“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own. They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital. By the time you are an adult, however, you have been taught to disconnect your identity from your feelings as much as possible, and to think of your personhood in terms of your intellectual orientation. Your identity seems to be in your head. Your feelings and your mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory. You try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

(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.

Some answers come when you are ready for them. Then they come naturally, as a matter of understanding and comprehension. The question of life’s tragedies still cannot be answered satisfactorily at the level at which either of you — or anyone else — is currently asking it. I can give hints and clues and explanations that are quite valid within that context (intently). (Long pause.)

The kind of orientation I am speaking of represents the truest picture I can give you of man’s natural relationship with himself and the world. This is how it works. This is physical.