“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Good evening, Seth. What do 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, 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.

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 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.

If you will remember what you know of the trance state, you are for example in a light trance, able to maintain awareness of yourself, your environment and your place in it. You simply behave somewhat differently, not bestirring yourself in any direction unless the suggestion to do so be given you.

The awareness of plant life lies along these lines. In a deep trance there is oblivion afterward, that is the subject though fully aware of what is going on while in deep trance, can remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also like the awareness of a 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 subject in trance, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time and latent, but they are present.

In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was therefore a natural law of the universe. Not only do these so-called laws, which are not laws, vary according to where you are in the universe, they also vary according to what you are in the universe. Therefore your tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. To a tree the laws are simply different. And if a tree wrote its laws of the universe, then you would know how different they are.

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.

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.

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 this 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 yourself.

What Ruburt must learn is that it is equally ridiculous to act as if it is a summer day when snows are falling. The tree has enough sense not to show blossoms in the middle of a blizzard. However, the danger is stronger on your side.

You have already opened up. This does not mean that you became dishonest in your relations with people, merely that you became large enough to contain the knowledge of good and evil in people, and to observe it as part of what is. If you have no objection I will continue, or you may take a break if you suggest.

When you start out by trying to be practical in cold terms you rarely succeed, because you close yourself away from what does not seem to be practical in your terms. But your terms are not the only terms that apply. The inner self, and I will make these differentiations for you clearly either now or later, the inner self is nourished by many springs. To cut off one is a danger. To cut off many is disastrous, and prevents any sort of practicality, since half of your abilities will not be used.

It was for this reason that Jane was antagonistic to Mr. Burrell from the beginning, and filled with panic. What set her off was not the disappointment over the teaching job, which fell through, but the sequence of events, such as Mr. Burrell’s advances and her subconscious knowledge of her father’s nature.

(Nor did I understand what was happening, beyond the obvious fact that she was coming to hate the job. I was doing some samples for a business venture with a relative that offered a chance of rather handsome monetary rewards if successful; our agreement was that Jane would hold a temporary job in the meantime.

Had you stayed in Miami you would have been ahead of the game, but you are still ahead of the game by getting out. Whenever Ruburt, or Jane, puts up such a fight against you there is good reason. Because Ruburt is trying to learn gentleness this time and because he is a woman strongly attached to you, his respect for you is boundless and in most cases he will give in to what he considers your superior judgment. When despite this the present Jane puts on a strong emotional guise it is because the intuitions push her to this extreme.

You would have had difficulty also had you stayed in Sayre on returning from Florida. You cannot allow these things to inhibit your spirit, but your mother cannot understand a man who does not have what she considers the ordinary social responsibilities.

Your father somewhat resented your seemingly magical projections of reality into paintings, since he worked futilely in the realm of material inventions and got nowhere. He also, to a much greater degree than you, never trusted his instincts, although they were very strong. Your mother had much to do with this and so did his own mother.