“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.

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.

His dreams reminded him that a cold season had come, and would come again. Most of your inventions came in dreams, and, again, it is the nature of your dreams that makes you so different from other species.

(See the brief references to the therapy of value fulfillment in the opening notes for Session 862, with its Note 1. Today I’d mentioned to Jane how I remembered Seth’s saying — perhaps a couple of years ago — that still untouched in his material is the whole question of the body consciousness, and its role in health and many other fields. Seth had indicated that he had available a vast amount of material on the body consciousness, and that he could give it to us at any time. I’ve been curious about the subject ever since.

(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.”)