“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Will you tell us what mental enzymes are? You mentioned them once before in a past session. I guess I’d rather learn more about that right now,” Rob said.

As mental genes are behind the physical genes, so to speak, so are mental enzymes behind the physical stuff you can examine on your plane. Chlorophyll is such a mental enzyme, and there are more which I will describe to you at a later date.

In a sense, any color or quality of that nature could be considered a mental enzyme. There is an exchange of sorts between the mental and physical without which, for example, color could not exist. I use color here as an example because it is perhaps easier to understand how this could be a mental enzyme than it is to perceive the same thing about chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green in more than color, incidentally.

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. …

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.

When I told you earlier to imagine the wire structure penetrating everything that is, I meant you to imagine these wires as being alive, as I am a live wire myself. Joking aside, I will now ask you to imagine these wires as being composed of the solidified emotion of which I have just spoken. Surely you must know that the words feeling or emotion are, at best, symbols to describe something else, and that something else comes extremely close to your mental enzymes.

Actually, a counteraction within a mental enclosure occurs. A mental enclosure divides itself in two, splits up, multiplies, acts upon its own various parts, and this produces a material manifestation. The ‘material’ is material, yet it is mentally produced. The mental enzymes within the enclosure are the elements that set off the action, and — listen to this — they are also the action itself.

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.

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 …

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.

While experimenting, we found that I could make a rapid decisive motion if I exerted great mental force. Rob asked me to lift a coffee cup with a normal gesture. (Earlier, he had held the cup while I sipped the coffee.) I concentrated as hard as I could on what he wanted me to do — which seemed hilarious to me, and an impossible task — and then really made a supreme physical effort. As a result, my hand jerked up high, suddenly, and then just as suddenly swung back, banging the cup back on the counter.