“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

Man is so highly verbal that he finds it difficult to understand that other species work with idea-complexes (with a hyphen) of a different kind, in which of course thought as you consider it is not involved. But an equivalent exists; using an analogy, it is as if ideas are built up not through sentence structure reinforced by inner visual images, but by like “mental” patterns structured through touch and scent — in other words, thinking, but within a framework entirely different and alien to you.

Animals, then, do not think of illness in terms of good or bad. Disease in itself on that level is a part of the life-survival process, and a system of checks and balances. With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved. Mankind feels its own mortality even more than the beasts do.

Man forgot the teaching and healing elements, and concentrated instead upon the unpleasant experience itself. To some extent this was quite natural, for the new species developed in order to change the nature of its consciousness, to follow a reality in which instinct was no longer “blindly” followed, and to individualize in strong personal focus corporeal experience that had previously taken a different pattern.

(2. The use of animals — rats, say — in experiments involving injections, before giving them to human beings. [Man’s psychological reality is so sweepingly different from that of the animals, Jane added now, that he would inevitably show a wide variety of reactions.]

Now: Man has a far greater leeway. He forms his reality according to his conscious beliefs, even while its basis lies in the deep unconscious nature of the earth in corporeal terms. Man’s “I am,” [seemingly] apart from nature — a characteristic necessary for the development of his kind of consciousness — led him into value judgments, and also necessitated some break with the deep inner certainties of other species.

In certain eras, the lines between the species were not completely drawn, and there were long periods where men and animals mixed and learned from each other. Man’s imagination made him a great maker of myths. Myths as you know them represent bridges of psychological activity, and point quite clearly to patterns of perception and behavior through which, in your terms, the race passed as it traveled to its present state. Mythology bridges the gap between instinctive knowledge and the individualization of idea.

If you misinterpret the myths, then you may believe that man has fallen from grace and that his very creaturehood is cursed, in which case you will not trust your body or allow it its “natural” pattern of self-therapy.

(Jane said there was much more to the idea of natural therapy in animals. She began tuning in to this information on her own, rather than getting it through one of Seth’s channels. Ages ago, humans not only watched the animals, but went to them for help. It had to do with shock treatment, she said wonderingly. If a human was in a catatonic state after a battle, for instance, the “animal medicine man” would purposely shock the patient into an emotional reaction to bring him out of the state.

(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.)

(Pause.) They attract you because of their instinctive knowledge, and they represent the inner freedom that man is in the process of objectifying on a conscious level. They also remind you of the deep certainty of your creaturehood, and by their flight evoke within you the knowledge that you are leaping from creaturehood into dimensions of actuality you only barely sense.