“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.

(Pause.) You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. (Long pause, then with humor:) It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of your beliefs. The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider’s part — and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well. (Louder:) It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs. You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

(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.

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.