“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In Note 1 for the 817th session, which was held on January 30, I wrote that Sue Watkins had recently delivered the last of the typed manuscript for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche. Actually, she had converted my original typed sessions making up Psyche into standard manuscript form for the publisher; I still have to do many of the notes for the book after I finish my work on Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality several months from now.

(On the other hand, with the copyedited manuscript for James and the concluding chapters of Emir mailed to Prentice-Hall earlier this month, Jane found herself with some unexpected free time. [We don’t expect to receive the page proofs for James, for correcting, until late next month.] Jane began to enjoy her break by writing poetry and doing some painting — but she surprised me when she also spontaneously began to rough out some of the notes for Psyche. She still planned to leave up to me the detailed, even painstaking work that she doesn’t care for: the endless checking and rechecking of dates and events in order to get each note just right. Yet I was more than happy with whatever help she could give, I told her, since it would let us get Psyche published that much sooner after Volume 2.

(In line with doing things differently, no session was held last Saturday night because over the weekend we decided to give up the Monday–Saturday session routine we’ve followed for the last eight months, and return to our original practice of holding sessions on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The change was made to give Jane more time on weekends to handle the mail. I don’t think my own daily work patterns will be affected much; I help her with the correspondence, but don’t spend nearly the time at it that she does.)

The officials of the Roman Catholic Church altered many records — cleansing them, in their terms, of anything that might suggest pagan practices, or nature worship as they thought of it. In terms of your civilization, nature and spirit became divided so that you encounter the events of your lives largely in that context. To some degree or another, then, you must feel divorced from your bodies and from the events of nature. The great sweeps of emotional identification with nature itself do not sustain you, therefore. You study those processes as if you somehow stood apart from them.

(Long pause, one of many, at 9:51.) Give us a moment… To some extent your society’s beliefs allow you enough freedom so that most of you trust your bodies while they are growing toward adulthood. Then, however, many of you no longer rely upon the processes of life within you. Certain scientific treatises often make you believe that the attainment of your adulthood has little purpose, except to insure the further existence of the species through parenthood — when nature is then quite willing to dispense with your services. You are quite simply told that you have no other purpose.³ The species itself must then appear to have no reason except a mindless determination to exist. The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics. Period. In both cases man’s nature, and nature in general, take short shrift.

Such tales are myths. They do indeed have power and strength. In those terms they represent the darker side of myths, however — yet through their casts you presently view your world. You will interpret the private events of your lives, and the spectacular range of history, in the light of those assumptions about reality. They not only color your experience, but you create those events that more or less conform to those assumptions.

(10:19.) The myths upon which you base your lives so program your existence that often you verbally deny what you inwardly know. When people are hurt in a natural disaster, for example, they will often profess to have no idea at all for such involvement. They will ignore or deny the inner feelings that alone would give the event any meaning in their lives. The reasons for such involvement would be endless, or course — all valid, yet in each and every case, man and nature in those terms would meet in an encounter that had meaning, from the largest global effects to the smallest, most private aspects of the individuals involved. You have made certain divisions because of your myths, of course, that make this kind of explanation extremely important and difficult. You think of rain or earthquakes as natural events, for example, while you do not consider thoughts or emotions as natural events in the same terms. Therefore it is difficult for you to see how there can be any valid interactions between, say, emotional states and physical ones.

(Long pause, then with much subdued irony:) In exasperation some of you see nature as good and enduring, filled with an innocence and joy, while on the other hand you envision man as a bastard species, a blight upon the face of the earth, a creature bound to do everything wrong regardless of any strong good intent. Therefore you do not trust man’s nature either.

I am speaking particularly of epidemics that are less than deadly, though danger is involved. In your times, hospitals, you must realize, are important parts of the community. They provide a social as well as a medical service. Many people are simply lonely, or overworked. Some are rebelling against commonly held ideas of competition. Flu epidemics become social excuses for much needed rest, therefore, and serve as face-saving devices so that the individuals can hide from themselves their inner difficulties. In a way, such epidemics provide their own kind of fellowship — giving common meeting grounds for those of disparate circumstances. The [epidemics] serve as accepted states of illness, in which people are given an excuse for the rest or quiet self-examination they desperately need but do not feel entitled to otherwise.

(Long pause at 11:21.) I do not mean to assign any hint of accusation against those so involved, but mainly to state some of the reasons for such behavior. If you do not trust your nature, then any illness or indisposition will be interpreted as an onslaught against health. Your body faithfully reflects your inner psychological reality. The nature of your emotions means that in the course of a lifetime you will experience the full range of feelings. Your subjective state has variety. Sometimes sad or depressing thoughts provide a refreshing change of pace, leading you to periods of quiet reflection, and to a quieting of the body so that it rests.

In such instances natural healing processes occurred, for which the body is seldom given credit. Such healings do not just involve changes in the body, for example, for a physical healing can take place because of events that seem utterly disconnected.

As I occasionally do in my notes, I’m anthropomorphosizing “science” by casting a multifaceted discipline in simple human or individual terms. But now it seems that when science claims to understand the workings of a molecule of DNA, for example — the “master molecule” of life, as it’s often called — science then states that it’s stripped away the mystery of DNA and reduced our functions to easily understood mechanistic ones. But Jane and I maintain that grasping the marvelous workings of DNA should instead increase our sense of the wonder and mystery of life. The DNA lies exposed in all of its parts, but the questions about the life within it remain unanswered. Why does science want us to live thinking that we’re creatures programmed only for the survival of our selfish genes? Even the biologists (and other scientists) who insist upon our mechanistic bases do so with feeling!