“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane, for her part, said she didn’t particularly feel like having a session tonight, that she was “doing it just to do it.” I suggested that by all means she have it. She’s been feeling better at times, so our new program is getting some kind of results.)

(With some dry amusement:) Now: I myself have heard it said that all other species preserve nature, while man has a propensity for destroying it.

I have myself heard it said that other creatures behave with a natural grace, save man. I have myself heard it said that all of nature is (pause) content unto itself save man, who is filled with discontent. Such thoughts follow “naturally” the dictums of so-called rational thought. When you think such thoughts, you think of them at the most strained level of intellectual speculation — that is, the thoughts seem self-evident to the intellect that is forced to operate by itself, relatively speaking, divorced from the self’s other faculties. It then does indeed seem that man is somehow apart from nature — or worse, an ungrateful blight, almost a parasite, upon the face of the planet.

That view itself is a symptom of the intellect’s difficulty. In the position in which your culture places the intellect, it does (underlined) see itself quite alone, separated both from other portions of the personality, from other creatures, and from nature itself. Therefore science, for example, says that creatures — except for man — operate by blind instinct, and that term is meant to explain all of the complicated behavior of the other species. Therefore the gulf between man and animals, the intellect and nature, seems to deepen.

When you believe that the worst will happen you must always be on guard. In your culture people use the term “intellect” almost like a weapon to protect themselves against impending disaster. They must be alert for dangers of all kinds. They begin to collect evidence of danger so that any other kind of orientation to life seems foolhardy, and to be a realist means in that framework to look out for the worst.

First of all, if you realize that the intellect itself is a part of nature, a part of the natural person, a part of magical processes, then you need not overstrain it, force it to feel isolated, or put it in a position in which paranoid tendencies develop. It is itself supported, as your intuitions are, by life’s magical processes. It is supported by the greater energy that gave you and the world birth. That power is working in the world, and in the world of politics, as it is in the world of nature, since you make that distinction.

The magical approach takes it for granted, in the simplest terms, that the life of any individual will fulfill itself, will develop and mature, that the environment and the individual are uniquely suited and work together. This sounds very simple. In verbal terms, however, those are the beliefs (if you will) of each c-e-l-l (spelled). They are imprinted in each chromosome, in each atom. They provide a built-in faith that pervades each living creature, each snail, each hair on your head. Those ingrained beliefs are, of course, biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

The idea of heaven, for all of its distortions, has operated as a theoretical framework, assuring the intellect of its survival. Science has believed to the contrary in the utter annihilation of the intellect after death, and since man had by then placed all of his identification with the intellect, this was a shattering blow to it. It denied man a necessary biological imperative (all intently).

All of these reasons lie beneath man’s mass problems, and apply in each life. I want to note, again, that Ruburt earlier decided to bank on his intellect as a child, rather than upon beauty, as he felt his mother had. In his case also, as given in the past, he felt that the feminine qualities were those opposed to intellectual development. (Pause.) He was gifted intuitively and intellectually, however, and naturally was propelled toward growth in both areas — areas that he felt stressed contradictory rather than complementary characteristics.²

(Long pause.) He also felt that the questioning power of the intellect was not just one of its functions — which it is — but its primary purpose, which it is not. In your terms the intellect’s primary function is to make clear deductions and distinctions involving the personality’s relationship with the world. Your society, however, has indeed considered the rational approach to be the masculine-favored one — so Ruburt had an additional reason in that regard to be such a proponent of the rational approach. All of the beliefs connected with the sex were of course erroneous, but they were part and parcel of that “rational” framework itself.

(9:44.) It is certainly too simple to say what I am going to say, yet it is almost as if you would be better off turning the entire rational approach upside down, taking it for granted that all of its assumptions were false, for they are indeed more false than true (intently). Again, you see, the divisions are arbitrary on your part. The intellect is, again, the result of highly spontaneous processes of which it itself knows nothing, and the intuitions that are considered so undisciplined and unreasonable are based upon calculations far more spectacular than those of which the conscious mind can conceive. The intellect could not follow them, so the distinctions are not basic: They are the result of beliefs and habitual usage. Therefore, of course, I speak of them separately, as you think of them.

The magical approach takes it for granted that the human being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the animals do, whether or not those purposes are understood. (Pause.) The magical approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow. The magical approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally. Overall, that approach operates in your world. If it did not, there would be no world. If the worst was bound to happen, as the scientists certainly think, even evolution, in their terms, would have been impossible, of course — a nice point to put somewhere (all intently).

In your dream³ you were, of course, in the process of forming new ideas about the nature of the magical self (through my art) and also in your way working that idea out through imagery. The dream is above all an example of “work” being done at other levels of awareness.

Ruburt’s [recent] mental conversation with “Mary,”⁴ and your own dream about Mary with the sketchbook sheets⁵ — all of these experiences are indications of the exquisite kind of reasoning that goes on at the levels of awareness that are usually considered unreasonable. That kind of material enriches the intellect and reassures it.

(“These comments about Seth’s abilities seem obvious when they’re considered as I’ve just described them, yet I don’t think I’ve thought of what Seth can do in just that way before. They make his performances all the more remarkable. See the material after 9:44 in the session of August 13, about the intellect and the ‘undisciplined and unreasonable’ intuitions. Actually, that whole session applies here.”)

“‘Have you ever noticed,’ I said to Jane the other day, ‘that everything on earth remains the same except human activity?’ Jane has heard it all before. It’s one of my favorite notions, and one from which I draw — with my own kind of perverse humor, it seems — great comfort and stability.

“I could list hundreds of examples of what I mean. This is one of those obvious ideas that seem childish once it’s thought of. I don’t care whether or not it’s a profound thought; it has meaning for me. But as far as I know, we humans are the only species that’s obsessed with ‘change’, and ‘progress’, and ‘controlling or mastering nature’; with learning about our past and with charting our future. We strive toward an impossible, or at least rosy, future in which we will have met all of our challenges, so that we’ll live in some sort of unreal wonderland on earth. What do we do next — or will we give up on that idea too? Perhaps we’ll spend all of our time contemplating each other!

“The rabbits in our neighborhood would continue to live as usual without our help, although they might miss nibbling upon the leafy vegetables in the local gardens. The fish and all of the complex minutiae of the local river bottoms would go on living as they always have. The deer I see in the woods north of the hill house would continue to bound through the brush and among the trees. They’d live the same as ever, since it’s illegal for us to feed them — although they do like to move down the hillside at night and sample certain shrubs we have kindly planted about our houses.

“In my darker moods I find myself thinking that I love the earth and everything upon it except the increasingly destructive activities of human beings — and sometimes I wonder about the human beings themselves! I love the deserts and forests, the oceans and rivers and lakes of the earth, the plains and the poles, the marshes and the mountains. And I know that in the Puerto Rico trench in the Atlantic Ocean, life in the sea at more than 8,000 feet down goes on just as it has for many millennia. It’s been like that for all of the sea creatures and the flora of the oceans. It’s been like that for all of the interwoven life forms of the poles and the tropics, of the deserts and woodlands and prairies. Each species lives within its environment, whatever its conditions. And I think that in its way each life form must know that and love its home, and has no desire to change or destroy it.

“Were there acid rains and dead lakes in Europe in the 1700s, for instance? There may have been, for all I know. …”

“I was not conscious of my age, 61, in the dream, nor do I remember anything about being committed to draw a daily strip also. I had a much younger assistant who reminded me of Tom Lantini, an artist friend who had been a year behind me in Sayre High, our hometown school in Sayre, Pennsylvania. In the dream, I’d left certain areas blank in the panels making up the Sunday page, and my nameless assistant had done the art to fill in those places. My main character, a male who wore a tight-fitting Superman-type costume with a flowing cape, occupied a space several panels high right in the middle of the page — quite a daring concept for a comic layout. I knew the character type well because in the early 1940s, in ‘real’ life, I’d been one of the artists who had drawn the very popular comic-book hero, Captain Marvel. My dream character stood confidently facing the reader — except that I’d omitted drawing his head! My assistant had drawn the head, though, on a small separate piece of board, and protected it with a piece of tracing paper. I thought the head was too small, but well done, quite youthful with curly black hair and handsome features, as one would expect such a magical character to have. I also saw that the head was almost too youthful for the strong physique of the character I’d drawn, although I wasn’t critical of this. All that remained was for the printer to fit the head and the body together. I sat at the drawing table examining the assistant’s work.”

“Difficult to recall, and what I do recall makes no sense to me at all. In vivid color: I dreamed that Jane and I were eating at a little table in an open-air restaurant or cafe-type setting. It was a beautiful summer day. Our friend Mary came up to us. She was by herself and I don’t recall her saying anything to us. She was carrying a large sketch pad, perhaps a 22-by-30-inch size. One would expect the pages of the pad to be white, ready for drawing. Instead, as Mary lifted the cover of the pad, holding the pad out for Jane and me to see, we saw that the top page was covered by a lovely large floral pattern of leaves and flowers, as one might see on bedsheets these days. I examined several pages of Mary’s pad and saw that all of them were covered by the same design, in reds and greens, etc. The pattern made the pages of the pad quite useless for their ordinary purpose. I woke up several times with this dream in mind, telling myself to remember it.”

“As you can see, the dream states all this far more simply and concisely than I’m able to!”