“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The inner senses of the tree have strong affinity with the properties of the earth itself. They feel their growing. They listen to their growing as you might listen to your own heartbeat. They experience this oneness with their own growth, and they also feel pain. The pain, while definite, unpleasant and sometimes agonizing, is not of an emotional nature in the same way that you experience pain. In some ways, it is even a deeper thing. The analogy may not be perfect, far from it, but it is as if your breath were to be suddenly cut off — in a manner, this somewhat approximates pain for a tree.

The tree makes adjustments just as you do. It listens to its growth up from the earth and to the murmer of the growth of its roots beneath. It adjusts each root ending according to what impediments might lie in its way. Without the conscious mind of man it nevertheless retains this inner consciousness of all its parts, above and below the ground, and manipulates them constantly.

But when I read the session, I thought of Rob sitting there, listening to what I thought of as criticism, while his wife paced the room “telling him off” in another voice and supposedly for another, invisible personality. “I worry that it’s just a psychological trick,” I said. “I mean, suppose that’s really what I think, subconsciously — the idea that your ego is too rigid at times and closes you off. So I simply adopt another personality to tell you so. Then I wouldn’t be responsible and you couldn’t talk back.”