“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.

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.

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.

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.)

Self-disapproval is always detrimental, so it does not help, as you know, to become angry at yourself. These negative beliefs are the ones we are trying to combat in our own work. They are the beliefs you are trying to combat as well. Therefore, do not be angry with yourself, when you fall susceptible to beliefs that are so paramount in your world. Be thankful that you can recognize them.

(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.

(She thought the information would be part of this book. Another idea—“It’s no big deal”—was that for centuries man thought the universe was created for man, and everything else revolved around man.

(“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.”

(“Man’s own subjective reality, in all of its manifestations [pause] is the only one real “tool” that will give him any indication of his own greater existence, and therefore of his own origins and that of the universe. The patterns for all of man’s work appear first in the mind, and the fragments of man’s individual and joint dreams fall together faultlessly to form the mosaic of individual and mass events.”

(As we went to bed Wednesday night, I told Jane that I thought the material on the body consciousness was excellent—the kind of thing we’d never heard before. It reminded me also of a comment Seth had made months—years—ago, to the effect that he had reams of material, untouched, on the body consciousness. I’d always been interested in asking him about that, had we the time.)