“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday Jane and I read the Time magazine cover story for November 13, 1972, featuring Richard Bach and his book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. We were very pleased for Dick. The article also included information about the Seth material. See the 618th session in Chapter Three for an account of Seth’s meeting with Dick and the latter’s editor, Eleanor Friede.

(It isn’t necessary to go into dates and other details here; but several days before we were told that the Bach story’s originally scheduled appearance in late October had been postponed, Jane had a vivid dream giving her that literal information. She wrote Dick about it and told others. Her dream was also fairly accurate concerning the magazine’s cover painting for the piece: a montage featuring “a bird that was somehow a part of a man’s head, or face,” as she described it. Actually Time’s design showed a seagull superimposed over Dick Bach’s head, partially obliterating it.

Dictation. (Pause. Then humorously:) An aside to you: Now, you see, I can speak in Time or out of it. Underline “Time.”

New paragraph: Consciousness then is not dependent upon physical perception, though this attribute does require an awareness immersed within a material form. While physical consciousness is sifted through the bodily apparatus, you are usually unaware of noncorporeal kinds because of that process. The general framework, properties and characteristics of the body exist, therefore, before its formation. In simple terms, you choose ahead of time the kind of body you will inhabit and impress. It may seem to you that you do not have any conscious control over your body’s condition in life as you know it, much less before your birth. You have been taught that there is little connection between your thought and your body’s activities.

As I also mentioned (in the 614th session in Chapter Two), the conscious mind is not basically cut off from the inner self or from those deep inner sources of knowledge available to it. The aware mind is not any one event, for that matter; it represents various portions of the inner self that “surface” at any given time.

The conscious mind exists before material life and after it. In corporeal existence it is intertwined with the brain, and during physical life your earthly perceptions — your precise and steady focus within your particular space and time system — are dependent upon that fine alliance.

Now it is here that the seeming division in the self occurs, for in physical life the conscious mind must be connected with the brain, and in terms of time that organ itself must grow and develop. So all of your consciousness cannot be physically aware. The portion that must “wait for” the brain’s development is the part you call in life “the conscious mind.”

The brain with its bodily connections must deal with the time lapses that sensual perception always imply. The interior workings of the body, to be conscious, would have to deal with time sequences that would present the physically attuned consciousness with “mathematical” deductions and calculations far too numerous for it to handle. For example, it would have to keep conscious track of all the muscles, nerves, organs, cells, molecules and atoms, while manipulating the body in space and time.