“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

NATURE AS MAN’S CARETAKER. NATURAL MAGICAL REASONING AND TRUST.

Now (pause): Man likes to think of himself as the caretaker of nature and the world. It is closer to the truth, however, to say — in that regard, at least — that nature is man’s caretaker; or that man exists, physically speaking, as the result of the graceful support of nature and all of its other species. Without those other species, man as you know him would not exist, not without the continuous cooperation of those species with each other, and their interrelationships with the environment.

(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.

So what we want, obviously, is to ensure that the conscious mind, with its reasoning processes, can make proper adjustments about the nature of the world and the individual citizens within it. I will return later to the purposes of man’s conscious mind in nature, and part of that discussion will fall in our book (Dreams).

(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.”

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.

(9:48 P.M. For several seconds Seth and I stared at each other with some amusement. After she came out of trance Jane told me that she had picked up from Seth that he liked the way my painting of “the dog” — Gus, from my dream of August 16 — was coming. I finished the thin underpainting for it this morning and must now wait a few days for it to dry. In the meantime I’m going back to work on my impressionistic tree painting and the one of the dream man and boy in blue.)