“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal—alert, above all optimistic, focused in the present, as you understand it, glorifying in motion and in rest, in excitement and in quietude. The body seeks to use itself. The body consciousness enjoys its own expression.

Mitzi, running up and down the stairs (as she was doing even now, chasing her wadded-up paper ball), is an example of the love of excitement and activity with which both man and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, loved. They react in their own ways to suggestion to the tone of your voice, to your expectations of their behavior, to your treatment of them—and in that regard your body consciousness responds to your conscious treatment of it. For this analogy alone, meant to further develop your joint understanding of the relationship between your conscious mind and your body, we will make further points. Think of your body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal. Think of the human animal, only let the word “animal” carry all of those beneficial colorations that you hold when you think of other species.

If you treated your body as well as you treated your animals—your pets —there would be little difficulty, relatively speaking. There is no need here to again outline the barrage of negative cultural beliefs with which indeed your civilization has an overabundance.

There is certainly no point either in belaboring the fact that you are still, individually and jointly, affected by some of them. Animals and your own body consciousness have little concept of age. (Pause.) In a fashion almost impossible to describe, their consciousnesses—the body’s and the animals’—are “young” in each moment of their existences. I must perhaps here clear up a point: I am taking it for granted that you understand that I am referring to the “mental attitude” of animals and of the body consciousness, for they both do possess their own mental attitudes—psychological colorations—and above all, emotional states.

You can learn much about your own body consciousness, and therefore to some extent about the natural man, by observing the behavior of your pets or other animals, and you can to some extent learn from their behavior, and therefore to some extent counteract any susceptibility to negative beliefs. I have given some material like this in the past—but on such occasions try to return to the moment, to the present. Perceive it as clearly as you can from the standpoint of the stimuli present before you. Mentally say “This is my present experience now.” Then, if you find yourself exaggerating any unpleasantness within that moment, and projecting it into the future, you stop and say “That is not a part of this present moment. In the terms of my bodily reality, those dire imaginings, whatever they are, are not real. My body can only respond to the present. I will not overload that present by borrowing trouble that in this moment has no reality” (all very emphatically). Such imaginings frighten the body consciousness, as you might frighten an animal.

Every animal wants to know what is going on in the area of its perception. That is a normal reaction. People are the same way. That is why they chase fire trucks, so to speak—not necessarily because they are looking for tragedies, but because of life’s great curiosity, and also because life enjoys variety and the unusual. It is quite natural then, for example, to want to watch the news on television, and in the same way and for the same reason.

In any case, the body consciousness innately makes that distinction. It knows that it is related to those events, but it is also impeccably realistic in animal terms. If the skirmish is not at the front door or in the neighborhood, the animal consciousness simply watches all with a wary or amused mental attitude.

That is animal sense. The conscious mind, however, with its cultural beliefs and fears, usually cut off to a large degree from the animal wisdom, feels as if it is in the midst of a battle. It instantly exaggerates any dire circumstances, because it has been told that to exaggerate a problem and worrying about it is sane adult behavior.

Any normal process or feeling of the body can then be magnified or dwelled upon until it seems to provide only further proof of the same fears—which are then projected into the future. Some few people in your world expect to work productively through their 90’s at hard work, and do so. Not because hard work keeps them alive and healthy, but because their beliefs do. They are kind to their bodies. They give their bodies (pause) credit for having an animal’s good sense, vitality and endurance. They do not think their bodies are out to get them.

Remember the natural man. Remember his animal characteristics. Ask him what is wrong when you are bothered with symptoms, and he will most certainly tell you that you are frightening him by dire imaginings that do not exist in his world.

He understands the nature of death, as in their way all animals do, but he does not understand frightening pictures of imagined illnesses that do not exist in his present, or worries about death that is not as yet to be encountered. Again, he is like all animals, filled himself with unbounded, natural biological optimism, and when that biological support is allowed its freedom, you have people performing into the very latest of years, with vitality, agility, and an elegance that only age can provide.

Now Ruburt has managed to find a platform, lately, that has allowed him a good deal of freedom from his usual worries. This has allowed more body relaxation, and agility. In exercises his legs are indeed more flexible, his knees more agile, and relaxation of mind is the key, for it allows the body to express its own animal wisdom.

(10:12 PM. Jane came out of trance quickly, but before I could even tell her how good I thought the session was, she now told me that lately she’s been picking up from Seth that animal consciousness is turned inward to form the civilization of nature, and that ours is turned outward into our physical civilizations—but that ours have to be built upon that civilization of nature.