“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After her visit I began to feel a resurgence of the same uneasy, even panicky, chest symptoms that I’d experienced on occasion before while Leonard has been sick. These sensations persisted through the evening; they certainly felt physical in origin, even while I tried to tell myself to forget the whole thing. I was mad at myself. I felt badly as I took out the garbage, went for a walk, etc, and when I went to bed I nearly had to get up again because the feelings intensified. But I soon fell asleep all right. However, in the morning the symptoms returned as soon as I woke up, and have lasted at various pitches of intensity through the day. By session time they were somewhat diminished, but were very inhibiting during the day, making me hesitate to do the things I’d ordinarily do without a second thought, such as drive to the post office to mail Jane’s intro for Sue’s book Conversations With Seth.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

(By now, speaking, Jane had fallen into a mode of dictating to me as I wrote; this was different than her simply telling me something in ordinary terms. It wasn’t Seth speaking, but her own delivery was quite precise and unhesitating, and she paused just as Seth did to give me time to write down her words. So from here on I’ll put her material in quotes:

(“Man was created by God, so that nature only had meaning in relationship to man—man was dominant. Then science threw out the entire thesis: Man wasn’t at the center of the universe anymore. The universe wasn’t created by God, and man and nature alike had no meaning, so that thematically man went from being the center of the universe, a special creature, created by God, to a meaningless conglomeration of atoms and molecules, and a meaningless universe, and that philosophical drop was shattering to man. So he’s now actually in the process of forming a new model of the universe between those two extremes—one that recognizes that each portion of the universe has meaning in relationship to all of its other parts, but that the meaning can’t necessarily be deduced by an examination of exterior appearances, but only in so far as man examines the nature of his own consciousness in its relationship to other species—to nature itself, to the objective universe, and begins to understand the vital nature of interrelatedness, within which the process of divinity is actualized.”

(10:24. “It’s weird when I do that. It’s fascinating, but it’s really weird....” Then: “It’s almost like a dream. I could go right on.” Then with another laugh:

(“Each individual mind is a storehouse of knowledge from which each person can draw, but you have been taught that all knowledge comes from the exterior world, and from the stimuli that arises from it. But all knowledge is originally direct knowing—a kind of molecular mentality, in which the atoms and the molecules give their own kind of intuitive translation of knowledge possessed by all units of consciousness —for all of the knowledge of the universe is inherently contained within even the smallest, most microscopic of its parts.”

(10:29 PM. “I know that’s from Seth,” Jane said. “I’m sure it’s from a line of his that I got in the john the other day, but why does it come through that way? Well,” she said, pleased, as she moved over to the couch, “that’s one of life’s little surprises. Maybe next time we can ask Seth how come I got it that way.”