“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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?

Their lack of knowledge and techniques and methods then become quite plain. By concentrating too deeply upon the world of newspapers and the negative reports of man’s actions, it is truly easy to lose sight of what I tell you (louder) is each man’s and each woman’s basic good intent.

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.

That kind of experience will let you glimpse the larger patterns of man’s creativity, and your part in it. You have been taught to concentrate upon criticisms and faults in your society; and in your times it seems that everything will work out wrong — that left alone the world will run down, the universe will die, man will destroy himself; and these beliefs so infiltrate your behavior that they organize much of your experience and rob you of the benefits nature itself everywhere provides in direct primary experience.

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.

This would be only too clear if you were physically experiencing the conditions about which you might be reading. If the world were falling down about your shoulders, you would only too clearly understand that “earlier” you were reacting to an imagined and not a real situation.

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.