“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(Long pause.) Those who “lose” their lives in natural disasters become victims of nature. You see in such stories examples of meaningless deaths, and further proof of nature’s indifference to man. You may, on the other hand, see the vengeful hand of an angry God in such instances, where the deity once again uses nature to bring man to his knees. Man’s nature is to live and to die. Death is not an affront to life, but means its continuation — not only inside the framework of nature as you understand it, but in terms of nature’s source. It is, of course, natural then to die.

(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.

Some people believe that they must be punished, and so they seek [out] unfortunate circumstances. They [go] to one event after another in which they meet retribution. They may seek out areas of the country in which natural disasters are frequent, or their behavior may be such that they attract from other people reactions of an explosive kind. Often, however, individuals use disasters quite for their own purposes, as an exteriorized force that brings their lives into clear focus. Some may be flirting with the idea of death, and choose a dramatic encounter with nature in the final act. Others change their minds at the last moment.

Those involved in such disasters — the survivors — often use such “larger-than-life” circumstances in order to participate in affairs that seem to have greater import than those possessed by previous humdrum existences. They seek the excitement, whatever its consequences. They become a part of history to whatever extent. For once their private lives are identified with a greater source — and from it many derive new strength and vitality. Social barriers are dropped, economic positions forgotten. The range of private emotions is given greater, fuller, sweep.

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!