“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.

Medicine men may do a rain dance. They understand the innate relationship that exists within all portions of nature. You are taught to believe that faith can move mountains, yet many of you will find it extremely difficult to accept your own relationship with the environment. Your beliefs (often as opposed to your desires) cause wars. Your feelings represent the inner reality behind what you think of as purely natural phenomena, such as weather.

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.

A war is one kind of natural event brought about as feelings and beliefs interact on one level. A natural catastrophe represents the same kind of phenomenon at a different level. Your part in these feelings and beliefs will place you in your own “natural” position within such events.

INNER STORMS AND OUTER STORMS. CREATIVE “DESTRUCTION.” THE LENGTH OF THE DAY AND THE NATURAL REACH OF A BIOLOGICALLY-BASED CONSCIOUSNESS

(Pause at 10:32.) Next chapter [Eighteen]: “Inner Storms and Outer Storms. Creative ‘Destruction.’ The Length of the Day and the Natural Reach of a Biologically-Based Consciousness.”

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.

(10:44.) The rhythms of your body and of your consciousness follow the patterns of your planet. The planet itself is composed of atoms and molecules, each with their own kind of consciousness, however; and in the gestalt and cumulative cooperative organization of their nature the physical structure is formed — out of consciousness.

Your feelings are as natural a part of the environment as trees are. They have a great effect upon the weather. There are even connections that can be made, for instance, between epilepsy and earthquakes, where great energy and instability come together, affecting the physical properties of the earth.

Here you can find individuals of great energy; of unstable, “excessively” temperamental natures, and with intense capacities for creativity and innovation. They need a strong stimulus or impact with reality against which to pit themselves, however. There is often a great impatience with social situations, and unusual vitality. Such individuals operate at a high pitch, and en masse emit inordinate excesses of what I have called ghost chemicals.

(Pause at 11:38.) You do not need a self-conscious mind to feel, and in the “past,” earthquakes represented the feeling-patterns of species in the same way — unstable conditions of consciousness that in themselves initiated natural phenomena, further altering the state of consciousness and the conditions of species as well.

(11:45.) From it spring ideas that are quite as natural as lightning. When lightning strikes the earth, it changes it. There are also changes that come about through the impact of your thoughts upon the atmosphere. The great overall inner trust with which you were born forms the basis for the encompassing reliability of the physical earth. Your body dwells in the earth as you dwell in your body. You were born with a faith in your existence that automatically directed the proper functioning of your personal corporeal self. This provided the necessary stabilizing properties upon which your consciousness could play, and through which it could effectively and creatively operate. The smallest atom has its own kind of built-in integrity, upon which all of its organizations and alterations are based, so generally there is a gestalt kind of permanence within the body of the earth.

I told you that a dis-ease (with the hyphen) can have a creative basis (in the 620th session in Chapter Four). And so can an earthquake or a natural disaster.

There are many hints and signs picked up by the body itself — alterations in air pressure, magnetic orientation in terms of balance, minute electrical differentiations of which the skin itself is aware. On that level the body is often prepared for natural calamities before they occur. Defenses are set up.

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.

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.