“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. “Now, for example,” Seth told us this evening, “man deals with a kind of dual selfhood, in that he presently thinks of himself as an uneasy blend of body and mind. He identifies primarily with what I call a limited portion of his consciousness. That portion he equates with mind or intelligence. He identifies with events over which he is aware (underlined) of having some control.

“Man thinks of acts, for example, and acting and doing, but he does not identify himself with those inner processes that make acting and doing possible. He identifies with what he thinks of as his logical thought, and the abilities of reasoning. These seem to suggest that he possesses an elegant, cool separation from nature, that the animals for example do not. He does not identify, again, with the processes that make his logical thinking possible. Those processes are spontaneous and ‘unconscious,’ so it appears that anything outside of his conscious control must be undisciplined or chaotic, and lacking in all logic.

“Man is therefore set against his nature in his own mind, and he thinks he must control it. The fact is that man’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. But he himself has largely closed the door of comprehension, so that he only identifies with what he thinks of as his rational mind, and tries to forget as best he can those spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly.

“He has often become frightened of his own creativity, then, since he has not trusted its source.”

3. “After last night’s (845th) session,” Jane wrote, “I watched television while Rob went for a walk. As I sat there I started to get more from Seth on one of the subjects mentioned in the session. The material came in ideas, though, not in Seth’s ‘finished copy.’ I told Rob about it when he came back, and now this morning I’ll see what I can recall for these notes.

“The scientist carries the burden of this alienation, and in his heart he must hope that his mission fails — for if it succeeds he will have effectively separated man from man’s nature in the world of beliefs, philosophically casting man adrift as meaningless psychological debris. Therefore, the scientific community often sabotages its own efforts.”