“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.

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.) There are communions of consciousness of which you are unaware. While you believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then you put together your perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories. You will see no value in the life of a mouse sacrificed in the laboratory, for example, and you will project claw-and-fang battles in nature, completely missing the great cooperative venture that is (underlined) involved.

(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.

(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.

(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.

The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s primitive “unconscious” drives. The private unquelled thrusts toward creativity were seen as the unbalanced conglomeration of chemicals within a person’s most private being — a twist of perversity. Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’s hatred for his father. The meaning of life was reduced to the accidental nature of genes. Science thought in terms of averages and statistics, and each person was supposed to fit within those realms.

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.

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.

I am not simply saying that man does not live for bread alone. I am saying that if man does not find meaning in life he will not live, bread or no. He will not have the energy to seek bread, nor trust his impulse to do so.

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.