“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.

(Jane was so relaxed by session time, so “out of it,” that she didn’t think she could manage a session. I told her to do as she pleased; I hadn’t asked her to have Seth say anything about me. She decided to try for the session. As I sat on the couch Billy, who is much improved now, curled himself up half in my lap, so that writing as Seth spoke was more than a little difficult. Yet when Jane went into trance her delivery as Seth was fast and steady:)

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.

(Mitzi was still playing on the stairs.)

(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.

(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.”

(“I guess that’s it,” Jane laughed as she paused. “I don’t know what it was. I guess it’s Seth—one of those in-between things....”

(Billy was still curled up against my side. And even now, on Friday night, he’s curled up on my lap as I type these notes.

(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.)