“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

However in some other manners the experiences of the tree are extremely deep, dealing with the inner senses which are, and properly, also properties of treedom. There is something here difficult for me to explain clearly. The inner senses of the tree have strong affinity with the properties of earth itself. They feel their growing. They listen to their growing as you listen to your own heartbeat. They experience this oneness with their own growth, and they also experience pain. The pain however while definite, unpleasant and sometimes agonizing, is not of an emotional nature in the same way that you might experience pain.

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.

The idea of dissociation could be likened to the slight distance between the bark and the inside of the tree. Here we do not have a rigid bark, as you should not have a rigid ego. We have instead a flexible bark, changing with the elements, protecting the inner tree or the inner self, but flexible, opening up or closing in rhythmic motion. The bark is so to speak outside our tree; and there is a small space between the inner tree and the bark. This small space is our dissociation.

The inner tree continues to grow because the bark is flexible. Man lets his ego face the outer world as does the tree bark, and this is its purpose. Nevertheless the inner self, like the inner tree, must have room to expand. The tree bark makes allowances for good weather (here Jane pounded the table) though bad weather is repulsive to the bark. Nevertheless the bark makes whatever adjustments are necessary and is flexible. Forgive me if this is a trite analogy, I almost hate to say it, but it bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind. Nor does it solidify, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

(The Mr. Burrell referred to here was Jane’s employer, the manager of a supermarket in Marathon where Jane worked for a few weeks as a cashier. It was a job she hated.)

The situation would have been much worse. Ruburt was overly weary, and if I may say so, bleary. He would have tried to make a serious mistake at this time. In pity and against his own intuition, he would have tried to move in with your parents. You would have both attempted to support them, with disastrous psychic effects. There is little more I would like to say here. I promise you that neither of you will feel any poor results from tonight’s long session. Please do take a break.

By this time Ruburt-Jane was so confused that he would have taken the radio position in Elmira, and here again this would have been an error. In fact Joseph, and I do not say this to make you feel better but because it is the truth, you literally saved her life.

Her Walter Zeh comes in here very definitely. However it is too late now to go into details. The circumstances were so unusual that more leeway is permitted. That is, she, Jane, got away with more without guilt because she was so threatened.