“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

MAN AND OTHER SPECIES. MISTAKES AS CORRECTIVE ACTION. DEFINITION OF THE MAGICAL APPROACH.

(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.

In those terms (underlined), it is quite as truthful to say — as I have said before — that man’s intellect is also instinctive. He begins thinking at once. He cannot help but use his intellect. The intellect, again, operates magically, spontaneously, automatically. Its most keen reasoning processes rise as a result of that natural magical action (deliberately.

(Pause.) The intellect has been taught to divorce itself from its source. It realizes in that regard a sense of powerlessness, for to some extent it is philosophically cut off from its own source of power. When it looks, therefore, at the world of political events, the problems seem insoluble. Man makes many decisions that may seem quite wrong to the intellect because of its belief systems, and because it is so cut off from other sources of information. A goodly number of those mistaken decisions, or “poor moves,” often represent self-corrective actions, decisions taken on knowledge not consciously perceived, but this escapes your consciousness.

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