“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:01.) However, animals do reason. They do not reason in the same areas that you do (intently). In those areas in which they do reason, they understand cause and effect quite well. Their reasoning is applied, however, to levels of activity to which your own reasoning is not applied. Therefore, often animal reasoning is not apparent to you. Animals are curious. Their curiosity is applied to areas in which you seldom apply your own.

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect. You do not need a human intellect to be aware of your own consciousness. Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man does (pause), but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended. It is self-evident.

(Long pause at 9:10.) The natural person is understood perhaps more clearly by considering any person as a child. In a fashion the child discovers its own intellect, as it discovers its own feelings. Feelings come “first.” The child’s feelings give rise to curiosity, to thoughts, to the operation of the intellect: “Why do I feel thus and so? Why is grass soft, and rock hard? Why does a gentle touch soothe me, while a slap hurts me?”

In most cases children grow up, of course (pause), although in the vast overall picture of nature (pause) a goodly proportion of individuals do indeed take other courses. They serve other functions, they have other purposes, they take part in life through a different cast of action. They affect life while themselves not completely immersed in it. They die young. They are aborted. They remain, however, an important element in life’s overall picture — part of a psychological underpainting that always affects later versions.

(9:27.) You are taught to submerge the very intuitive abilities that the intellect needs to do its proper work — for the intellect must check with the feeling portions of the self for feedback, for support, for knowledge as to biological conditions. Denied that feedback, it can spin on endlessly in frenzied dry runs. (Long pause.) At each moment, from the most microscopic levels the body (pause) in one way or another is ascertaining a constant picture of its position within physical reality. That picture is composed of millions of ever-changing smaller snapshots, as it were — or moving pictures is better — determining so many conditions, positions and relationships that they could never be described. You end up with a predominating picture of reality in any given moment — one that is the result of the activity of psychological, biological, and electromagnetic stratas. One picture is transposed upon the others, and calculations made constantly, so that all of the components that make up physical existence are met, and intersect to give you life.

One of the intellect’s main purposes is to give you a conscious choice in a world of probabilities. To do that properly the intellect is to make clear, concise decisions, on its level, of matters that are its concern, and therefore to present its own picture of reality to add to the entire construct. (Long pause.) On the one hand you have been told to identify yourselves almost completely with your intellects. On the other hand, you have been taught that the intellect, the “flower of consciousness,” is a frail, vulnerable adjunct — again, a chance creation, without meaning and without support — without support because you believe that “beneath it” lie “primitive, animalistic, bloody instincts,” against which reason must exert what strength it has.

(9:46.) Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity¹ — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellects alone, but to enlarge your scopes of identity. Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.

(Pause.) With Ruburt: The new orientation is bringing results, and the results do appear effortlessly.² The affair with Mitzi (one of our cats) did involve action at other levels — a magical orientation. Ruburt is doing well. Have him remember that creative activity goes on within him all of the time, and he is often most active precisely when he is not aware of it. He is only aware of those moments when creative activity surges into his conscious awareness, and by then much of the “work” has already been done.

(Last Saturday, on the 23rd, I bought another pair of flea collars. Mitzi in the meantime had become thoroughly miserable, and I had determined that I was going to get a collar on her somehow. A friend had suggested using a towel to prevent her scratching. When I set out to do the job that afternoon, Jane suggested using catnip on the towel. After some coaxing on the back porch, I got Mitzi rolling around in the catnip on the towel, but only half succeeded in wrapping her up. I carried her squirming into the kitchen. Jane was doing the dishes. I knelt on the floor holding the cat, while Jane mentally tried to soothe her struggles — and I succeeded in getting the flea collar in place around her neck. Actually, Mitzi didn’t resist half as much as I’d feared she would. I’d thought I might totally alienate her this time if she fought too hard, but such was not the case. Jane said she’d sent Mitzi a stream of suggestions while I coaxed her into letting me put the collar on her. Everything worked well. I fed her a few times that afternoon, and succeeded in making friends okay. Mitzi hasn’t tried to get the collar off. It has a medicinal smell. Now, several days later — as I type this session on Wednesday night — she seems to feel much better.)

“Anyhow, have been applying the Magical Approach to a variety of other areas, household annoyances, with some gratifying results. Mitzi, our cat, has been loaded with fleas. Rob tried to get a collar on her a month ago and there was such a hassle, he gave up, got mad at the cat, and vice versa. Yesterday he tried again, both of us remembering the Magical Approach; me saying mentally that the affair would take place easily, etc. Rob did get the thing on the cat with much less difficulty; she didn’t even seem to resent it. Granted, this might have happened anyhow. The point is that the odds didn’t seem to go in that direction and that I do think … we did mental work at other levels that resulted in that benign event … as if before we gave cluttered orders for an event to take place.

“Several aches or whatever in various parts of my body came and vanished as I used this approach … where before that sort of thing used to last longer. Have been very relaxed; still lay down two or three times a day — do notes, read, rest … yesterday wrote letter to the editor about my mention in the ‘miracle’ article in [the well-known] psychology magazine.