“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As human beings we live suspended between life and death. We share this with the animals. It is a condition of our existence. But animals, as far as we know, do not anticipate their own death, or wonder about their status before birth. Their present is the moment.

We are aware of past, present, and future—a series of moments strung out, it seems, one before the other. What if this series is only part of a larger present, a more spacious “moment” of which we are unaware?

Physically we can only handle so much data at once, since we are dependent in that respect upon our neurological structure. Each sensation we have received since our birth is still intact in the subconscious. We push such details “back” so that we can handle the present. We focus our attention upon a certain group of events—the “present” ones—and then drop them into the subconscious where they seem to fall away and become distant. If we could keep our attention on these past events and still concentrate on the present ones simultaneously, then our sense of present time would be immeasurably enlarged.

Since he is responsive, he must be affected by his relationship to us (though perhaps not to the extent that we are affected by him!). There is no doubt that my own personality has grown as it accommodated itself to the Seth experience. I had to learn to handle more stimuli than ever before, and to maintain overall stability as I learned to develop latent abilities. This certainly involved strains and stresses as well as rewards: but none that couldn’t be resolved with a sense of humor and some common sense. When I feel I need a rest, I take a break, which Seth respects with good grace.

One night before our regular Wednesday session Rob and I were pretty upset over the state of the world in general. We sat talking and Rob wondered aloud why we behaved as we did. “What real sense or purpose is behind it all?” he said. “Granted some part of us knows what we’re doing, still we seem hell-bent on destroying the planet, if not through war, then through pollution.”

Among other things, Seth Two said: “The human race is a stage through which various forms of consciousness travel. … Before you can be allowed into systems of reality that are more extensive and open, you must first learn to handle energy and see, through physical materialization, the concrete result of thought and emotion. As a child forms mud pies from dirt, so you form your civilizations out of thoughts and emotions, and then see what you have created.