“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.

(9:21.) The term “value fulfillment” is very difficult to explain, but it is very important. Obviously it deals with the development of values — not moral values, however, but values for which you really have no adequate words. Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center. The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.

In those terms, animals have values, and if the quality of their lives disintegrates beyond a certain point, the species dwindles. We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning (intently). Life is meaning for animals. The two are indistinguishable.

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.

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.

What protection, then, but to effectively project these outside of the self — impulses of good as well as evil — and hence effectively block organized action?

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.

(10:17 P.M. “Now that’s weird,” Jane said as soon as Seth withdrew, “It’s only a quarter after ten, but I feel that what we got is way beyond in proportion to the time involved. Before the session I knew he was going into schizophrenia and so forth, but he went past those inklings….” Indeed, her delivery had often been intense, and quite demanding as far as my writing speed went.)

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:

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.