“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

These fears do not belong to what you think of as the subconscious. Then these materializations of panic and pain play about the physical body, projected by the ego, and steal the powers of the subconscious mind from their natural constructive tasks.… In other words, the ego becomes a tool to disrupt rather than to create.

The particular atmosphere surrounding your personalities just prior to the animals’ deaths was short-circuited and filled with inner panics. I do not want to hurt your feelings. This is, I’m sorry to say, a natural occurence often on your plane. The fact is that the animals caught your emotional contagion and, according to their own abilities, translated it for themselves.

At times, the ego can hold you in a tight vice, which the dissociation breaks. This is what happened after your exercises. You have been doing very well … in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However, conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp, and some effects of this nature were starting up. This is why I suggested the exercises at this time.

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.

Now, in a deep trance the subject, though fully aware of what is happening in the trance, may remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also somewhat like that of the subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not bestir itself in other directions. But like the trance subject, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time, and latent, but they are present.

“I suppose that’s natural enough,” Rob said. “Does it bother you that much?”