“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth’s statement at the end of dictation for the 815th session, “I will try to begin work on our book in a more predictable fashion,” reflected his good intent, but things didn’t turn out that way. Jane and I let the holiday season intervene to some extent, and Session 816, which came through the day after Christmas, didn’t concern book work at all. Then, starting in early January, we held eight sessions having to do with questions we’d put off dealing with for a long time; some were personal and some were not. We stayed with our Monday–Saturday evening session routine, though, and kept busy with all of our other projects.¹

All being is manifestation of energy — an emotional manifestation of energy. Man can interpret the weather in terms of air pressure and wind currents. He can look to fault lines in an effort to understand earthquakes. All of this works at a certain level, to a certain degree. Man’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations. Using the terms begun in the last chapter, I will say then that man’s emotional identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framework 2. And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s relationship with nature. There in Framework 2 the nature of the psyche appears quite clearly, so that its sweeps and rhythms can be understood. The manifestations of physical energy follow emotional rhythms that cannot be ascertained with gadgets or instruments, however fine.

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that you know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framework 2. In a manner of speaking your factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, and imagination, from which all of your detailed paraphernalia emerge. What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

In all cases, however, such situations instantly bring to mind questions of man’s own reality and source, his connections with God, his planet, and the universe. He interprets those questions according to his own beliefs. Let us then look at some of them.

In those terms, the great religions of your civilizations rise from myths that change their character through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. You can see mountain ranges. It would be ridiculous to ignore their reality. You see your myths somewhat less directly, yet they are apparent within all of your activities, and they form the inner structures of all of your civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

In those terms, then, Christianity and your other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone. In those terms also, your science is also quite mythical in nature. This may be more difficult for some of you to perceive, since it appears to work so well. Others will be willing enough to see science in its mythical characteristics, but will be most reluctant to see religion as you know it in the same light. To some extent or another, however, all of these ideas program your interpretation of events.

Facts are a very handy but weak brew of reality. They immediately consign certain kinds of experiences as real and others as not. The psyche, however, will not be so limited. It exists in a medium of reality, a realm of being in which all possibilities exist. It creates myths the way the ocean creates spray. Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source. They involve symbols and known emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that that world is never the same again.

They cast their light over historical events because they are responsible for those events. They mix and merge the inner, unseen but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization. In Framework 2 the interior power of nature is ever-changing. The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of your world. That interaction includes not only man, of course, but the emotional reality of all earthly consciousnesses as well, from a microbe to a scholar, from a frog to a star. You interpret the phenomena of your world according to the mythic characteristics that you have accepted. You organize physical reality, then, through ideas. You use only those perceptions that serve to give those ideas validity. The physical body itself is quite capable of putting the world together in different fashions than the one that is familiar to you.

There are good things coming. That is all I have to say.