“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man likes to believe that this is so. [...] The natural man, then, is a natural artist. In a sense, painting is man’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his own reality—and by extension to create a new version of reality for his species.”

[...] Man related the concept of free will long ago to the question of whether he could deliberately choose evil, for example. [...] Opposing determinism is the idea that man has always fought for his personal responsibility—that instead of being controlled entirely by his heritage, he’s capable of forming new syntheses of thought and action based upon the complicated patterns of his own history.

I had the same feelings of limitation concerning the session for April 9. In it Seth dealt with the creation of art: not only by “natural man,” but by other creatures—and yes, also the flora—of the earth.¹

[...] So physically, and on his physical attributes alone, a man cannot use his free will to fly like a bird, or to perform physical acts for which the human body is not equipped.

[...] He was an outsider and a small, short, tubercular-looking man. [...]

In terms of your beliefs and in terms of deeper truths, man is related to the ape, so his experience also brings an even more substantial sense of belonging to the earth, and identification with the utter rightness of instinct.

[...] You are also quite correct, in that the ape also acted as an animal medicine man-woman (as in Personal Reality), symbolically acting out a part that once very well could have been performed in fact. [...]

[...] The ape could not have appeared however until after the blond man forcibly threw out that negative image. [...]

[...] He is therefore within each man and woman. He is also within each spider, shadow, and frog, and this is what man does not like to admit.

[...] This imagined god has therefore changed throughout your centuries, mirroring man’s shifting ideas of himself.

God was seen as cruel and powerful when man believed that these were desirable characteristics, needed particularly in his battle for physical survival. [...]

(Pause at 9:55.) Judas, for example, was not a man in your terms. [...]

[...] The fact that Ruburt considers the man an ass, helped, because Ruburt could then justify his own conditioned reflex toward authority; and keep in mind other material I have given you concerning Ruburt and the gallery.

[...] He also turned down rather coldly the man’s innocent enough invitation that you visit his home. [...]

He is bound to set himself up as aloof and superior to the man in charge. [...]

[...] The man is simply a stickler for detail. [...]

The inner creative man knows, as the child did, that the way will be cleared. There was Miss Bowman, there was art school and so forth—so I want you to remember that inner man. [...]

Now: the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland was, I believe, a mathematician of note in his time. [...]

[...] So he was to some extent a divided man. [...]

Cézanne, as you know, was not a happy man. [...]

The tree does not even build up an image of man, which is why this is difficult to explain. [...] Nevertheless the tree builds up a composite sensation which represents say an individual man. And the same tree will recognize the same man who passes it by each day. [...]

[...] At a later date I intend to go quite intensively into the means by which other fragments sense each other, and man. The abilities of the tree are latent in man as, dear Joseph, are the abilities latent in the tree.

So should man’s ego be. When man’s ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data, and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. [...]

[...] Without the so-called mind of man, it nevertheless retains this inner consciousness of all its parts above and below the ground, and adjusts them constantly.

[...] Evidently it had been inspired by our conversation after the last deleted session, about Seth’s material on animal-man and man-animal. Now I speculated about trying some drawings or paintings of man-animal, animal-man. [...]

[...] The aura of the mind of man simply had a different cast.

(10:17.) In man, again, generally speaking, reason and emotion become separated so that man can think about his emotions, or emotionally feel his reasoning thoughts. [...]

[...] I talked with our tax man, Jack Joyce, on the telephone today; we may get our forms Thursday. [...]

[...] He had not been there long, he said, when he did meet a man as described by Seth in the 68th session. [...] The man was 54 years old actually, and his “prickly hair” turned out to be a brush cut. [...] The man is from New York City, and was spending a week in Provincetown to “get away from his wife and family.”

[...] The young man is named Gary, and is from Boston. The older man is named Larry O’Toole, and is from Baltimore, MD. [...]

(It seems that last night John, while eating in a restaurant with a friend we do not know, was informed by this friend that the Elmira police had taken into custody a man who had been making the rounds of the Elmira pharmacies with a forged prescription for narcotics. [...]

[...] When man realizes that he himself creates his personal and universal environment in concrete terms, then he can begin to create a private and universal environment much superior to the one that is the result of haphazard and unenlightened constructions.

[...] It seems only natural that early man, for example, carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark. (Pause.) As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept. [...]

(10:00.) In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night. [...]

[...] It is not that man stressed physical data less, but that he put it together differently — that in the darkness he relied upon his inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion. [...]

(10:10.) In those times, however, man identified more with his intuitive self, and with his imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he put his intellect.

In the beginning, man’s dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man information—a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man’s dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh.

(9:30.) Now (underlined): When he dreamed—when he dreamed (underlined)—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. [...]

[...] It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” [...]

In a fashion man also is equipped with the ability to initiate actions on a nonphysical level that then become physical and continue to wind in and out of (pause) both realities, entwining dream events with historic ones, in such a fashion that the original nonphysical origins [are] often forgotten. Man overlays (underlined) the true reality quite spontaneously. [...] This applies individually and collectively, but man is often unaware of that interplay.

[...] In man’s case, at least, the selection of who should live or die was often anything but natural. If you are to understand the characteristics of the species, then you cannot avoid the study of man’s consciousness.

Man, however, deals with probabilities and with creativity in a unique fashion—a fashion that is made possible because of the far more dependable behavior of the other species.³

Psychologists often speak of the needs of man. Here I would like to speak instead of the pleasures of man, for one of the distinguishing characteristics of value fulfillment is its pleasurable effect. It is not so much that man or nature seeks to satisfy needs, but to exuberantly, rambunctiously seek pleasure—and through following its pleasure each organism finds and satisfies its needs as well. [...]

Earlier, I also spoke about the importance of dreams in man’s early background, and their importance to you as a species. [...]

[...] dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. [...]

[...] Instead of sending cameramen and newspaper people to the farthest corners of the earth, early man sent out aspects of himself to gather the news and to form it into [...]

[...] For man alone the arrangement goes in this descending order from the most inclusive: The kingdom Animalia; phylum Chordata; class Mammalia; order Primates; family Hominidae; genus Homo; species name Homo sapiens; common name Man.

In view of Jane’s own limited knowledge of the scientific vocabulary man has devised to classify just the multitude of living forms alone on our planet, it’s very interesting that Seth used what I think is the correct popular terminology as he went through the session. [...]

[...] Man does not in his physical development pass through the stages supposedly followed by the hypothetical creature who left the water for the land to become a mammal—but each species does indeed have written within it the knowledge of “its past.” [...]

(“That isn’t going to run into the idea of transmigration, is it?” I was thinking that man is also a mammal.)

[...] It’s perfectly capable of surviving even while it’s home to a species as obstreperous as man. After all, I said, man is but one species who creates his perception of the living earth in concert with nearly innumerable other species — and each other species does the same thing from its viewpoint. Even with his seemingly destructive ways, man can injure that joint reality only to a minor extent, regardless of such potential fiascos as that posed by Three Mile Island, or even nuclear war. [...]

Ruburt was recently scandalized upon reading that orthodox science still does not grant man with volition. [...] Yet I am saying that man has free will within the framework of his existence, and that all other species do also within the frameworks of their existences (underlined).

[...] We’ve heard of the theory before, by the way — but transmitting cancer in such a fashion seems to be one of the most deadly results that can follow from the union of a man and a woman. [...]

[...] Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years — the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body. [...]

3. Seth packed a lot of information into the short 689th session for Volume 1. He discussed the innumerable experiments of consciousness with animal-man and man-animal forms; the great communication between man and animal in ancient times, and the deep rapport of both with their natural heritage; psychic and biological blueprints and cellular precognition; the growth of man’s ego consciousness; the beginnings of our god concepts and mythology; and more.

4. In Volume 1, see the 687th session at 10:45, when Seth said: “Biologically the man knows he has come from the earth. Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.” [...]

[...] Let me briefly continue that early Seth material here: “In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said (in the 16th session) that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was, therefore, a natural law of the universe. [...]

[...] The first man is my primary self, who discovers that he must bear the burdens of the second man imposed upon him through cultural beliefs involving taxes, success, the male breadwinner role, and so forth. [...]

[...] Now whenever I sense a conflict arising, I do as I’d figured out—and as Seth himself suggested recently: I ask the advice of the first man; what would he do in these situations? [...] This means that I sidetrack —but not try to repress—those cultural and learned beliefs I’ve let rule my life in large measure, instead of following the natural, creative dictates of my first, or primary man. [...]

I have myself heard it said that other creatures behave with a natural grace, save man. I have myself heard it said that all of nature is (pause) content unto itself save man, who is filled with discontent. [...] It then does indeed seem that man is somehow apart from nature — or worse, an ungrateful blight, almost a parasite, upon the face of the planet.

[...] Therefore science, for example, says that creatures — except for man — operate by blind instinct, and that term is meant to explain all of the complicated behavior of the other species. Therefore the gulf between man and animals, the intellect and nature, seems to deepen.

[...] Science has believed to the contrary in the utter annihilation of the intellect after death, and since man had by then placed all of his identification with the intellect, this was a shattering blow to it. It denied man a necessary biological imperative (all intently).

MAN AND OTHER SPECIES.

[...]

[...] The fact is that they can never be condoned, and yet they must be understood for what they are: man learning through his own errors. [...]

The race of man is far more than the physical race however. [...]

They may return, even enduring violence, as a man might set up a school amid a jungle of savages. [...]

In those days neither did a sane, righteous man give thought to sharing his wealth, or even consider the plight of the poorer classes. [...]

[...] So it is fashionable to believe that early man did not understand the connection between intercourse and birth.

[...] Early man was hardly more ignorant. [...]

Now: Historically speaking, early man in his way understood those connections far better than you do, and used language as he developed it to express first of all this miracle of birth. [...]

[...] No matter how fast he ran or how far he traveled, early man could not run out of land, or trees, or forests, or food supplies. [...]