“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: on your television screen this evening you saw a little girl (in a European country). She said that she had asked in a prayer for proof of God’s existence. After a short time an earthquake occurred (in Romania), and the child was afraid that she had caused it. She was convinced that God had answered her prayer thusly.

When consciousness becomes overly exteriorized and no longer identifies strongly with nature, then it no longer properly identifies itself with the inner nature of its own actions. One’s own actions therefore seem to be as exteriorized, or apart from consciousness, as trees or rocks seem to be. The exteriorized consciousness will always see such an event as an earthquake by viewing only its immediate, sometimes tragic, results. Those results will seem meaningless, chaotic. Men caught in such an event will question “Why should this happen to me?”

The conventionally religious will be certain that the earthquake is a punishment for sin. The scientist will see the affair as relatively neutral —an event, however, in which man is certainly a pawn, caught by chance in a catastrophe that he would otherwise most certainly avoid. The earthquake is a mass natural catastrophe, seeming then to be perpetrated upon man and his cities by an earth that certainly does not take man or his civilization into consideration.

Those data were equal in his experience to those physical data of the world, so that the two kinds of experience constantly enriched each other. Man then understood that he did form his own reality in all of its aspects, both privately and en masse, and in terms of natural earth events, as well as for example the events of his society. You cannot of course limit your world to the world of facts at any given time, though you may try to do so. That little girl’s experience with the earthquake, and her beliefs about it, have little to do with the bare facts involved. She is dealing instead with an inner world of myths.