“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If such issues could all be mentally worked out on some nonphysical drawing board, again, the great challenge of physical existence would be neither necessary nor meaningful. How far, say, can nationalism be carried? To what extent can the world be treated as if it were external to man, as an object? What can man learn by treating the body as if it were a machine? As if it were a mirage? As if it were driven by blind instinct? As if it were possessed by a soul?

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.

At the levels with which we are concerned, the body must primarily react to present, immediate, primary existence in space and time. At other levels it is equipped to handle many kinds of data, in that I have mentioned before the precognition of cells. But the body depends on the conscious mind to give it a clear assessment of precise conditions of the space and time it occupies. It depends upon that knowledge.

Your conscious mind is meant to give your body an assessment of what I will call cultural conditions, for there are sophistications and specifications that in your terms consciousness alone can assess. If, under conditions naturally safe in the terms of primary experience, you become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience — that is, from your reading or whatever — you show a lack of discrimination. You are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined, which is perhaps unsafe, calling forth the alarms of danger.

The body mechanisms become highly disoriented. The signals to the body are very contradictory, so that after a while, if such conditions continue, you can no longer tell whether you are in actual danger or imagined danger. Your mind then forces your body to be in a state of constant alert — but more unfortunately, you train yourself to ignore your direct, sensual feedback in the present moment.

Your body then might say you are safe, and your senses show you that no danger is present — yet you have begun to rely so upon secondary experience that you do not trust your creature reactions.

The body cannot act tomorrow, today. Its sense data must be clear. This resulting feeling of powerlessness to act leads to a state of hopelessness of varying degrees — and that mood does not tie itself to specific details, but pervades emotional life if it is allowed to. To whatever degree, the condemning, critical material too often becomes self-prophesying — for those who put merit on it (loudly) allow it to cloud their reactions.

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.

You must trust your sense data in that regard. Otherwise you confuse your psychological and corporal stance, for the body cannot be in a situation of safety and danger at the same time. It wastes its resources fighting imaginary battles.

(11:40.) To some people wars, poverty, murder, treachery, corruption, are primary experience, and must be dealt with — as requiring immediate action. The body must react. Such persons are beaten up, or robbed. Those are immediate sense data, and in one way or another they do react. However feebly, their point of power corresponds immediately with the point of danger.