“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The bare ground episode concerned a small experience I had as I walked into the kitchen before taking my nap. I glanced out the window and saw the ground bare of snow, and thought that I wouldn’t have to shovel snow. Immediately I began to feel light sensations of anxiety in my chest. Next I began to remind myself of Seth’s material in the last three private sessions—to live in the present and stop projecting into the future, that my body didn’t deserve to be treated that way, and didn’t understand such musings. The sensations went away, and I napped peacefully.)

Now: You are coming along again. The instance you mentioned, about the bare ground, became a learning experience, because you are beginning to understand the processes involved. Gradually you can change events that once led to “negative behavior” so that they then stand for small graduation exercises, and you are in the process of doing so.

[...] You are told more or less that you can go faster without harm, yet the dream itself poses a question, for it does not seem that you actually cover the ground to the red light at Hoffman Street any faster. The question is why, of course; if you have been given permission to go faster, then why have you and Ruburt not covered the physical ground faster, or why do you still have problems? [...]

(Pause.) The trooper, elevated from the ground in the car dream, was another dream version carrying the theme further, though it actually occurred, I believe, before the God dream (the morning before). [...]

[...] You actually interpreted it in more mundane terms than was meant, and because you so interpreted it, the end result was that you did not seem to cover the ground any faster than others.

[...] This is directly caused by the fact that you suspect such ideas as these, beneficial on theoretical grounds, but quite impractical in your actuality.

[...] The electrical currents are not working to our advantage; this being a peculiar circumstance, incidentally, having to do with a changed ionization of the surface of the ground, that sometimes occurs about this season. [...]

[...] It is the altered ground ionization, somewhat peculiar to this season, that causes the difficulty.

[...] Beneath our living room windows, a carpenter pounded on an outside door frame as he repaired damage done to the ground floor of the house by the flood of last June [see the 613th session in Chapter One]. [...]

[...] The body knows how to handle “natural” drugs coming directly from the earth — whether ground or boiled, minced or steamed. [...]

[...] Probabilities involve you with a rich psychological growth and development, present but not observable in your “home ground.” [...]

[...] They are the ground rules of your reality—but not the ground rules of all realities or of all probabilities. [...] I have said his feet touch the ground but not the flames. [...]

In a manner of speaking, the man’s feet touch the ground but they do not touch the fire. [...]

(Jane didn’t have much to say about the map simile, but thought the ground crack idea pertinent. While sitting in the sun, smoking the one cigarette she had with her—it is shown in the sketch, which means she smoked it after I finished the drawing—she looked for a bare spot of ground against which to put the smoke out. In doing so she realized that the ground was quite dry, and that we needed more rain.

(“The sort of lines for example that a map would have to indicate small roads, or the lines like cracks in a dry ground.” [...] The drawing is composed of thin pencil lines in part at least, and these could in the abstract represent small roads on a map, or lines like cracks in dry ground.

The building (eyes open) has a resemblance to an English-type mansion, or large building of this sort, set in fine grounds. [...]

Now this whole self is completely unique, yet the energy that composes it is a part of the energy that also is the ground of being, for all other consciousnesses. Therefore when you are true to yourself, when you materialize these paintings clearly, there is also (Jane pointed at me emphatically eyes open wide) within them a ground of knowledge, intuition and being, that is instantly felt by all other individuals.

This is what makes a painting great, the validity of the inner ground of being within them, interpreted in highly individual ways. [...]

run for dry ground.

[...] My position was at ground level. [...]

[...] For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes⁴ of the Roman army. [...]

[...] First, until now my internal perceptions have staged themselves like old silent films; second, the sound itself was quite unusual: The clustered troops on the ground were emitting a low rhythmic chanting or wailing. [...]

[...] A shadow of a tree cools the ground. [...]

Physically, an oak tree may cast a rich deep shadow upon the ground. [...]

[...] The physical world has buildings in it that you manufacture — that is, they do not spring up naturally from the ground itself. [...]

(Last night, April 12, 1964, I had a brief but very vivid dream, in which I saw one of the big branches of the tree in front of Stamp’s house, around the corner from us, fall to the ground.

At one level of your being there is a common ground where body consciousness merges with that higher consciousness from which your own identity springs. This is the ground of your being where soul and flesh meet, both in time and out of it.

(We’ve had a series of brilliant warm days this month, and the ground is bare of snow. [...]

[...] To you this apartment house and its grounds are considered in terms of land, and dwelling. [...] You have not been able to take advantage of the yard or the ground available as positive things of joy and refreshment, and have therefore been denied an extra advantage from this place, and the conditions that Ruburt has enjoyed.

[...] I do not know what he was to do on the street, or ground level, with the notebooks. [...]

[...] And it doesn’t matter how it comes, as long as it’s honest—through our “earning” it in the conventional way, or whether we find it on the ground or it falls out of the sky, or someone gives it to us, or it comes through insurance, or whatever. [...]

[...] Sticks were placed on the ground in those approximate locations as extensions of the rays in the eyes. [...]

[...] And by the pressure of the ivory image upon the earth, the months were also told and it sank into the ground, little by little. [...]

[...] The psyche’s roots are secure, nourishing it like a tree from the ground of being. [...]

[...] A tree does not have to ask for nourishment from the ground or the sun, and so everything that you need is available to you in your practical experience. [...]

[...] I heard him hit the ground with such force that I was very afraid he had broken a limb. I then looked over the edge of the roof, and to my great agitation I saw that Dick had not only fallen off the roof and hit the ground hard, but that now he had slipped over the edge of a steep cliff beside the porch, and was saving himself only by grasping a skinny little shrub that was in the process of loosening in the frozen ground. [...]

[...] They didn’t farm too much because the ground was poor and rocky and very hilly, so they depended on the fish.

[...] But he couldn’t get much because the ground was too rocky. [...]

[...] The whole viewpoint of this data was very dramatic, low, very close to the ground. [...]

[...] It is understood that the author is breaking new ground—but metaphysical ground. [...]

(Seth continued:) He also began to see two poles in society one highly conventional and closed, in which he would appear as a charlatan; and another, yearning but gullible, willing to believe anything if only it offered hope, in which his activities would be misinterpreted, and to him [would be] fraudulent … There was a middle ground that he would have to make for himself … to make a bridge to those intellectuals who doubted, and yet maintain some freedom and spontaneity in order to reach those at the other end. [...]