“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(2. Last Thursday night, kidding around with Frank Longwell, Jane said I could have all the reincarnational material on my own lives that I wanted, but that she wasn’t interested in her own. So I asked that we get some info on my Roman captain life, since we’d been talking about that one.

(3. During a conversation Jane and I had wondered why the members of the human species were so woefully ignorant of the internal structure of their own bodies. Not that we wanted or needed conscious control—but why didn’t we have the conscious visual knowledge of the workings of our various bodily parts, be they heart, liver, or whatnot?

(Another question I’d meant to ask but forgot to list, had to do with our failure to do certain things, regardless of how often Seth mentioned them: viz.—using the hot towels, trying for the library, etc. Seth does go into those questions tonight.)

In your terms, early man felt his body to be a living, independent extension of the earth itself, and of the land. His head, to him, was like space or the sky. His feet were like moving roots. He believed that his feelings were like the world’s winds that swept through his body. To him, his spirit was inside his skin. Blood flowed through him with refreshing life, as water flowed through the rivers, refreshing the land. In your terms of course he had a heart and liver, but those terms are still arbitrary.

Early man related to his insides, then, symbolically in a way that is now quite outside of your comprehension. He knew he needed rain and sun and food as the land did. He felt so at one with the land, he and his body, that “a conscious knowledge of it,” it in your terms not only would have inhibited his identification with nature, but his agility within it.

Give us a moment.... For example, in your culture some people feel that there is a struggle between their hearts and their heads, a conflict between emotion and reason, in other words. In many cases, now, meaning not in all, such feelings set up quite invisible but definite alienations, or lacks of balance, between the heart and the brain, so that delicate relationships between them are upset. Those relationships affect physical organs, but the medical profession is not used to thinking in terms of relationships that cannot appear under a microscope.

The body is given mechanistic qualities. The heart is a pump, for example, but everywhere there are examples where people act in an entirely different fashion. Medical men are taught that certain muscles or organs do thus and so. People who should have died ten years ago by such prognoses, still live, while others who it seems should have lived, died.

Give us a moment.... As to Ruburt: the relationships between his bodily parts are being corrected. I am not speaking of stance here, but of those invisible relationships mentioned earlier, for he felt earlier as if he were literally a self divided, so that one part shouted discipline, and one shouted spontaneity. One shouted go ahead, one shouted slow down, be cautious, and these feelings of separateness were reflected in the body.

There have been considerable changes even since our last session, and I hope you have noted them. Feelings and emotion caused tensions under certain conditions that are not necessarily physically apparent, but that change the body. In your terms the body grows in time. So do beliefs. Ruburt is completely changing emotional and intellectual beliefs of long standing. His poor mobility did not exist alone, but reached back to an archaeology, say, of beliefs that affected his sinuses, jaw pressure, and so forth.

You have changed your own beliefs. This is reflected in your household, but you did not have Ruburt’s backlog, so to speak. Your table (pointing) is an excellent idea. The further changes in his position will take place far easier. Reinforce that idea of safety, and comfort him, as you have.

It should play far more a part then than it does in your lives, whether it amounts to a quiet half hour, simply lying together; but touch is vital. You see how your cat needed it (who stood in Jane’s lap as she spoke for Seth).

If he feels that he has not done enough that day before his nap, he then compares himself to those who come home from work around five, after “putting in a good day.” If he has worked enough in his terms the comparison is not so bothersome. Beside this, there is sometimes a feeling of isolation, since you nap separately, and at times he has felt that to be a rejection—not in deep terms, but important enough so that that feeling is combined with the first one mentioned.

Noises outside the bedroom, of neighborhood activity, sometimes add to this, making him think he should be out in the world in a more gregarious, competitive manner, so he feels more isolated from other people and the community also at such times, as a result of the Darwinian concepts mentioned in our last session. If all of these issues click in one day, then his mood is more severe, but usually one or two operate.

You have not done so yet, and that means something also. The same applies to the hot towels, and to the extent to which you are willing, even in small ways, to alter your way of life, to achieve desired ends. It means something that you do not make love more often, also, and I am not necessarily referring to hours of rollicking passion, either, but to an allotted time to the simple pleasure of body and mind together, and to a kind of communication that is important for its own sake.

(11:21.) You watch television. Perhaps this is an odd suggestion from me, perhaps not even practical, but a television set in the bedroom also invites intimacy. Be more creative in your living patterns.