“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I don’t know how long I’ll continue to benefit from Jane’s assistance, though, since poetry, painting, and notes can all be quickly laid aside if she starts a new project, or resumes work on one that she’s kept in abeyance for some time. One such delayed endeavor is an autobiography that she began several years ago. Another is the sequel to her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven; that first Seven book was published in April 1973 — and lately she’s been thinking of resuming work on Seven Two, as we usually call it.¹ One thing is certain: Jane will see to it that something creative happens to change the status quo, for she’s much too restless and energetic to leave things as they are.

Growing from an infant to a full adult was probably one of the most difficult, and yet the most easy of feats that you will ever accomplish in a life. As a child you identified with your own nature. You intuitively realized that your being was immersed in and a part of the process of growth.

No amount of intellectual information, no accumulation of facts however vast, could give you the inner knowledge necessary to accomplish the physical events involved in that growth process. You learn to read, but the seeing itself is an accomplishment of far greater magnitude — one that seemingly happens all by itself. It happens because each of you is, again, indeed a part of nature and of nature’s source.

In various ways your religions have always implied your relationship with nature’s source, even though they often divorced nature herself from any place of prime importance. For religions have often hinged themselves upon one or another quite valid perception, but then distorted it, excluding anything else that did not seem to fit. “You are children of the universe.” This is an often-heard sentence — and yet the main point of the Christ story² was not Christ’s death but his birth, and the often-stated proposition that each person was indeed “a child of the father.”

(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.

(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.

You might say: “Of course, I realize that the weather affects my mood,” yet it will occur to very few of you that your moods have any effect upon the weather. You have so concentrated upon the categorization, delineation, and exploration of the objective world that it surely seems to be “the only real one.” It seems to exert force or pressure against you, or to impinge upon you, or at least almost to happen by itself, so that you sometimes feel powerless against it. Your myths have given great energy to the outsideness of things.

Dictation: I will return to those accomplishments somewhat later. For now I would like to mention some other issues, involving the individual’s connection either with natural disasters or with epidemics of one kind or another, that by definition concern large groups of people.

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.

Objectively — whatever the appearances — storms, earthquakes, floods, et cetera, are quite necessary to the well-being of the earth. Both man’s and nature’s purposes are served, then, though generally speaking man’s myths make him blind to those interactions. People’s thoughts and emotions always give clear clues whenever illness is involved, yet most people ignore such information. They censor their own thoughts. Many therefore “fall prey” to epidemics of one kind or another because they want to, though they might deny this quite vigorously.

Fears, sometimes even seemingly irrational ones, can serve to rouse the body if you have been too lethargic, or have been in a rut psychologically or physically. If you trusted your nature you would be able to trust such feelings, and following their own rhythms and routes they would change into others. Ideally even illnesses are a part of the body’s health, representing needed adjustments, and also following the needs of the subjective person at any given time. (Long pause.) They are a part of the interplay between the body and mind, or spirit.

The majority of my readers have come down with one or another disease usually considered very dangerous, and without ever knowing it, because the body healed itself normally and naturally. The disease was not labeled. It was not given recognition as a condition. Worries or fears were not aroused, yet the disease came and vanished.

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!