“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Man serves his purposes within nature, as all species do, and in the terms of your understanding man “thinks” in his own way, but he is also the thinking portion of nature. He is the portion that thinks, in your understanding, again, of that term.

(9:01.) Give us a moment… He deals with the effect of thinking upon nature, so to speak. He adds to the rest of nature. (Pause.) He therefore adds a different kind of mental organization — an organization, then, that nature itself requires, anticipates, and desires. Animals do not read or write books, but they do “read” nature directly through the context of their own experience, and through intuitive knowing. Man’s reasoning mind adds an atmosphere to nature (pause), that is as real, say, as the Van Allen Belts (or radiation fields) that surround the earth.

Think of your own government in ideal terms for a moment. Its citizens are all individuals, with their own lives and interests. The government, if it has their loyalty, utilizes their energies in such a fashion that the majority are benefited, as is the government itself. Yet you cannot really put your finger on “the government,” though you might mention the White House as the seat of its power. The government is composed of many people, of course, and really extends all the way down the line, even to its least citizen, but the government can direct the use of energies, of goods, commerce, power, and so forth.

The people count upon the government to realistically define the conditions of the world, to have proper intelligence so that the activities in foreign lands are known, to keep up proper communication with other governments, and so forth. Now in some important respects the reasoning mind is like the government in this analogy. If the people in power are paranoid, then they overestimate the dangers of any given world situation. They overreact, or overmobilize, using a disproportionate amount of energy and time for defense, and taking energies away from other projects. The reasoning mind acts in the same fashion when paranoid beliefs are in power. It therefore tells all of the citizens — or cells of the body — to mobilize for action, to be on the alert, to pare down all but necessary activities, and so forth.

(9:25.) Man’s mind is really more of a process. It is not a completed thing, like an arm or leg, but a relationship and a process. That process has its source in what I can only call (pause) “natural reasoning.”

You are given far more knowledge than you realize when you are born, for example. I am not speaking of genetic information alone, as you understand it, but of a natural (underlined) yet intuitive reasoning process that is the result of the relationships that exist among all portions of the body. This is the kind of “reasoning” that is the source from which thinking emerges, and you might think of it as magical reasoning.

There is no such thing as a killer instinct, with the implications and meaning that man gives that term (intently). At levels almost impossible to describe to you in your adulthoods, all infants, for example, know that they are born into the environmental niches that suit them and no others — [that are] tailored to their requirements. You can usually see in a superficial fashion how animals under “natural conditions” fit into their environments so perfectly, so that their needs and desires and equipment meet and merge with the characteristics of the environment. It is not nearly as easy to see that the same applies to man and his mental and physical environment, his town or country or culture, but the infant trusts from the very first moment.

You may not consider trust an attribute connected with reasoning, but it is indeed, for it represents the creature’s innate understanding of the support with which it has been gifted. The natural person still feels that trust. There are many books written about occult knowledge, or magical knowledge. Most of them are filled with distortions, but they are all efforts to uncover man’s natural magical reasoning. I will also have more to say on that subject later.

Now: Had Ruburt gone to a doctor or a faith healer when we began our last group of sessions, and then in a matter of a week or so found himself able again to walk with his [typing] table across the kitchen floor, some thirteen or fourteen steps perhaps, where before three were his uncomfortable limit, he might have attributed the improvement to a doctor’s treatment or to a faith healer’s ability — but he would have been impressed. He would have been impressed also with the greater obvious motion of his feet, the feelings of release in the legs now spreading to the back and shoulders.