“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.

These portraits obviously have a biological reality. In a manner of speaking, now, each person dips into the same supplies of paint, and so forth — which are the elements out of which your likenesses emerge. There must be great creative leeway allowed for such portraits. Each one interacting with each other one helps form the psychological and physical reality of the species, so you are somehow involved in the formation of a multitudinous number of portraits. I simply want you to keep that analogy in the background.

(9:46.) Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in your terms there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what you think of as deadly ones. The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call (underlined) an inactive form — inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance. In a way (underlined) in each body, the species settles upon a known status quo, and yet experiments creatively at many levels with cellular alterations, chromosomal variations, so that of course each body is unique. There are kinds of gradations, say, in the lines and kinds of disease. Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses. Under certain conditions, some so-called disease states could insure the species’ survival.

(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.

(10:20.) Give us a moment… Now many of the characteristics you consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species. It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species. (Intently:) You learned to dream differently than other creatures. I thought you would like that quotation.

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.

Using the intellect alone, man did not simply learn through daily experience over the generations, say, that one season followed the other. He lived too much in the moment for that. In one season he dreamed of the others, however, and in dreams he saw himself spreading the seeds of fruits as he had seen the wind do in daily life.

(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.”