“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“It sounds too melodramatic,” I said. “The Seth Material will be published, and you’ll help the world — it’s too much! We’ve only had sixteen sessions! I mean … well, I’m not some poor deluded idiot with the idea that I can solve the world’s problems. And Malba didn’t sound terribly bright; at least Seth is intelligent and knows what he’s talking about. But what’s the use in speaking for anyone else? This way I’m trying to figure out if Seth is independent or not … [and] worrying about a Malba, too.”

“Oh, that’s what the sense of outrage is about,” Rob said. He was really laughing now, and I sulked. I realized he was right the moment he spoke.

“She didn’t say you had to. Only that you could if you wanted to. See what Seth has to say about Malba in our next session. I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

When the ego becomes overly concerned, it becomes overly conditioned to negative responses. The creative energies build up their thickly-dimensioned pseudo-realities of pain. For a certain amount of time, according to your condition, they automatically create the patterns of fear that belong to the ego.

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.

Begin the yoga exercises and follow them faithfully. Your few experiments with autosuggestion upon falling asleep have been ego-bound. Think of this in terms of muscle-bound, and you will see what I mean. Be in a drowsy state and suggest, Ruburt, suggest — suggest, Joseph. Do not attempt to bully or command the subconscious. Joseph, if you are uncomfortable, I suggest you move to your sturdy old rocker.

The largest segment of the session dealt with personal matters connected with Rob’s earlier illness. This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

The interior universe had its influence even as far as pets were concerned! The whole concept fascinated me. Seth showed us in the next session that not only animals but all living things had their primary existence in this inner world. He also carried on with his discussion of the ego and health, giving an excellent analysis of the ego’s relationship to the personality as a whole. I took what he said to heart and found myself opening up, becoming more free and creative. In this session, he also spoke about the consciousness of trees in such a way that I was never able to look at the trees outside of my window with the same old detachment. Through the sessions, the whole world seemed to come alive.

“Good evening, Seth. What did you think of my performance last night?”

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 fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the inner self like a glacier, and the exercises help melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears. … You were released so quickly as a result of the exercises that you didn’t know what had happened.…

As to Jane’s feeling about the tree having a certain consciousness, of course this is the case. What you have here is latent energy, vitality and capacity, with much of it withheld or suspended momentarily. The tree is dissociated in one manner. In some ways, its living forces and consciousness are kept to a minimum. It is in a state of drowsiness on the one hand; and on the other, it focuses the usable portion of its energy into being 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.

If you remember what you know of the trance state — in a light trance, you are able to maintain awareness of self, your environment and your place in it. You simply behave somewhat differently, not bestirring yourself in any direction unless the suggestion to do so has been given. The awareness of plant life lies along these lines.

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.

A tree knows a human being also … by the weight of a boy upon its branches … by the vibrations in the air as adults pass, which hit the tree’s trunk at varying distances, and even by voices. You must remember what I said earlier about mental enzymes and my remark that color can sometimes be heard … The tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. It does not build up the image of a man, but it builds up a composite sensation which represents, say, a given individual. And the tree will recognize the same man who passes it by each day.

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data. As a result, it stiffens, and then you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you at one time faced the world.

(Break at 10:26. Jane said that she had stage fright this evening. She didn’t know why. She still wonders where the material comes from, especially when she doesn’t know what she is saying from one word to the next. She resumed dictating at 10:35.)

The inner tree can continue to grow because the bark is resilient. It bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind, nor does it stiffen, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear that the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

Neither should the ego react so violently that it remembers and reacts to past storms in the midst of clear and sunny weather. You can understand the analogy, Joseph. You know that such a tree bark would be death to the tree. What you must still understand is that the same applies to any individual and the ego. It applies to you. And Ruburt must learn that it is equally ridiculous to act as if it is a summer day in the middle of wintertime. The tree has enough sense not to show blossoms in a blizzard.

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.”

“Is that what you think it is?” Rob asked.