“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.

The simplicity of natural guilt does not lead to what you think of as conscience, yet conscience is also dependent upon that moment of reflection that in a large measure sets you apart from the animals. Conscience, as you think of it, is caused by a dilemma and a misunderstanding of the conditions set upon your physical existence. Conscience arose with the emergence of artificial guilt. Give us a moment…

The conscious mind is a maker of distinctions. It brings to the surface of awareness whole gestalts of previously unconscious material, then assembles and organizes it in ever-changing form. Through purposeful focus, a literally infinite amount of such data can be unconsciously sorted; then only the desired elements will emerge.

The conscious mind is endlessly creative. This applies to all areas of conscious-mind thinking. It is also the organizer of physical data, so natural guilt became the basis for all kinds of variations. These closely followed man’s religious and social groupings. The latter are also the result of the aware mind’s capacity to play upon, mix and merge, and rearrange perception and experience.

The mind is also equipped to see its own beliefs, reflect upon them and evaluate their results, so using this tool as it was meant to be used would automatically help man in recognizing both his beliefs and their effects. Part of this great permissiveness has to do with the fact that man is to realize that he creates his own reality. Free will is a necessity. The leeway given allows him to materialize his ideas, meet them in physical experience, and evaluate for himself their particular kind of validity.

(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.

Your beliefs, thoughts and feelings are instantly materialized physically. Their earthly reality occurs simultaneously with their inception, but in the world of time, lapses between appear to occur. So I say one causes the other, and I use those terms to help you understand, but all are at once. So are your multiple lives occurring as the immediate realization of your being in the natural extension of its many-faceted abilities.

Your body has within it the miraculous strength and creative energy with which, in your terms, it was born. You most probably take this to mean that I am implying the possibility of an unending state of youth. While youth can be physically “prolonged” far beyond its present duration, that is not what I am saying.

(11:32.) Physically, your body must follow the nature into which you were born, and in that context the cycle of youth and age is highly important. In some ways, the rhythm of birth and death is like a breath taken and exhaled. Feel your own breath as it comes and goes. You are not it, yet it comes into you and leaves you, and without its continuous flow you could not physically exist. Just so your lives go in and out of you — you and yet not you. And a portion of you, while letting them all go, remembers them and knows their journey.

Imagine where your breath goes when it leaves your body, how it escapes through an open window perhaps and becomes a part of the space outside, where you would never recognize it — and when it has left you it is no longer a part of what you are, for you are already different. So the lives you have lived are not you, while they are of you.