“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Private events of tragedy seem in a smaller context to happen without man’s knowledge or without his consent. The overly exteriorized consciousness has cut itself off so that it no longer perceives the inner order of events. The world with its wars or disasters, its illnesses or poverty, its mass or private tragedies, seems to be thrust upon man or to happen—again without his consent.

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.

Myths are far more powerful than any facts, and they carry with them the great sway of nature’s own emotional force as it is interpreted through man’s experience. Facts certainly seem to be provable in your world. Myths are generally considered to be distorted facts, interpreted by primitive minds, or the result of creative acts of the imagination. That power is little understood, much less its reasons.

(10:06.) That inner knowledge is behind all of his myths. It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. And for one-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-eight years Christianity has flourished in one way or another. For a time it fueled both the arts and political life. It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

The first Gods began the process of man’s exterior consciousness, so that the portions of nature with which he no longer identified were gradually deified, and put outside of himself. I have told you that your physical habits of perception are learned, and that the world can indeed be physically put together in different fashions. Events such as hallucinations give you hints of this.

The interweaving of “dream reality” with the world of facts, however, is precisely what causes a myth to begin with, and is the source of its tremendous power, for it combines the two realities into a construct powerful enough to charge civilizations with new vitality, and literally to reshape man’s course. Fact alone could never do that.

Historically speaking, the ancients understood man’s psychology, his psyche, far better than you do now, for they were far more aware of its context. Their identification with nature gave them a sense of man’s emotional power. They understood that dreams represented a reality as valid as the physical one, and they did not see the two worlds as separate. The early gods carried remnants of that grandeur.

Give us a moment.... As a people you are geared, say, to the exploration of the physical world. You climb mountains. It seldom occurs to you as a people that inner landscapes are as real, or that there are, say, psychological structures, usually unperceived, that are quite as real as any physical one. You are unable to see your own events as they interrelate with others. You do not understand that an idea can indeed change the world, unless you see firmly that the idea has a factual basis.

The inner landscape is no less real because you do not generally perceive it. In Framework 2 that inner landscape is the reality, and it is from that world that your physical events emerge.

If in your private subjective reality you label yourself, unthinkingly now, in too-limited a fashion, then you can see yourself for example as the isolated artist at the brunt of society, the misunderstood poet that must be protected from the world’s ways—mythic material that falls short. Such ideas can have strength only if you forget to identify yourself with the great inner order of nature, and with the physical natural world.

When you identify with nature you automatically fulfill your own world. Your dreams instantly come to life, and appear in your experience as aids and guides. You need not pit yourselves then against what you think of as a society that does not understand you, for that society falls into place as simply being one present aspect of a vaster natural world in which you are indeed firmly rooted. You can therefore naturally draw from Framework 2 all that you require.