“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On September 25, 1972, the day of the 617th session in Chapter Three, I wrote a note describing how Jane and I had seen and heard geese flying south, in a spectacle both inscrutable and moving. Last night, we had reminders that a natural rhythmic cycle was completing itself six months later: As we retired I thought I heard the barking of geese migrating north, although Jane didn’t. I woke up around four a.m., though, and heard a flight clearly in the silent hour. Then early this morning as I was painting in my studio, that same cadence came sounding down through a fine rain.

Instinct is fairly accurate, for example, guiding the beasts to those territories in which proper conditions can be found; and even for them the well-being of the body represents physical evidence of their “being in the proper place at the proper time.” It reinforces the animals’ sense of grace, in terms mentioned earlier in this book. (See the 636th session in Chapter Nine.)

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them. They became frightened of disease, particularly in the case of plagues.

(We chose the first category since it would continue the subject matter of this chapter. See the notes for the 616th session, in Chapter Two, for descriptions of Jane’s first experience with Seth’s multiple channels. Resume in the same unhurried manner at 10:58.)

(Jane told me that she could delve into the available data in much more detail, but since it would go off from the chapter at a tangent we reluctantly decided not to pursue it. I thought of racial memory and our ancient heritage of gods that were half man and half beast, bird or reptile. Resume at 11:50.)

What you consider conscience is often an applied-from-without sense of right and wrong instilled in you in your youth. As a rule these ideas represent your parents’ conceptions of natural guilt, distorted by their own beliefs. (See the 619th session in Chapter Four, as well as the first session in this chapter.) You accepted those ideas for a reason, individually and en masse, for mankind at any given “time” has a strong idea of the particular sort of world experience it will create.

Because you have free will you have the responsibility and the gift, the joy and the necessity, of working with your beliefs and of choosing your personal reality as you desire. I told you earlier (in the 636th session in Chapter Nine) that you cannot fall out of a state of grace. Each of you must intellectually and emotionally accept it, however.

(12:13 a.m. Jane still felt exhilarated, yet tired. A note: Lately she’s been working on a sequel to her novel, The Education of Oversoul 7, which she finished early in July, 1972. [See Jane’s Introduction, and Chapter One.] The new book is called, appropriately enough, The Further Education of Oversoul 7.)