“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The approach that you use in the production of art is instinctively “magical.” It is quite natural for children to play creatively with the various states of their own consciousnesses, to explore the “us-ness” of a seemingly single identity. They play at being historic known characters. They play at being trees or animals or stars. They play at being all of those things. They understand the multiplicity that resides within the idea of single personhood.

From their parents they learn to pare down the dimensions of their own practically accepted personhood. To that extent they cut themselves off from large portions of their own subjectivity. The “us-ness” of a single identity is experienced less and less. It exists, nevertheless. (Long pause.) I told you that at certain levels contradictions would certainly seem to appear, but the us-ness of the self represents an important psychic characteristic. The child’s explorations of its environment are in a fashion quite different from its later adolescent explorations of the world. A child’s curiosity goes out in all directions. In a fashion it psychologically multiplies itself as it goes. Its consciousness spreads out to include all that it perceives, while still retaining a sense of its own singularity.

To some extent, particularly at certain levels, that participation brings about a far greater sense of sympathy and power than adults ever realize, particularly in your cultural times. The child does not have to cry out or address or search for a particular kind of God, because it understands through such subjective behavior that its own precious singularity is also a part of the greater us-ness of all other creatures, and that its singularity is automatically assured, as is its own us-ness within that larger context.

The child understands that it is itself, and yet that it is simultaneously a portion of its parents, alive within their lives (intently), as well as within its own. In calling out to them, the child calls out to a quality of its own us-ness. The child expects the parents to come to its support in the same way that it expects its own fingers and toes to support its various positions and decisions. The child understands that in a certain fashion (underlined) the parents are an extension of its own identity. At the same time it knows that the parents are equally independent, and that its own identity is a part of extensions that are the parents’.

The concepts themselves are difficult verbally to express. (Pause at 9:32.) The children participate in their own dimensions of natural divinity to a large-enough extent that they feel themselves automatically supported within the presence of an ever-acting comprehensive trust and love. It is only when the us-ness of the self begins to fade that a sense of relative personal helplessness begins to mar the picture of subjective experience.

At that point the us-ness is ever projected outward. The dimensions of the self begin to shrink enough, and it is at that point, in your terms, that the search for a private God or religion begins to emerge. Everyone has at least some nebulous memories of the earlier state of comprehension, however.

(Very long pause at 9:37.) Give us a moment.... The creative abilities in one way or another deal with the us-ness, with the inner intersections that everywhere occur within the most singular seeming aspects of your reality. The creative abilities join the creator and created (long pause) in a behavior in which for example, now, the painting that is to be affects the creator of it before its inception and before its form, so that the two are connected in a kind of behavior in which at deeper levels the ideas of cause and effect can have no meaning. The painting-to-be pushes against the awareness of its creator (all intently).