but of the natural world with all of its creatures. The body, then, no matter how private, is also a public, social, biological statement. A spoken sentence has a certain structure in any language. It presupposes a mouth and a tongue, the kind of physical organization necessary; a mind; a certain kind of world in which sounds have meaning; and a very precise, quite practical knowledge of the nature of sounds, the combination of their patterns, the use of repetition, and a knowledge of the nervous system. Few of my readers possess such conscious knowledge, yet the majority speak quite well.

At cellular levels the world exists with a kind of social interchange, in which the birth and death of cells are known to all others, and in which the death of a frog and a star gain equal weight. But at your level of activity your thoughts, feelings, and intents, however private, form part of the inner environment of communication. This inner environment is as pertinent and vital to the species’ well-being as is the physical one. It represents the psychic, mass bank of potential, even as the planet provides a physical bank of potential. When there is an earthquake in another area of the world, the land mass in your own country is in one way or another affected. When there are psychic earthquakes in other areas of the world, then you are also affected, and usually to the same degree.

The person might feel indisposed, but in such ways the body assimilates and uses properties that would otherwise be called alien ones. It immunizes itself through such methods. The body, however, exists with the mind to contend with — and the mind produces an inner environment of concepts. The cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world. They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a nonbiological nature. So they depend upon your assessment.

The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.

The beliefs people acquire when young can be changed, of course, and according to Seth (and the ideas Jane and I have also) this process of change would be the best “inoculation” there is against senility. As I watched my father grow older, with an accompanying progressive loss of memory and function, I used to wonder why he didn’t consciously revise his response to life — and why I never saw any indication that he wanted to. I clearly sensed that it was possible for him to improve his beliefs about life, and that the benefits from such a course of action would be great. Nor did I merely wish he would change just so that I could avoid the pain I felt watching him deteriorate. My father’s chosen withdrawal from the world was all too plain for everyone to see. In our imperfect understanding, Jane and I and other family members saw this process go on: We did not feel there was much any of us could do.