“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A note: The Democratic National Convention is in its third day. As I typed away after supper, I could tell that Jane was listening to the speeches on TV in the living room. Then I realized I’d goofed: Last Saturday, our local paper had carried a short article to the effect that a psychic we’d heard of had predicted recently that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia would obtain the Democratic nomination for president, after a deadlock between Carter and Kennedy developed at the convention. I read the article and called it to Jane’s attention. I’d meant to save it, but instead the paper ended up bundled up with the trash for pickup this morning. Since the Carter forces won the fight to keep the convention “closed” during its first, Monday session, this assures Carter the nomination on the first ballot. Thus the psychic is wrong in the prediction, which evidently obtained national circulation.

(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.

“‘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.