“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

If someone is caught in a natural disaster, the following questions might be asked: “Am I being punished by God, and for what reason? Is the disaster the result of God’s vengeance?” A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?” He might try to dissociate himself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a nonpersonal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

In this part (2) of the book, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as you understand it. It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because you divorce yourselves from nature, you are not able to understand its manifestations. Often your myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when you begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then you misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

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.