“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.

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.

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.)

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.

(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.”

(“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.”

(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.)