“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

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.) Men can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning. Religion has made gross errors. At least it held out an afterlife, a hope of salvation, and preserved — sometimes despite itself — the tradition of the heroic soul. Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless. This is a direct contradiction of deep biological knowledge, to say nothing of spiritual truth. It denies the meaning of biological integrity. It denies man the practical use of those very elements that he needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he is at life’s center, that he can act safely in his environment, that he can trust himself, and that his being and his actions have meaning.

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:

No matter where I look, I seem to be
at the center of a world that forms
perfectly around me.
No lopsided vision ever shows
the world spread only to my left,
with my image on the last right edge,
nor has the world
ever appeared just ahead,
while nothingness began
just behind my back.