“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Ann Kraky visited us at supper time last night. She brought with her a batch of papers Leonard Yaudes had saved for us; naturally our talk revolved around Leonard’s recent heart bypass operation—see the opening notes for sessions 894-97, for example, and my own reactions to Leonard’s situation.

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 news watching—which does satisfy a natural need—you also run into a barrage of cultural beliefs and attitudes that are secondary. They are secondary in that they are interpretations placed upon events. The events come first. The body consciousness, watching the news, would think—if it thought as you do—“What activity, what commotion, what excitement (almost laughing), what a conglomeration of smells and sights, what a congregation of my fellows, running and chasing, rising and falling, even living and dying. What a sensual barrage of activity—and how juicy it all is, since, relatively speaking (underlined), I sit here in my cozy cave, gnawing my supper bone, peacefully, with a rug at my feet. My belly full and my bed nearby.” (All with gusto and emphasis.)

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.

(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.

(“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.”