“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 thinking mind to a large degree directs the activity of great spontaneous forces, [with] energy-cellular organization being, say, the captain (pause) of the body’s great energy sources. The reasoning mind defines, makes judgments, deals with the physical objects of the world, and also with the cultural interpretations current in its time.

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.

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).