“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Briefly, remember analogies I have made in the past, comparing the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape — which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art. In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color — a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action. Those of you now living, say, are in the same life class. You look about to see how your contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and you find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits. And all of these portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of your world.

(Pause.) These portraits, however, are the result of creativity so inborn and miraculous that they are created automatically — an automatic art. At certain levels the species is always creatively embarked upon alternate versions of itself. The overall patterns will remain. Biological integrity is [everywhere] sustained. What you think of as diseases, however, are quite creative elements working at different levels, and at many levels at once.

(Long pause, one of many.) Give us a moment… (Long pause.) It is very difficult to explain. (Pause.) In a way, some disease states help to insure the survival of the species — not by weeding out the sickly but by introducing into large numbers of individuals the conditions needed to stabilize other strains within the species that need to be checked, or to “naturally inoculate” the species against a sensed greater danger.

(Long pause at 10:01.) Your culture has its biological effect upon the species. I am not speaking of obvious connections in a derogatory manner, such as pollution and so forth. If you were thinking in old terms of evolution, then I would be saying that your cultures and civilizations actually alter the chromosomal messages. Your thoughts affect your cells, again, and they can change what are thought of as hereditary factors. Give us a moment… Your imaginations are intimately connected with your diseases, just as your imaginations are so important in all other areas of your lives. You form your being by imaginatively considering such-and-such a possibility, and your thoughts affect your body in that regard. In a way, illness is a tool used on behalf of life, for people have given it social, economic, psychological, and religious connotations. It becomes another area of activity and of expression.

It “sings” with the quality of its own life. It cooperates with other cells. It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in a way it lends itself to that formation. (Pause.) The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. In the old terms of evolution. I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact. You would not have had (pause) any way (pause) of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations. You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

(Pause.) End of session — but I will continue with the material. I bid you a fond good evening, and we have opened up a fine kettle of metaphysical fish.

(10:42 P.M. I’ve indicated but a few of the many long pauses Jane took while speaking for Seth; in fact, the session had been her slowest one in many months. “Now I see why I felt so puzzled before the session,” she said, “even with the company. I just had to sit there and wait for things to be put together in a new way. It was really funny.”

(She paused. Then: “I seem to get things that are different toward the ends of books, like where one is leading into the next one. Take the idea of the book Seth mentioned on therapy and value fulfillment, and so forth, and what you said today about body consciousness. Everything’s related.”