“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: The state of grace is a condition in which all growth is effortless, a transparent (pause), joyful acquiescence that is a ground requirement of all existence. Your own body grows naturally and easily from its time of birth, not expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon.

You were born into a state of grace, therefore. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot “fall out of” grace, nor can it be taken from you.

You can ignore it. You can hold beliefs that blind you to its existence. You will still be graced but unable to perceive your own uniqueness and integrity, and blind also to other attributes with which you are automatically gifted.

Love perceives the grace in another. Like natural guilt, the state of grace is unconscious in the animals. It is protected. They take it for granted, not knowing what it is or what they do, yet it speaks through all their motions and they dwell in the ancient wisdom of its ways. They do not have conscious memory, again, but the instinctive memory of the cells and organs sustains them. All of this applies in degrees according to the species, and when I speak of conscious memory I am using words that are familiar to you — I mean a memory that can at any time look back through itself.

The dog does not recall joyful appreciation of his own state of grace from a past, nor anticipate a recurrence in any future. With the large freedom provided by the conscious mind, however, man could stray from that great inner joy of being, forget it, disbelieve in it, or use his free will to deny its existence.

The splendid biological acceptance of life could not be thrust or forced upon his emerging consciousness, so to be effective, efficient, to emerge in the new focus of awareness, grace had to expand from the life of the tissue to that of the feelings, thoughts and mental processes. Grace became the handmaiden of natural guilt, then.

Man became aware of his state of grace when he lived within the dimensions of his consciousness as it was turned toward his new world of freedom. When he did not violate, he was aware of his own grace. When he violated, it fell back into cellular awareness, as with the animals, but he felt consciously cut off from it and denied.

(Pause at 10:34.) The animal has no such need. It nestles safely within the confines of its instincts while exploring other aspects of awareness with which man is not so intimately familiar. Yet natural grace and natural guilt are given you, and these will also grow more fully into conscious awareness. If you can sit quietly and realize that your body parts are replacing themselves constantly — if you turn your conscious mind into the consideration of such activity — then you can realize your own state of grace. If you can sense your thoughts steadily replacing themselves then you can also feel your own elegance.

Close your eyes. Think of your breaths as lives, and you the entity through which they have passed and are passing. Then you will feel your state of grace, and all artificial guilts will be meaningless. None of this negates the supreme and utter integrity of your individuality, for you are as well the individual entity through whom the lives flow, and the unique lives that are expressed through you.