“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In my Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I explained how Jane acknowledges the mail we get from our readers by sending them copies of letters from Seth and herself; to the latter she adds a few personal lines for each correspondent. She also encloses a list of her books, which many readers ask for. Seth dictated his letter in April 1975, just after finishing his part of the work for Volume 2 of “Unknown,” and I presented it while introducing Volume 1. Jane still handles most of the mail herself, and she continues to send people Seth’s letter because we still think he presented excellent ideas in it.

(In those notes I also referred to an earlier letter that Seth had dictated for readers in January 1973, and it can be found in Chapter 8 of Personal Reality. Jane and I suggested then, as we do now, that when possible the two Seth letters be read together, since they compliment each other so well.

(Pause.) I am speaking of the inner laws of nature, that pervade existence. What you call nature refers of course to your particular experience with reality, but quite different kinds of manifestations are also “natural” outside of that context. The laws of nature that I am in the process of explaining underlie all realities, then, and form a firm basis for multitudinous kinds of “natures.” I will put these in your terms of reference, however.

(Long pause.) Each being experiences life as if it were at life’s center. This applies to a spider in a closet as well as to any man or woman. This principle applies to each atom as well. Each manifestation of consciousness comes into being feeling secure at life’s center — experiencing life through itself,¹ aware of life through its own nature. It comes into being with an inner impetus toward value fulfillment. It is equipped with a feeling of safety, of security within its own environment with which it is fit to deal. It is given the impetus toward growth and action, and filled with the desire to impress its world.

For one thing, you are dealing with different kinds of consciousness than your own. They are focused consciousnesses, surely, each one feeling itself at life’s center. While this is the case, however, these other forms of consciousness also identify then with the source of nature from which they emerge. In a way impossible to explain, the fly and the spider are connected, and aware of the connection. Not as hunter and prey, but as individual participants in deeper processes. Together they work toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled.

(Pause, then forcefully:) I am trying to temper my statements here, but your psychology of the past 50 years has helped create insanities by trying to reduce the great individual thrust of life that lies within each person, to a generalized mass of chaotic impulses and chemicals — a mixture, again, of Freudian and Darwinian thought, misapplied.

At the same time, the paranoid person can use his creative abilities in fantasies that seemingly boggle the minds of the sane — and those creative abilities have a meaning, for the fantasies, again, serve to reassure the paranoid of his worth. If in your terms he were sane, he could not use his creative abilities, for they are always connected with life’s meaning; and sane, the paranoid is convinced that life is meaningless. It did little good in the past for Freudian psychologists to listen to a person’s associations (pause) while maintaining an objective air, or pretending that values did not exist. Often the person labeled schizophrenic is so frightened of his or her own energy, impulses, and feelings that these are fragmented, objectified, and seen to come from outside rather than from within.

Ideas of good and evil are exaggerated, cut off from each other. Yet here again the creative abilities are allowed some expression. The person does not feel able to express them otherwise. Such people are afraid of the brunt of their own personalities. They have been taught that energy is wrong, that power is disastrous, and that the impulses of the self are to be feared.

There are natural laws, then, that guide all kinds of life, and all realities — laws of love and cooperation — and those are the basic needs of which I am speaking.

1. In recent weeks Jane herself has been quite intrigued by the idea of “personal centering,” as she put it in her notes for God of Jane. She also wants to study the subject for her book in connection with reincarnation, the origins of our species — and even of our world. She’s already written several poems about her own view of reality. The one that follows charmed me as soon as she produced it last May 31. It’ll probably end up in God of Jane, but I’d like to present it here, too:

These brief definitions are very general: A paranoid is afflicted with systematic, logically-reasoned delusions of grandeur or persecution; the personality can be relatively stable otherwise. A schizophrenic suffers from a division between thought processes and emotions. The cause of schizophrenia is unknown, and the victim usually ends up hospitalized because of the severity of symptoms, which can include motor malfunctions, perceptual distortions involving hallucinations and delusions, strange behavior, and a withdrawal from reality. Yet the schizophrenic can also keep the use of his or her primary intellectual capacities.