“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One is that because objects just originate in man’s imagination anyway, there’s always a strong connection between objects and man’s dreams. They act as symbols of inner reality, so it’s only natural that whether he’s aware of it or not, man perceives objects in such a fashion that they also stand for symbols that first originate in his dreams.

[...] It stands in man’s dreams as belonging to God: the power of the universe (intently). Man has always considered himself, in your terms, as set apart from nature, so he must feel set apart from nature’s power — and there must be a great division in his dreams between the two. [...]

[...] Man’s fears of not achieving brotherhood, of not achieving a secure state of consciousness, or a workable morality, result in his dreams of destruction, however they are expressed. And indeed, the present physical event as it exists now at the energy plant near Harrisburg can easily be likened to — and is — a warning dream to change man’s actions.

[...] Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature because they are “smarter than” nature is — smarter than nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. [...]

“The scientist carries the burden of this alienation, and in his heart he must hope that his mission fails — for if it succeeds he will have effectively separated man from man’s nature in the world of beliefs, philosophically casting man adrift as meaningless psychological debris. [...]

“Man is therefore set against his nature in his own mind, and he thinks he must control it. The fact is that man’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. [...]

The scientific elite could of course present a probability in which a world was created [where] the common man could have little knowledge of its workings. [...]

1. “Now, for example,” Seth told us this evening, “man deals with a kind of dual selfhood, in that he presently thinks of himself as an uneasy blend of body and mind. [...]

(Pause.) Your many civilizations, historically speaking, each with its own fields of activity, its own sciences, religions, politics and art—these all represent various ways that man has used imagination and reason to form a framework through which (underlined) a more or less cohesive reality is experienced.

(9:02.) Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. [...]

[...] Man’s imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence. [...]

Ruburt (Jane) today received a letter from a man who would certainly be labeled a schizophrenic. [...]

Scene 3—These same women, myself, and at least one man are hiding though I don’t remember why. [...] The man with us may have his hands in shackles or something; I have to help him climb over some walls. [...]

[...] On phone a man makes appointment to take me to dinner to discuss giving me an excellent position but I can’t hear him properly and got to another office to check time, etc. [...]

[...] The book was based on the idea that nature was against man; and that religion was man’s attempt to operate within that unsafe context. [...] The idea of the stories was to save each man from having to encounter reality in such a frightening fashion.... [...]

[...] The idea also being that outside of the known order provided by these stories, there were raging forces working against man’s existence. [...]

You cannot collect data—and you collect it, both of you—that points out man’s stupidities, and then demand that you personally go against what you think of as man’s ingrained idiocy. [...]

[...] You think it more realistic to expect a continuation of past performance, because you believe that man alone, of all nature, is basically ignorant and unknowing.

[...] Give me a moment here —on the one hand you desire more from a relationship with a man than you have any right to expect. No human being could ever deliver what you expect a man to deliver in a relationship. [...] No man can possibly be as godlike as your inner conception. Therefore, each man is bound to disappoint you. At the same time, you hope and pray subconsciously that the man will disappoint you because this male in your mind has godlike qualities that attract you; on the other, you see him as all powerful and as one who gives out punishment and one who is unreasoning and cruel because you felt that your father was cruel. You are afraid, so to speak, to come under a man’s thumb for this reason, to come under his domination. [...]

You are not able, at this point, you have never been able to look at a man as an individual human being. [...] The man realizes, of course, that you do not see him as he is, and each one of the men involved has resented it subconsciously. You do not communicate with an individual man; you communicate with your idea of what this man is, this man with the godlike qualities that can bring both joy and punishment.

You have been afraid that the male would hurt you cruelly—and on purpose, and at the same time, you have endowed him with godlike qualities, and, therefore, demanded more than any man could possibly deliver. [...] When you have settled yourself upon a particular man, you see, it becomes a matter of principle with you that you get him. [...] On the one hand, you want him, on the other hand, as you had to escape from your father, you must also escape from the man and so you are caught in a dilemma. [...]

[...] You are not seeing the man as he is. [...] But you do not see this man’s good points or failings clearly. [...] You have no chance in a thousand lives of having a relationship with the man you think of as being Dick Reed, because you cannot have a two-way relationship with an image that is one-sided and has no flesh. [...]

The past, in the present, would appear so brilliantly that man could not react adequately in circumstances of time that he had himself created. [...] With memory, however, mental projections into the future were of course also possible so that man could plan his activities in time, and foresee probable results: “Ghost images” of the future probabilities always acted as mental stimuli for physical explorations in all areas, and of all kinds.

[...] In historic terms, early man, using here your theories about the race — early man — was in intimate contact with his family, clan, or tribe. [...]

Though the past is actually quite as immediate, alive, and creative as the present is, man made certain adjustments, on several layers, that would focus definite distinctions and set past and present experience apart. [...]

[...] That animal — the past one — existed as surely as the one presently perceived, yet in man’s context, physical action had to be directed to a highly specific area, for physical survival depended upon it.

[...] You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

[...] As soon as you did, I felt a circle of information open up — a lot of it — about when ancient man had a series of mass dreams in which he learned how to speak. The dreams were like glossolalia — you know, speaking in unintelligible speech sounds — yet they made sense, and man began to speak….”

[...] I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

[...] It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species. [...]

He received a phone call from a man who lived in another state. [...] Without knowing why, Ruburt felt an impulse to see the man, and set up an appointment. [...]

[...] The lawyer not only did not understand the condition, according to the story, but hurt the feelings of the man under discussion. We will call the man Augustus.

Here was a young man whose beliefs were alive with their own life while he was relatively powerless. [...]

Entering, the man bristled with belligerence and hostility. [...]

[...] He denied it; but when they decided that another innocent man was the culprit, a man whom he knew to be innocent, then to save his own life he let them think the innocent man was the betrayer.

[...] A man in his company was thought to be disloyal. This man—

The other man was not involved with any of you in past lives, nor do I see him indeed at all in England in any era. [...]

The impediment, beginning in this life, 1507, represented a time when he did not speak out, and he should have, for a man’s life was at stake. [...]

[...] According to her, if man didn’t emerge from the animals, there were certainly close relationships involved — a dance of probabilities between the two, as it were. [...] Although she left Appendix 6 unfinished, it contains many ideas worth more study: “Some of the experiments with man-animals didn’t work out along our historic lines, but the ghost memories of those probabilities still linger in our biological structure … The growth of ego consciousness by itself set up both challenges and limitations … For many centuries there was no clear-cut differentiation between various aspects of man and animal … there were parallel developments in the emergence of physical man … there were innumerable species of man-in-the-making in your terms….” [I can add that just as Jane supplemented Seth’s material on early man, he in turn has added to hers in a kind of freewheeling exchange; his information is presented later in this appendix.]

[...] The species’ religious drives have been around a lot longer than its scientific ones, however, so I found myself looking for broad correlations between the two, in that under each value system the individual carries a very conscious sense of personal vulnerability. Before Darwinism, to use that concept as an example, man at least felt that God had put him on earth for certain purposes, no matter how much man distorted those purposes through ignorance and war. According to Judaism and Christianity, among many religions, man could seek forgiveness and salvation; he had a soul. After Darwin, he learned that even his physical presence on earth was an accident of nature. [...] Either way, this very fallible creature found himself vulnerable to forces that consciously he couldn’t understand — even though, in Seth’s view, down through the millennia man had chosen all of his religious and antireligious experiences.

[...] I suggest that the entire 634th session in Personal Reality be read with this appendix, for in it Seth explored some connections between animal and man — including the evolution [my emphasis] by man of “certain animal capacities to their utmost.” At practically the same time, in the 637th session for the following chapter [9], he could tell us: “Note: I did not say that man emerged from the animals.”

[...] No matter how beautifully man works out a hypothesis or theory, he still does so without any thought of consciousness coming first. [...] He also projects upon cellular components like genes and DNA¹⁴ learned concepts of “protection” and “selfishness”: DNA is said to care only about its own survival and “knowledge,” and not whether its host is man, plant, or animal. Only man would think to burden such pervasive parts of his own being, and those of other entities, with such negative concepts! [...]

[...] A man who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life—and a meaningless existence could never produce life (intently). Nor was the universe created for one species alone, by a God who is simply a supervision of the same species—as willful and destructive as man at his worst.

In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of the animals also—long before he learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. [...] Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was there.

[...] Man dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know.

[...] And we will see how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man’s relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with them.

The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s primitive “unconscious” drives. [...] Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’s hatred for his father. [...]

Creativity is an in-built impetus in man, far more important than, say, what science calls the satisfaction of basic needs. [...] And if man does not find these (louder), then the so-called basic drives toward food or shelter will not sustain him.

I am not simply saying that man does not live for bread alone. I am saying that if man does not find meaning in life he will not live, bread or no. [...]

[...] This applies to a spider in a closet as well as to any man or woman. [...]

Now let us look briefly at Ruburt’s old man.

The old man could have healed himself no matter what the physical difficulty had been.... [...]

The old man changed probabilities, you see, moving into another, and your thought patterns deal with probabilities all the time, at one level, as your c-e-l-l-s (spelled) do at another—so perhaps that will help you see more clearly the connections between health and illness, and the directions that your thoughts take.

As I mentioned in Seth Speaks, the Christ entity was too great to be contained in any one man, or for that matter in any one time, so the man you think of as Christ was not crucified (See chapters Twenty-one and Twenty-two of Seth Speaks.)

Christ was the symbol of man’s emerging consciousness, holding within himself the knowledge of man’s potential. [...]

(Pause.) At the time, Christ united man’s consciousness in ways that reached out into history. [...] Now this represents the spiritual side of man’s evolution. [...]

[...] It often hides a distorted, puffed-up, denied self-pride, because no man or woman can really accept a theory that denies personal self-worth.

Value fulfillment will always provide inner directions that remind man constantly of the best ways in which such technology can be used. The need to possess such knowledge is uppermost in man’s mind now, and so it also becomes a vital dream topic or subject. In the dream state, then, to one extent or another man seeks solutions to the problems of his age.

Man explored the physical world in the dreaming state long before he explored it physically. [...]

A man or woman might [be] while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be. [...]

(Long pause.) In such a fashion man learned the location of the oceans upon the earth—or at least was given the assurance that such large bodies of water existed, along with clues as to their locations, and the placement of the stars overhead.

When you are discussing the nature of good and bad, you are on tricky ground indeed, for many — or most — of man’s atrocities to man have been committed in misguided pursuit of “the good.”

[...] The Jews, for various reasons — and again, this is not the full story — the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” [...] Hitler brought many of man’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. [...]

[...] In your arena of events, obviously, one man’s good can be another’s disaster. [...]

[...] Man’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. [...]

[...] Another man is now ready to move into the third man’s place, and there seems to be something somewhat surprising in this movement.

A man with glasses and a scar, or a scar connected with the name, is retreating. [...] In any case he will be replaced by a man with white or whitish blonde hair—light hair, initially from the Midwest, and he may have an accent. [...]

[...] Man will be so shoved together that the impact will literally explode into a new level of consciousness, a new development in those terms.

[...] (Pause.) Now either there is a woman, or a man with a name like a woman, who will shortly step up and come to Philip’s notice, either generally in the same sort of position as Philip, or slightly above.

Christ, as he is known historically, psychically represented man’s probabilities. His theories and teachings could be interpreted in many ways; they stood for kernels that man could sow as he wished. [...]

(Long pause.) Other democratic societies had existed in the past, but in them democracy was still based on one religious precept, though it might be expressed in different ways — as, for example, in the Greek city-states (in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.). The Holy Roman Empire united a civilization under one religious idea, but the true brotherhood of man can be expressed only by allowing the freedom of man’s thought under the banner of cooperation; and only this will result in the fulfillment of the species, with developments of consciousness that in your terms were latent from the beginning.

[...] I have said that evolution does not exist as you think of it, in any kind of one-line, ape-to-man time sequence.^l No other species developed in that manner, either. [...]

[...] Man would believe he did indeed have dominion over the earth as a separate species, for God the Father had given it to him.