“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As creatures you are a part of nature. The change of thoughts, feelings and beliefs into physical, objectively perceived phenomena is as natural as water changing into ice, for example, or a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You not only form the structure of your civilizations and social institutions through the transference of beliefs, thoughts and feelings; but in this natural exchange you also help on quite intimate levels in the “psychic manufacture” of the physical environment itself, with all of its great sweeping variety, and yet seasonal stability.

Catastrophes, such as earthquakes or floods, are not perpetuated by certain elements of nature against other portions of itself. Your feelings have as much natural validity as the tides, and they have their own kind of attraction — mind does move matter. A ring manipulated at a seance under controlled conditions is but the most simple kind of demonstration of the great ability of mind to interact with matter. You each participate in the creation of each thunderstorm, each new spring, each flood, earthquake, and summer rain.

First sentence: Your reality exists independently of your physically oriented consciousness, but while you are a creature your awareness must be interpreted through your neurological structure and your corporeal aliveness. There are indeed various kinds of memory, so that the right information can be at your fingertips when you need it. Other data will seldom be required consciously, yet it must always be available to unconscious portions of the self. Biologically the reach and capacity of your physically oriented consciousness is directly connected with the length of your days and nights, and of course with the seasons. Physically speaking, there are chemical interactions when thought occurs, and memories ride on the chemicals’ smooth flow. With the precise night and day schedule that it possesses, your planet would, in those terms, give birth to a creature consciousness uniquely suited to fit it. In other terms, the night and day represent the innate rhythms of your consciousness physically materialized through natural phenomena, for you are not yet equipped to perceive longer-duration days. Your nervous system would find great difficulty in a rhythm in which a day was stretched out to be three or four times as long, for instance.

(10:55. As far back as the 613th session in Chapter One, Seth was making statements like this: “Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself,” but at the time we paid little attention to the implications behind such ideas. Resume at 11:06.)

(Slowly:) Feelings are still dependent upon your neurological structure and its impact with physical reality. An animal feels but it does not believe. Your feelings with their chemical interactions have, beside their subjective reality to you, electromagnetic properties, as indeed your thoughts have. But your bodies must rid themselves of chemical excesses in the same way that land must clear itself of excess water. There are what I am going to call here “ghost” chemicals — aspects of normal chemicals that you have not perceived so far, where certain thresholds are approached in which chemicals are changed into purely electromagnetic properties, and energy released that directly affects the physical atmosphere.

Such emotional nonphysical qualities are unstable, and affect the deep electromagnetic integrity of the earth’s structure. Obviously there have been earthquakes where there are no people, but in all cases the origins are to be found in mental properties rather than exterior ones. (Pause.) Earthquakes are very often associated with periods of great social change or unrest, and from such locations the fault lines originate and are projected outward. They may then affect a generally unpopulated area on another continent, or an island, or cause a tidal wave on the other side of the world, even as a stroke might affect a portion of the body far from the original damage.

(Long pause at 11:54.) Yet with all of this there is always change, as with the experience of time in a linear fashion any event must “knock out” another one. In terms of your focus a given occurrence “takes time.” You know that many events occur that you do not consciously perceive, but take on the word of others. In your terms, therefore, change is apparent. The body is altered.

Many additional issues operate, however, that have to do with any given personal reaction. Here other psychological conditions enter in. People live in regions threatened by earthquakes with clear conscious knowledge of them. Regardless of what they might say, they need and enjoy the constant stimuli and excitement; the very unpredictable nature of the circumstances arouses them to action. There are many different attitudes and characteristics that apply, so that it is difficult to make generalizations, but there are always reasons why any individual is involved in a disastrous natural catastrophe.

Psychically, mentally and physically, they will be as much a part of such an event as, say, the water that sweeps through a town in a flood. They will utilize the physical catastrophe as an individual might use a symptom for purposes of challenge, growth, or understanding — but they will choose their disaster just as they will choose their symptoms. They will be aware of the framework, therefore. It will not be thrust upon them.

They may not consciously accept such information, but if they knew how to examine themselves, they would discover that their beliefs added up to precisely the given kind of situation. (Pause.) An illness of a severe nature may be used by an individual to put him or her into the most intimate contact with the powers of life and death, to initiate a crisis in order to mobilize buried survival instincts, to vividly portray great points of contrast and summon all of his or her strength.

(12:36 a.m. Each of Jane’s trances and deliveries tonight had been deep and very steady. “Seth just stopped for us,” she said as she put her glasses on. “I can feel more material right there. I’ll bet I could sleep for an hour, then start another session — we won’t bother, I know,” she laughed as I thought about trying it, “but when I feel the information coming I hate to stop….”