“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The night was so warm that I unzipped the bag all the way down to my feet. In the half-dark I spoke aloud to my wife, telling her that I wished she was with me. I fell asleep. Around 4:30 A.M. I woke to the sound of a heavy wind and the feel of much colder air creeping in around my body. The wind chimes hanging in a corner of the porch were clashing together repeatedly. I zipped up the bag as spatters of rain began to blow in on me. The woods come down over the crest of the hill in back of the house, to the north, and with a sound like an ocean tide the wind was racing through their treetops, plunging south past the house and into the valley. Jane and I had always loved that great roar. The trees thrashed in my neighbor’s yard across the road. The whole scene was one of change and energy and mystery.

A block to the west of the hill house, the main road drops straight down into the outskirts of Elmira. Opening off the road to the left like a series of steps are short, level sidestreets upon which I often run late at night. In the beginning the running helped me physically handle my grief over Jane’s passing; I cried often as I ran, and tried to comprehend where she is now. I’m a natural runner, but had been unable to do more than a little jogging in recent years because of the pressures of work and of taking care of Jane as she became more and more ill. After her death I could run nightly if I chose to. I find that activity still secret and evocative. The streets are lined with trees arching up to meet overhead; periodically those intersecting patterns of leaves and branches are punctuated by bursts of light from the streetlamps. At certain times the moon follows me along in its phases. The only sounds might be the wind in the treetops and the chug-chug of my shoes on the asphalt. A dog may bark in the distance. When I do it right I float effortlessly along. And amid my tears I finally permitted the obvious to become obvious to me. The following is revised from my entry in my grief notebook.

October 13, 1984. Jane has been dead for thirty-eight days. It has finally come to me that the dark tunnels of those streets I run on, with their mysterious implications of the unknown, and the fear of the dark that such streets can generate, are physically oriented metaphors for the transition Jane has made to another reality. In our terms, the tunnel shapes lead to an unfathomable new reality that is supposedly filled with the light of the universe. That light is symbolized by the streetlights shining through the tunnels every so often, and hinting at that great brilliant reality beyond. This metaphor is particularly apropos at this time, with the trees still carrying their thick growth of leaves — yet later in the fall it may become even more applicable as the leaves drop and the streetlights, poor as they may be in comparison to the light of the universe, can shine through a little more brilliantly.

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. [...] And the tree will recognize the same man who passes it by each day.

[...] The ego can be compared to the bark of a tree. [...] It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter and, to some degree, the tree’s companion. [...]

As to Jane’s feeling about the tree having a certain consciousness, of course this is the case. [...] The tree is dissociated in one manner. [...] 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.

[...] You know that such a tree bark would be death to the tree. [...] The tree has enough sense not to show blossoms in a blizzard.

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at it, his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree. [...]

[...] … In concrete terms, if a tree branch moves, then you take it for granted that something blows it. [...]

Then Seth told Rob to imagine a man looking at a tree in the near distance on an ordinary street, with intervening houses and sidewalks.

[...] A tree is conscious of itself as a tree. [...]

I become impatient, though I shouldn’t, with this continued implied insistence that evolution involves merely the human species — or, rather, that all evolution must be considered some gigantic tree with humanity as the supreme blossom.

The idiot cries.
The tears slosh inside his boots.
The people say he’s bats
Because he weeps
When the police shoot down the starlings
Aiming at the tall-eyed trees.

[...] Finally I tried to reach out and envelop the feeling of the houses and trees on either side of me — to sense them as if by inner touch, as I passed each one by.

Again, if you will consider our maze of wires, I will ask you to imagine them filling up everything that is, with your plane and my plane like two small birds nests in the netlike fabric of some gigantic tree … Consider, for example, that these wires are also mobile, constantly trembling and also alive, in that they not only carry the stuff of the universe but are themselves projections of this stuff, and you will see how difficult it is to explain. [...]