“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

When a government is paranoid, it even begins to cut down on the freedom of its own peoples, or to frown upon behavior that in freer times would be quite acceptable. The same applies to the conscious mind in that situation. Now the people might finally revolt, or they will take certain steps to see that their freedom is restored, and so the body’s cells will do the same.

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.

(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.)