“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(They also fit in beautifully with my own recent feelings and questions about the behavior of our species, and Seth’s answering material. In fact, Seth had much more to present on the subject this evening, so even though he didn’t say so Jane and I take it for granted that this session belongs in Psyche.)

You realize that a tiger, following its nature, is not evil. Looking at your own species you are often less kindly, less compassionate, less understanding. It is easy to condemn your own kind.

He is indeed as blessed as the animals, however, and his failures are the results of his lack of understanding. He is directly faced with a far more complex conscious world than the other animals are, dealing particularly with symbols and ideas that are then projected outward into reality, where they are to be tested. If they could be tested mentally in your context, there would be no need for physical human existence.

Too many complicated issues are connected here, so that I must at best simplify. It is as if man said: “Now what about this idea? What can we do with it? What will happen if we toss it out into reality, physically? How far can we go with any of the great social, scientific, religious ideas that are so peculiarly the offshoots of man’s mind?”

To some extent, these are all unique and creative ponderings that on the part of the animals alone would be considered the most curious and enlightening intellectual achievements. The animals must relate to the earth, and so must man. As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man must pursue his ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

(Louder:) Grant your own species the same.

To identify man with his poorest works is to purposefully seek out the mars, the mistakes, of a fine artist, and then to condemn him. To do this is to condemn yourselves personally. If a scientist says consciousness is the result of chance, or Darwin’s theories say that basically man is a triumphant son of murderers, many people object. If you say, however, that men are idiots, or that they are not worth the ground they walk upon, you are saying the same thing. For you must be concerned with this reality as you know it; in those terms, to condemn man is to condemn the species as you know it, and the practical terms of your world.

To say that people can escape to another probability is pragmatically a cop-out — this is apart from the reality of probabilities, for I am speaking from your emotional viewpoint.

Now: Physically your body has a stance in space and time. I will speak of primary and secondary experience. Let us call primary experience that which exists immediately in sense terms in your moment of time — the contact of body with environment. I am creating certain divisions here to make our discussion — or (with a smile) monologue — easier. Therefore, I will call secondary experience that information that comes to you through, say, reading, television, discussion with others, letters, and so forth.

In your terms, while you live, and in the most pertinent terms of intimate sensation, your reality must be what you perceive in the framework of your time, and what you create within that framework as it is experienced. Therefore, I entreat you not to behave as if man will destroy himself in some future — not to behave as if man is an imbecile, doomed to extinction, a dimwitted, half-crazy animal with a brain gone amuck.

None of the prophesied destruction man so fears is a reality in your time; nor, for all of the critical prophets through the ages, and the forerunners of doom, has the creativity of man destroyed itself in those terms.

When you are considering the future in your terms, constructive achievements are as realistic as destructive ones. In those terms, each year of man’s existence in fact justifies a more optimistic rather than pessimistic view. You cannot place man’s good intent outside of the physical context, for outside of that context you do not have the creature that you know. You cannot say that nature is good, but spawned man, which is a cancer upon it, for nature would have better sense. You cannot say, either, that Nature — with a capital N — will destroy man if he offends her, or that Nature — with a capital N — has little use for its own species, but only wants to promote Life — with a capital L — for Nature is within each member of each species; and without each member of each species, Nature — with a capital or a small N — would be nonexistent.

Whatever your scientists think, your body and your consciousness and your universe spring constantly into actualization. Therefore, through cultivating the clear experience of your own consciousness and being with time and with the moment as you feel it, you can draw upon the greater vitality and power that is available.

Often then you ignore your senses’ reality in the world — the luxurious vitality and comfort of the daily moment — by exaggerating the importance of secondary experience as defined for this discussion.

The most negative projection or prophecy seems to be the most practical one; when you are reading of the world’s ills, you say in all honesty, and with no humor: “How can I ignore the reality, the destructive reality, of the present?” In the most practical, immediate, mundane terms, however, you and your world are in that moment naturally and physically safe, as your bodily senses immediately perceive. In the most basic of bodily terms you are not reacting to present conditions.

I am afraid that I think some of this will still escape you — meaning Ruburt, yourself, and others. But while disasters, imagined or encountered second-handedly, may in fact later occur, they are far different from physically encountered ones. You only add to their unfortunate nature by negatively brooding upon what might happen in the future, and you destroy your own stance. Your stance in time is highly important, for it is your practical base of operations.

You cannot react physically in the same way to projected or imagined dangers. There seems to be no possible reaction. You are frustrated. You are meant to deal with your immediate, primary experience, and in so doing you take care of your responsibility. You are able to take action in your own experience, and therefore affect others. You do not have to be ignorant of wars in other corners of the world, or close your eyes. But if you allow those experiences to overcloud your present, valid intersection with reality, then you speak and act from a position not your own, and deny the world whatever benefits your own present version of reality might allow you to give.

The natural creature-validity of your senses must remain clear, and only then can you take full advantage of those intuitions and visions that must come through your own private intersection with space and time.