“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth spoke through Jane five times last week. On Monday and Wednesday evenings he furnished material on this book, plus some personal material for us; discoursed at length Tuesday night in ESP class; spoke briefly Friday afternoon to a visiting editor from Time magazine — subject, Freudian psychology; and on Saturday evening talked informally to a group of our friends about daily life in Italy during the time he had been a minor pope in the fourth century a.d. [Reincarnation-wise, Seth had first mentioned his papal experience in an ESP class session in May, 1971. See Chapter Twenty-two of Seth Speaks.]

(I made just a few notes on the Saturday night material after our guests left. We’d been discussing current population problems when Seth came through to tell us that in the fourth century, infanticide — at least to his knowledge — had been quite common. Before a child was baptized it was considered to be the property of its parents, who could do with it as they wished, with no stigma attached.

On the other hand there are those who stress the great value of the inner self, the emotional being, at the expense of the conscious mind. These theories hold that the intellect and usual consciousness are far inferior to the inner “unconscious” portions of being, and that all the answers are hidden from view. (Pause.) The followers of this belief consider the conscious mind in such derogatory terms that it almost seems to be a supercilious cancer that sprouted like a growth upon man’s psyche-impeding rather than aiding his progress and understanding.

Before that time man did believe that he could affect matter and the environment through his thoughts. With the Industrial Revolution, however, even the elements of nature lost their living quality in man’s eyes. They became objects to be categorized, named, torn apart and examined.

You do not dissect a pet cat or dog, so when man began to dissect the universe in those terms he had already lost his sense of love for it. It became soulless for him. Only then could he examine it, you see, without qualm, and without being aware of the living voice that protested (Jane now spoke in a much louder and deeper voice temporarily); and so in his great fascination for what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand the heredity of a flower, say, he forgot what he could [also] learn by smelling a flower, looking at it, watching it be itself.

You cannot understand what makes things live when you must first rob their life. And so when man learned to categorize, number and dissect nature, he lost its living quality and no longer felt a part of it. To some important extent he denied his heritage, for spirit is born into nature and the soul, and for a time resides in flesh.

Man’s thoughts no longer seemed to have any effect upon nature because in his mind he saw himself apart from it. In an ambiguous fashion, while concentrating upon nature’s exterior aspects in a very conscious manner, he still ended up denying the conscious powers of his own mind. He became blind to the connection between his thoughts and his physical environment and experience.

Nature became then an adversary that he must control. Yet underneath he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because in cutting himself off from it he also cut himself off from using many of his own abilities.