“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane receives 35 to 50 letters a week. The flow of mail to our hill house is surprisingly steady throughout the year, as we’ve often noticed: We never take in 100 letters one week, for instance, and none the next, or 70 one week and 15 the next. In some remarkable fashion, our correspondents space out their communications so that we get them on a steady basis. We have time to read each one. Each Saturday and Sunday Jane catches up with her replies for the week, brief as they often are, so that on Monday morning, when I put out that bundle of letters for the mailman, we’re ready for the next week’s accumulation. All of the mail doesn’t need answering, of course, but the other day we estimated that with very little help from me Jane now replies to around 2,000 letters a year. That total is slowly increasing as her work becomes better known.

Dictation: When I speak of natural law, I am not referring to the scientists’ laws of nature, such as the law of gravity, for example — which is not a law at all, but a manifestation appearing from the viewpoint of a certain level of consciousness as a result of perceptive apparatus. Your “prejudiced perception” is also built into your instruments in that regard.

(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.

(Pause at 9:30.) What about the poor unsuspecting fly? Is it then so enamored of the spider’s web that it loses all sense of caution? (Whispering, and dryly:) For surely flies are the victims of such nefarious webby splendors. We are into sticky stuff indeed.

(9:44.) Impulses provide life’s guide to action. If you are taught that you cannot trust your impulses, then you are set against your very physical integrity. If you believe that your life has no meaning, then you will do anything to provide meaning, all the while acting like a mouse in one of science’s mazes — for your prime directive, so to speak, has been tampered with.

To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period. Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s duplicity. Suddenly people with paranoidal characteristics, as well as schizophrenics,² emerged from the wallpaper of this slickly styled civilization. The characteristics of each were duly noted. A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored. Even the weight of guilt is better than no feeling at all. If the paranoid might feel that he [or she] is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers,” then at least he feels that his life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it? If voices tell him he is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him that his life must have value.

Creativity is an in-built impetus in man, far more important than, say, what science calls the satisfaction of basic needs. In those terms, creativity is the most basic need of all. I am not speaking here of any obsessive need to find order — in which case, for example, a person might narrow his or her mental and physical environment — but of a powerful drive within the species for creativity, and for the fulfillment of values that are emotional and spiritual. And if man does not find these (louder), then the so-called basic drives toward food or shelter will not sustain him.

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.

I sit in a swivel chair
with smooth ball bearings.
Without warning, I turn myself
around in a complete circle,
but nothing disturbs
my world vision,
and objects appear on all sides
with sweet precision,
as if a projector in my head
sends out invisible rays that turn
into images, so I
always seem inside
dimensions of depth
and weight.