“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Before we can begin to consider such questions, we must take another look at your own world, and ascertain its source, for surely its source and nature’s are the same. We will also along this line, and throughout this book, have to make some distinctions between events and your interpretations of them.

It certainly seems that your world is concrete, factual, definite, and that its daily life rests upon known events and facts. You make a clear distinction between fact and fantasy. You take it for granted as a rule that your current knowledge as a people rests upon scientific data, at least, that is unassailable. Certainly technological development appears to have been built most securely upon a body of concrete ideas.

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?

Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as a model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in their historical context.

(10:06.) When you accept myths you call them facts, of course, for they become so a part of your lives, of societies and your professions, that their basis seems self-apparent. Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts. They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality. It must be clearly understood, then, that when I speak of myths I mean to imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framework 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in your world.

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.

Now: Myths are natural phenomena, rising from the psyche of man as surely as giant mountain ranges emerge from the physical planet. Their deeper reality exists, however, in Framework 2 as source material for the world that you know.

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.