“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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, for you, in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp and some effects of this nature were starting up again. This is why I suggested that you begin these exercises now. The fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the subconscious vitality like a glacier, and these exercises melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears.

You are already much improved from just two exercises. You were released so quickly last night that quite literally you didn’t know what happened. Incidentally while we are on this subject, often in the past when you thought you were dealing with a matter or a person in a dissociated manner, you were instead exhibiting a cold conscious detachment.

This is an unbending conscious pose of the ego, and not to be confused with the lithe subconscious detachment which is actually warm, flexible and expansive. That is, it can contain within it many elements, acknowledge them but be not affected by bad or negative suggestions or elements.

As to Jane’s feeling about the tree having certain consciousness, or course this is the case. What you have here is much latent energy and vitality and capacity, with much of it withheld or suspended momentarily.

The tree is of course 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 hand it focuses the usable portion of its energy into being a tree. The state of consciousness involved here is dull as compared to the highly differentiated human ability in many ways.

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

And as far as motion is concerned, the tree moves upward and downward. It is quite unfair to say that it cannot transport itself since it does so to an amazing degree, the roots and limbs moving in all directions. The inner senses of all plant life are well attuned, alert and very important. All these fragments have consciousness to a rather high degree, considering that man holds them in such ill repute.

The awareness is focused along certain lines. The energy is likewise focused. Much of the ability again is suspended as for a subject in a trance, but consciousness is present. Your hybrid plants merely demonstrate this susceptibility to new suggestion which your plant, like your susceptible trance subject, will gladly follow. I will have more to say along this road of thought, but am detoured for just a moment as to which fork to follow.

As you have probably supposed by now, there is consciousness in everything. Visible or invisible to you, each fragment of the universe has a consciousness of its own. Pain and pleasure, the strongest aspects of all consciousness, are experienced strongly by every fragment, according to its degree. Differentiation is of course various, and it is in the degree of differentiation that consciousness is different.

In some fragments such as much plant life and vegetative life there is strong use of certain inner senses. Your rocks, Joseph, I will call vegetative. Rocks are far from lifeless. Other types of life, including your own, rely on the recognized outer senses. The ideal of course is a consciousness that is adept at using both the inner and outer senses fully.

Your tree lives through its inner senses, experiencing many sensations and reacting to many stimuli of which you are unaware. Minute earth tremors, even the motion of small ants about its lower trunk, are recognized and experienced by tree consciousness. Such invisibilities as humidity, radioactivity and all electrical earthly values, are felt as quite real things by your tree and recognized as being separate from the tree itself.

This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data on your plane. As a result it stiffens and you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you have faced the world. I do not want to digress here. I have certain points in mind for this evening. Nevertheless lest Ruburt thinks he is getting off scot-free, let me remind him that the tree’s bark is quite necessary, cannot be dispensed with—but I will get into that and into Ruburt at a later time.

(Break at 10:26. Jane said she had stage fright this evening; why she does not know. She still wonders where the material is coming from, especially when she does not consciously know what she will say from one word to the next. Her eyes have been very dark this evening.

You may take a break. If you do not mind, after the break I will continue for a short while. I am trying very hard, Joseph, because dissociation will answer more than one of your particular problems, and practical ones at that. Associations which you may consider impractical are often very practical. I always feel when I speak along these lines as if I must say over and over that I do not intend any shortening of your working hours, only that you have more energy than you realize and that associations, as certainly you must see with your landlord, are often practical. Take your break.