“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The evening was very humid but cool after a late-afternoon thunderstorm. Jane felt the humidity as we sat for the session at 9:15. She had no questions for Seth, but expected him to continue his material of last Wednesday night, when he’d started an answer to my question about the relationship between the host organism and disease. This idea had come to her “pretty strongly” after supper: “It won’t be dictation. I think there’s a whole lot there — but you know, it’s not quite here yet,” she said.

(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.

(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.

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.

Animals, as a rule (underlined) are less physically-oriented in their dreaming states. They do dream of physical reality, but much more briefly than you. Otherwise, they immerse themselves in dreams in different kinds of dreaming consciousness that I hope to explain at a later date (louder).

(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.”

(Then a minute later: “Another thing I just got was that when man was with other men in the physical world, he could point to stuff to share descriptions with others, but that he learned to really speak when he tried to describe dreams. It was the only way — speech — by which he could share data that couldn’t be seen. He could point to a tree and grunt, but there wasn’t anything in a dream he could point to. He had to have a method of expression to describe invisible things. Inventions could have come about when he tried to tell others what he saw in his dreams, too.”)