“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

HE WAS ON HIS WAY TO THE HOLY LANDS. HIS SHOES HAD BEEN STOLEN AS HE SLEPT. THE BUILDINGS YOU SAW WERE NOT PYRAMIDS BUT THE RUINS OF MONASTERIES IN THE DISTANCE.

Nevertheless, there is an interaction here which gives chlorophyll its properties. I hope to make this clearer to you, but it involves part of a larger concept for which you do not now have the proper background. … Chlorophyll is a mental enzyme, however, and it is one of the moving forces in your plane. A variant exists in all other planes. It is a mental spark, so to speak, that sets everything else into motion.

This also has to do with feeling, which is also a mover. You must try not to categorize things in old ways, but when you open your mind, you will see a similarity between chlorophyll, as a mental enzyme or mover, and emotion which is never still. Emotion ‘solidified’ is something else again and is perhaps a framework of other worlds. …

Rob laughed at the remark about my subconscious, but instead of giving us our rest period, Seth went on for a moment:

Perhaps I may be able to make mental enzymes clearer. … In your own experience, you are familiar with steam, water and ice. These are all manifestations of the same thing. So can a seemingly physical chlorophyll be also a part of a seemingly immaterial emotion or feeling, but in a different form — and, of course, directed into this form or caused to take various forms in response to certain laws — as your ice will not exist of itself in the middle of your summertime. And if I am not to be compared to a symphony, Joseph, you must admit that I do well with a figurative baton.

In other words, the mental enzymes not only produce action in the material world, but they become the action. If you will read over the above three or four paragraphs, you will come close to seeing where mental and physical become one.

You both know what love and hate are, but as I told you earlier, try to think in new ways. Love and hate, for example, are action. They are action and they both imply action in physical bodies …

These mental enzymes, to go back to them, are solidified feeling, but not in the terms that you usually use … I have said that our imaginary wires that seem to permeate our model universe are alive; and now if you bear with me, I will say that they are mental enzymes or solidified feelings, always in motion, and yet permanent enough to form a more or less consistent framework. You could almost say that mental enzymes become the tentacles that form material — though I do not find that a very pretty phrase …

The framework, again, is only for convenience, as your physical walls are for your convenience, as I mentioned earlier. The walls are not there as such, but you had better act as if they were or suffer a possible broken neck. I must still respect many like frameworks in my own plane, but my understanding of them renders them less … opaque. …

This session actually lasted from 9:00 P.M. until midnight, so only excerpts have been given here. The material on mental enzymes intrigued us. Looking back, we can see what a chore it must have been for Seth to introduce us to ideas that were very basic — to him — and quite new to us. Much later, he was to give some excellent material on the nature of physical matter and its “mental” components. But at the time of this session, he told us all we could understand, while he began slowly to build up the necessary background and concepts.

One episode in particular is funny in retrospect — looking back it was certainly undisciplined — but at least it was not overshadowed by superstitious fears about demons; and it led to the episode with which I will close the first portion of this book. The event was a deep trance experience into which I blundered. A second experience convinced me of the high validity of dream existence, for in it a dream was split open while I watched.

As nearly as I can recall, it was then that I began to feel strange — as if something were going to happen. I put the feeling down as due to imagination. Almost at once, I felt drowsy and sat in the rocker — without rocking. My eyelids were very heavy; my head slumped sideways. I could hardly keep awake, but my senses were extremely acute; I could hear every sound in the house.

Rob asked me what was wrong. I answered that I felt odd and unlike myself. My body then was very light — weightless to me, anyway. I wasn’t conscious of any muscular weight or pressure at all. My arms and shoulders felt like water or air. Rob told me to get up. He was beginning to look worried. But I could hardly rise from the chair. He had to help me to the couch. I didn’t feel physical enough to move.

I could tell that I was heading into a very deep trance state. On the one hand, I was tempted to go along with it, since I was supposed to be experimenting. Along the way I was able to maintain my present state, without going deeper, but I didn’t know how to snap out of the present state.

Rob made coffee for me. I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. When I finally did, my motions were extremely slow, as in a slow-motion motion picture. Rob made me drink two cups of coffee. He had me stand with my head out of the kitchen window in the cold night air, but nothing seemed to help. I just seemed to be in a weightless body in which I had little interest. By now I was rather frightened, yet I thought that I could snap out of it if I really exerted all of my will power — or knew how.

Applied suggestion by Rob would have snapped me out of this state easily, but we didn’t know that at the time. As it was, the condition lasted about three hours, ending only when we went to bed, past midnight. By then I was no longer frightened but merely curious and trying with one part of my consciousness to find out what the other part was up to — and how it went about its business. Finally, I fell asleep, expecting nothing but exhausted slumber for the rest of the night.

Astonished, I saw the two men still standing there. Surely, I thought, this was some trick of perception! I was still dreaming and didn’t realize it, perhaps. But I pinched myself and rubbed my eyes. Then, quickly, I closed my eyes and reopened them. The men were still there! As far as I could tell, they were perfectly solid and fully three-dimensional. There was nothing ghostly about them.