“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your terms, probabilities are extensions and variations on the growth principle that is quite obvious in your daily reality. Such growth is a natural manifestation flourishing within your particular area of actuality, observable to your senses. Again, other entirely natural manifestations of that principle exist. Some can only be glimpsed in distorted form because of other “natural” conditions that you cannot perceive. Probabilities involve you with a rich psychological growth and development, present but not observable in your “home ground.” Any kind of existence happens within the context of nature, and nature includes the soul. Your definition of nature has simply been too limiting.

When you consider ideas as mental and apart from nature, then you feel separated from nature itself. When you imagine a life after death as unnatural or supernatural then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered. You must try to understand that there are different kinds of nature within Nature — and a capital for the last one. Your physical life — your human nature — is, in your terms, dependent upon a time when you were not. You must realize that not being in that connotation is quite as natural as physical being. Your existence before and after death is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.

It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. It is natural for you to have probable selves as well as reincarnational existences.²

In the body’s spontaneous functioning you see the easy mobility of the soul, the “going with that which I am,” which is an indication of the soul’s inner freedom and yet innate sense of direction. All portions of the body’s reality are versions in flesh of the soul’s reality, even as all segments of the exterior universe mirror an internal one. The latter is as alive and natural and changing as the exterior world. Physical phenomena is only a portion of what nature is, and all realities are natural.

(Long pause.) Those who “lose” their lives in natural disasters become victims of nature. You see in such stories examples of meaningless deaths, and further proof of nature’s indifference to man. You may, on the other hand, see the vengeful hand of an angry God in such instances, where the deity once again uses nature to bring man to his knees. Man’s nature is to live and to die. Death is not an affront to life, but means its continuation — not only inside the framework of nature as you understand it, but in terms of nature’s source. It is, of course, natural then to die.

The officials of the Roman Catholic Church altered many records — cleansing them, in their terms, of anything that might suggest pagan practices, or nature worship as they thought of it. In terms of your civilization, nature and spirit became divided so that you encounter the events of your lives largely in that context. To some degree or another, then, you must feel divorced from your bodies and from the events of nature. The great sweeps of emotional identification with nature itself do not sustain you, therefore. [...]

[...] When people are hurt in a natural disaster, for example, they will often profess to have no idea at all for such involvement. [...] The reasons for such involvement would be endless, or course — all valid, yet in each and every case, man and nature in those terms would meet in an encounter that had meaning, from the largest global effects to the smallest, most private aspects of the individuals involved. [...] You think of rain or earthquakes as natural events, for example, while you do not consider thoughts or emotions as natural events in the same terms. [...]

[...] Certain scientific treatises often make you believe that the attainment of your adulthood has little purpose, except to insure the further existence of the species through parenthood — when nature is then quite willing to dispense with your services. [...] In both cases man’s nature, and nature in general, take short shrift.

I will clear up my meaning of the word “natural” later. However, when you examine animal behavior even in its most natural-seeming environment, for instance, you are not observing the basic behavior patterns of such creatures, because those relatively isolated areas exist in your world. Quite simply, you cannot have one or two or twenty officially-designated natural regions in which you observe animal activity, and expect to find anything more than the current adaptation of those creatures — an adaptation that is superimposed upon their “natural” reactions.

[...] In larger terms, it is as natural for a man to love a man, and for a woman to love a woman, as it is to show love for the opposite sex. For that matter, it is more natural to be bisexual. Such is the “natural” nature of the species.

In the natural biological flow of a person’s life, there are periods of varying intensities, in which love and its expression fluctuates, and tends toward different courses. [...] These natural rhythms are seldom observed, however. Tendencies toward lesbianism or homosexuality in children are quite natural. They are so feared, however, that often just-as-natural leanings toward heterosexuality are blocked. [...]

[...] Now man is obviously part of nature, so you may say: “But those changes wrought by him are natural.” When he studies such animal behavior, however, and sometimes uses the sexual patterns of the animals to make certain points about human sexuality, then man does not take this into consideration, but speaks as if the present observed animal behavior is the indication of a prime or basic nature inherent in their biology.

They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them — that is, men — to give it another kind of voice. When men spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.

[...] He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions. He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the gods of Olympus, for example. He was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he perceived his own version of those individualized consciousnesses which much later became the elementals, or small spirits. But above all he was aware of nature’s source.

[...] Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings you that message. In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.

Your concepts about death and nature, however, force you to see man and nature as adversaries, and also program your experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what you already believe. As I mentioned earlier (in Session 821), each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. [...]

A scientist examining nature studies its exterior, observing the outsideness of nature. Even investigative work involving atoms and molecules, or [theoretical²] faster-than-light particles, concerns the particle nature of reality. The scientist does not usually look for nature’s heart. [...]

[...] Man’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations. Using the terms begun in the last chapter, I will say then that man’s emotional identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framework 2. And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s relationship with nature. There in Framework 2 the nature of the psyche appears quite clearly, so that its sweeps and rhythms can be understood. [...]

You divorce yourselves from nature and nature’s intents far more than the animals do. Nature in its stormy manifestations seems like an adversary. You must either look for reasons outside of yourselves to explain what seems to be nature’s ill intent at such times, or its utter lack of concern.

Give us a moment… Before we discuss man’s and woman’s private roles in the nature of mass events — no matter what they are — we must first look into the medium in which events appear concrete and real. The great sweep of the events of nature can be understood only by looking into a portion of their reality that is not apparent to you. We want to examine, therefore, the inner power of natural occurrences.

(9:01.) Give us a moment… He deals with the effect of thinking upon nature, so to speak. He adds to the rest of nature. (Pause.) He therefore adds a different kind of mental organization — an organization, then, that nature itself requires, anticipates, and desires. Animals do not read or write books, but they do “read” nature directly through the context of their own experience, and through intuitive knowing. Man’s reasoning mind adds an atmosphere to nature (pause), that is as real, say, as the Van Allen Belts (or radiation fields) that surround the earth.

Now (pause): Man likes to think of himself as the caretaker of nature and the world. It is closer to the truth, however, to say — in that regard, at least — that nature is man’s caretaker; or that man exists, physically speaking, as the result of the graceful support of nature and all of its other species. [...]

[...] So let him be just as impressed — in fact, more impressed — at the body’s natural healing processes, that will naturally flow and are naturally flowing when he allows himself to trust his life and the support of his own being.

NATURE AS MAN’S CARETAKER.

The emotional identification with nature meant that man had a far greater and richer personal emotional reality. That love of nature, and appreciation, quickened and utilized inner biological capacities, also possessed by plants and animals, so that man was more consciously aware of his part in nature. He identified with natural events. [...]

When man identified with the grandeur and energy of nature, then he knew nature’s reasons, for they were his own as well. [...] He did not need to look for a reason for nature’s destructive aspects, for he knew through experience the great sweep of its vitality. [...]

When you identify with nature you automatically fulfill your own world. [...] You need not pit yourselves then against what you think of as a society that does not understand you, for that society falls into place as simply being one present aspect of a vaster natural world in which you are indeed firmly rooted. You can therefore naturally draw from Framework 2 all that you require.

Again, have Ruburt remember his love of nature. [...] I do want you to approve of yourselves as natural creatures, for that approval automatically brings you in contact with nature’s greater source, and your own.

During their lifetimes animals in their natural state enjoy their vigor and accept their worth. [...] They enjoy contrasts: that between rest and motion, heat and cold, being in direct contact with natural phenomena that everywhere quickens their experience. [...] They are aware of approaching natural disasters, and when possible will leave such areas. [...] Even in contests between young and old males for control of a group, under natural conditions the loser is seldom killed. [...]

In that environment there is a cooperative sociability of a biological nature, that is understood by the animals in their way, and taken for granted by the young of your own species. [...] The granting of those needs furthers the development of the individual, its species, and by inference all others in the fabric of nature.

A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way or another destroy its offspring — not because they could not survive otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a mockery of it. [...] But even the natural prey of another animal does not fear the “hunter” when the hunter animal is full of belly, nor will the hunter then attack.

There are also emotional interactions among the animals that completely escape you, and biological mechanisms, so that animals felled as natural prey by other animals “understand” their part in nature. [...]

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future. This is of course a learning process, natural within the time system that the species adopted. [...] Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. [...]

Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursion into the experience of past, present and future. Natural guilt was meant as a preventive measure. [...]

Any previous acts that had aroused feelings of natural guilt were to be avoided in the future. Because of the multitudinous courses open to the species, not only did the highly specific nature of many kinds of animalistic instinct no longer apply, but a curious balance had to be maintained. [...]

[...] When your species sees that it is destroying other species and disrupting the natural balance, then it is consciously aware of its violation. When such natural guilt is not faced there are other mechanisms that must be employed. [...]

As creatures you are a part of nature. The change of thoughts, feelings and beliefs into physical, objectively perceived phenomena is as natural as water changing into ice, for example, or a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You not only form the structure of your civilizations and social institutions through the transference of beliefs, thoughts and feelings; but in this natural exchange you also help on quite intimate levels in the “psychic manufacture” of the physical environment itself, with all of its great sweeping variety, and yet seasonal stability.

A war is one kind of natural event brought about as feelings and beliefs interact on one level. A natural catastrophe represents the same kind of phenomenon at a different level. Your part in these feelings and beliefs will place you in your own “natural” position within such events.

[...] They understand the innate relationship that exists within all portions of nature. [...] Your feelings represent the inner reality behind what you think of as purely natural phenomena, such as weather.

Catastrophes, such as earthquakes or floods, are not perpetuated by certain elements of nature against other portions of itself. Your feelings have as much natural validity as the tides, and they have their own kind of attraction — mind does move matter. [...]

Your educational systems, however, for all of their idealism, have largely ended up (pause) smothering the natural individual bents and leanings of children, and overemphasized instead the cultural organization. It became more important, then, for the child to conform to the culture rather than to follow its own individual natural leanings. Its own characteristic ways of dealing with nature were frowned upon, so that education does not work with the child’s abilities, but against them. Education then often goes against the grain of the natural person.

[...] The natural person that is yourself loved to draw and paint. [...] You can trust your natural inclinations. These sessions, in that regard, came naturally, as the expression of natural abilities and tendencies, finally emerging despite your official views at the time, jointly.

[...] You are approaching a state of mind, individually and jointly, that represents far more closely one that is natural, with which the natural person is innately equipped.

(9:23.) The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with. As I have said often, evidence of clairvoyance, telepathy, or whatever, are not eccentric, isolated instances occurring in man’s experience, but are representative of natural patterns of everyday behavior that become invisible in your world because of the official picture of behavior and reality.

Without going into background information again, and regardless of the reasons, people in your time have been taught to regard their natures with suspicion. Since Ruburt’s nature was rather—rather—extravagantly different from what he considered the norm to be, and since he possessed abilities that were not common generally and specifically to his sex, he became even more unduly suspicious of his own nature. [...]

More or less, your nature sustains you. The nature of the earth sustains its creatures, and overall, while there may be floods or earthquakes, you can rely upon the sustenance of the earth.

[...] They trust their nature, and the greater nature from which their existence springs.

Each person’s nature, however, innately possesses all of the qualities and characteristics necessary to bring about its own fulfillment. [...] When that nature is trusted, there are no interior impediments or conflicts, even though the individual may feel himself to be in conflict with certain elements in the world at large.

[...] If you do not trust the nature of your impulses, then you do not trust the nature of your life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of your own being.

Do the exercises in my book, The Nature of Personal Reality, to discover what conditions of a mental nature, or of psychological origin, are causing you distress. [...] Allow yourself to feel a sense of belonging with nature. [...]

(10:01.) Any animal knows better than to distrust the nature of its own life, and so does any infant. Nature exists by virtue of faith. [...] Your beliefs must interact with your impulses, however, and often they can erode that great natural beneficial spontaneity that impulses can provide.

[...] Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life. [...] You learn from nature always, and you are a part of it always.

[...] The natural person is of course the natural dreamer, and it is for that reason all the more unfortunate that psychology managed to divorce the world of dreaming from natural healthy psychology. In the natural person, dreams always serve a balancing function, leading toward self-illumination, self-instruction, self-help. [...]

(Pause at 9:50.) I also want to stress the fact that the entire psychic area of expression belongs to the natural person. [...] Man, for example, exhibited natural psychic activity long before the birth of science —and for that matter before the initiation of formal religion. [...] So remind Ruburt that his psychic activity represents a most basic portion of his nature—and of human nature. [...]

Natural therapeutics always operate, of course, but in your society at least there is considerable pressure put on the other side, for it is the natural person you are taught not to trust. (Pause.) The switch of course, again, can never become total, but science—and medical science in particular—almost managed to divorce man from his natural feeling of trust in his own capacities, so that it seems for example that medical science per se knows more about any given individual’s body than the individual does himself. [...]

Your own interest in (flower)seeds right now presents you with an excellent example of the natural person’s inclination to seek out fresh stimulation, and to ally itself, however innocently, with those forces of natural creativity. [...]

For example, Ruburt’s latest status, and your somewhat natural concern with the temporary walking difficulty—you know what I am referring to—I say to you that the concern is natural; for it certainly seems so to both of you. You have little idea, however, how sometimes the most natural-seeming reactions are not natural at all, but programmed. An animal, say, in Ruburt’s position, feeling as much new activity in the body, new motion in the knees, new elasticity in the ligaments, would quite naturally accept the improvements with physical elation, even if it had more difficulty one day, or two, than it had in days previous. [...]

Nature took the place of the devil in an insidious sleight-of-hand that initially Darwin himself never expected. [...] Darwin loved nature in all of its aspects, yet he could not reconcile its beauties and splendors with the course of its events. [...] He tried to wipe God’s hands clean, as he understood the nature of God through his early beliefs—but in so doing he wiped the soul from the face of nature. [...]

[...] That is natural. Your natures however are not particularly competitive. [...] You naturally both concentrate on ideas. Left alone, that concentration will naturally seek expression, amplification, and might result in, say, if you wanted it, some tours. [...]

Darwin managed to bring out nature’s complexity, though this had been mentioned by other men—I believe by a man called Mendel in particular. [...] Darwin then brought nature to man’s focus in a new way, for before neither science or religion had dealt with it in a meaningful manner. The full sweep and extent of the natural world , with all of its seeming ambiguities, cruelties and splendors, had to be accepted as more than a passive package delivered into man’s hand. [...]

[...] The thrust of your civilizations has been concerned with manipulating nature. [...] Not only of nature’s power and its effects upon civilization, but it also provides you with a very small hint of the other side of the picture, for man despite himself has not lost entirely that identification with the elements. People still feel a part of nature’s power. Storms often, oddly enough it seems, bring out a feeling of adventuresomeness and neighborliness, because people are united—not against nature, as they may think, but by it. [...] When you take a walk, you usually think of walking through nature, not realizing that you are a part of the scene through which you walk. The loss of a real, sensed, appreciated identification with nature has been largely responsible, however, for man’s attitude that self-disapproval is somehow a virtue.

[...] None of this has anything to do with natural guilt, as described in Personal Reality. Now man does feel a certain amount of natural guilt when he loses his identification with nature, for that identification leads to intuitive connections with nature’s greater source.

In your terms, with time, historically, he began to lose this identification, so that an emotional separation began to occur between man and the elements, between man and the other manifestations of nature. He still sensed nature’s grandeur—(louder:) but that grandeur was no longer his own, and he felt less and less a part of it. Nature became an exterior power, more of an adversary, even though man has a love for the earth, the fields, and the grain that they yielded.

When man identified with nature, as given in Psyche, he did not imagine that the gods disapproved of him when storms lashed across the landscape. [...] Instead, identifying with nature, man identified also with all of its manifestations.

[...] In Framework 2 both of your intents and natures are known. That is the source of your physical existence—the source of your impulses to begin with, and the more you learn to trust Framework 2 the easier it is for your natural selves to express themselves. [...]

Do have Ruburt ask the natural Jane (Jane one) what to do when there are difficulties, so that the natural self at least gets a chance to give an opinion. [...]

The natural person (number one) looks at the world and tries to see how his or her abilities can best be utilized and fulfilled. That person grows through its knowledge and experience with the world, as long as there is no attempt to make the natural self over to fit the world. [...]

(This noon Jane and I signed our wills, with, naturally, Bill Danaher and his wife as witnesses. [...]

(Long pause at 10:03.) Or: “Taking on my tree nature, I rest in my shade.” Or even: “From my man nature, I rest in the shade of my tree nature.” [...] Man’s initial curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, or touching the object’s nature as much as it involved a joyful psychic exploration in which he plunged his consciousness, rather than, say, his foot into the stream — though he did both.

In those terms of which I am speaking, man’s identification with nature allowed him to utilize those inner channels. [...] Man loved nature, identified with its many parts, and added to his own sense of being by joining into its power and identifying with its force.

It is not so much that he personified the elements of nature as that he threw his personality into its elements and rode them, so to speak. As mentioned, love incites the desire to know, explore, and communicate with the beloved; so language began as man tried to express his love for the natural world.

(A one-minute pause.) Each natural element had its own key system that interlocked with others, forming channels through which consciousness could flow from one kind of life to another. Man understood himself to be a separate entity, but one that was connected to all of nature. [...]

There is a natural impulse to die on the part of men and animals, but in such circumstances [as we are discussing here] that desire becomes the only impulse that the individual feels able to express, for it seems that all other avenues of expression have become closed. There is much misunderstanding concerning the nature of impulses, so we will discuss them rather thoroughly. [...] Only people who trust their spontaneous beings and the altruistic nature of their impulses can be consciously wise enough to choose from a myriad of probable futures the most promising events — for again, impulses take not only [people’s] best interest into consideration, but those of all other species.

[...] You would not spend time wondering what your purpose was, for it would make itself known to you, as you perceived the direction in which your natural impulses led, and felt yourself exert power in the world through such actions. Again, impulses are doorways to action, satisfaction, the exertion of natural mental and physical power, the avenue for your private expression — the avenue where your private expression intersects the physical world and impresses it.

[...] Followers had been taught to act against their natural impulses with members of their families. [...] The desire for suicide is often the last recourse left to frightened people whose natural impulses toward action have been damned up — intensified on the one hand, and yet denied any practical expression.

[...] However, to consider impulses as chaotic, meaningless — or worse, detrimental to an ordered life — represents a very dangerous attitude indeed; an attempt that causes many of your other problems, an attempt that does often distort the nature of impulses. [...] When such natural impulses toward action are constantly denied over a period of time, when they are distrusted, when an individual feels in battle with his or her own impulses and shuts down the doors toward probable actions, then that intensity can explode into whatever avenue of escape is still left open.

[...] Without the dictates of the Sinful Self, however, you can begin to sense the contours of the natural self, or the natural person. You can begin to sense your own good natures, in other words, and those basic natures are automatically optimistic. [...]

[...] They represent your natural persons. As Ruburt begins to understand the “artificial” characteristics of the Sinful-Self concept, then those natural characteristics of the natural person will more and more emerge. [...]

The natural person can be evoked, and its responses elicited, particularly through touching and through statements of love and affection. [...] For they offer a natural therapy. [...]

[...] Many will now surface most likely on their own in response to current events, as per this morning: the memories will not be frozen, but will move naturally into present experience, and take their natural place. [...]