“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nerves are stimulated so that the areas of the body become more alive and responsive to energies that can be overlooked in the face of cultural or secondary events. Few threats are directly physical in comparison with all of the imagined or actual social or cultural ones. The body is usually not fighting for its life. If secondary threats are concentrated upon, however, the body dares not relax. The reflexology greatly awakens the body, and is beginning to dissolve the physical armor.

When you brooded about past errors, criticizing Prentice in your mind for past and future errors, you were reacting to implied threats of a kind. The refreshment of prime data, the return to natural stimulation, allows you to react appropriately to any realistic “threat,” without exaggeration.

This applies regardless of the guises that such narrowness might take. In such concepts any natural goodness, or natural intent in man becomes not only invisible psychologically to the fanatic, but man’s natural nature appears as a direct threat to the ideal projected by dogma of any kind.

The whole affair can and should be used by you as an opportunity to examine your own beliefs. Those people, for example, do not represent the world or any fundamentalists in particular. They do not represent New York City. They are a tiny band of alienated, frightened people who strike out against anything they cannot understand. They see threats everywhere.

Whenever you reinforce the ideas of threat, defense must be built up. Some threats are realistic and some are not. If you concentrate upon your daily, natural prime events, you will not live under a constant sense of threat. [...]

If you worry about probable future threats, you lose some of that natural safety. If you do that as a matter of course, you not only lose the safety, but project threat into the future. Sometimes in extreme cases no threatful situations are even necessary. [...]

[...] Anything else is seen as a threat. [...]

Over the years he developed patterns of behavior to deal with threatful situations. [...]

Any purpose is better than none, and any intended personalized threat is better than an existence in which no life is important enough to be individually threatened, so these imagined threats serve to convince our young man that his life must have meaning or purpose—otherwise others would not be so intent on destroying him. [...] He lives with adventure, threat, and must forever be on guard. [...]

He must protect himself from threats from without. The threats convince him, again, that he must be important and valuable. [...] The threats then convince him of his value. [...]

[...] He is, however, still alive after each threat, and this convinces him that he will indeed survive. For look what he has survived so far, even though the threats grow more monstrous.

[...] You have been trained, like most of your contemporaries, to deal with an unsafe universe—to hold your own amid tumultuous threats—social, economic, spiritual or otherwise.

[...] In a certain way this is almost reassuring, because it correlates with the old habitual belief system that says “Aha, yes, there is a threat. [...]

[...] Before, you would accept that threat as realistic. [...]

[...] When you dwell upon, for example only, New York’s economic status, you keep the feeling of threat going. [...]

[...] No matter how often certain trapeze acts may be repeated, for example, there is always the threat of instant disaster — of missed footing, a final plunge. [...]

Life, then, has the sweetest buoyancy, the greatest satisfaction, because it is contrasted with the ever-present threat of death. [...]

[...] It is true that these individuals do choose for themselves a carefully planned and regulated style of life, in which the threat of death is encountered personally and regularly; each day becomes an odyssey, in which death and life are purposefully weighed. [...]

[...] (Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment.) Your beliefs often tell you that life is hard, however, that living is difficult, that the universe, again, is unsafe, and that you must use all of your resources—not to meet the world with anything like joyful abandon, of course, but to protect yourself against its implied threats; threats that you have been taught to expect. [...]

But your beliefs do not stop there; because of both scientific and religious ones you believe in western civilization that there are threats from within also. [...]

By such a belief you so attract probabilities that you actually miss the threats that appear at one level of reality. [...]

[...] When you do, then you pick up such threats almost as if you believed this would somehow compensate.

Any push toward success became a threat to your virility; a push from a woman became to you a double threat to your virility. [...]

He fears that you will interpret this as a threat of castration. [...] He has an innate talent for making money, that has not been developed nor used for these reasons; and all suggestions made by him to you have been regarded by you as threats, and he felt that the suggestions were mistakes on his part. [...]

[...] He took her hysterical and desperate threats literally, when many children would not have done so. [...]

The exaggerated fears carried threats not simply of scorn, but as you so clearly put it the other evening “Those people would burn us at the stake if they had the chance.” [...] But in the face of that kind of exaggerated threat they were considered very strict, but reasonable enough under the conditions. [...]

[...] It was that although Jane’s eye condition might be caused by my delays with getting “Unknown” Reality to the public, another reason was also involved: namely, that she saw the revealing notes I did for “Unknown” as a threat also.)

[...] But what’s the connection between eyes and the threat of exposure? [...]

There was also an implied threat involved. [...]

The tremor represented guilt here, but also a threat, for you thought: before I will do this full time for money, my hand would fail. [...]

[...] She no longer considers your art either as a potential ally, as she did in earlier years, nor even as a threat as she did in later years.

The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. [...]

[...] They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a nonbiological nature. [...]

[...] When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger conditions. [...]

[...] That is, they do not respond to what is physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell] upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other pertinent data that are immediately at hand.

[...] Your beliefs often tell you that life is hard, however, that living is difficult, that the universe, again, is unsafe, and that you must use all of your resources—not to meet [life] with anything like joyful abandon, of course, but to protect yourself against its implied threats; threats that you have been taught to expect.

[...] Because of both scientific and religious ones, in Western civilization you believe that there are threats from within also. [...]

When new “threats” arose, Ruburt reverted to the old pattern. (The new threats being the death of my mother; our freedom to travel, now that we have finished Personal Reality; the absence from home and the interruption of routine, etc., as we talked about tonight.) Reading our book however kept some improvements alive, and it was but a matter of time before he would read again the sessions of work that I gave him (as Jane did today). [...]

[...] You therefore place yourselves in a framework of threat in which your abilities must be cautiously presented, and yourselves in an environment against which you must take self-saving methods.

[...] Creative success, not necessarily in terms of money, but creative fulfillment, becomes then a threat in which you see yourself cut off and isolated—while isolation is precisely what you think you must have to fulfill your abilities.

[...] manageable; rather than getting entirely better which I see as a threat I guess.

[...] Perhaps a relationship between the intent to publish the sessions, and the idea of exposure or threat for not “toeing the mark.” [...]

[...] This kind of situation of course then triggers old fears of doubt or threat. [...]

Television becomes a threat because he feels he is being asked to prove the unprovable, and yet since this is his life’s work he feels responsible to do so.

[...] Hence, you do not make any simple, joyful remarks, like “The book will be out in England or Germany,” and indeed, you take little pleasure from that, but leap ahead to the imagined threats. A man protects his family because he loves it—but in his love he can see threats all around.

[...] The exuberant expression of your love, for your love for him is exuberant, found no expression in the overall of an active, direct, clear route, but was diverted through concern, and through mention of the threats you felt might surround him.

Your love since then has found more direct expression, and I am not obviously saying that that indirectness of expression is responsible for Ruburt’s symptoms—but only to state that your expressed concern in many instances, without the direct expression of love, reinforces the idea of threat or insecurity.

[...] The expression of your love saw threats, so that both of you together reiterate those beliefs.

Each of you sees buying a house now as a threat, though you are at times tempted. You have always seen family life yourself as a threat to artistic production, and the first thing you would do if you had a house would be to build a studio outside of it. [...]

[...] A prudent understanding of the need for safety is wise, and built-in— but no animal or person can operate fully under constant implied threats. [...] And by the realization that those feared threats are indeed imaginary, and self-created.

[...] In the meantime, of course, your nervous systems reacted to the implied threat against your work, a threat that now existed in the past, present, and future.

[...] Such qualities are indeed considered threats, for they do not accept easy answers, and are not content with the status quo.

[...] But the threat—and you must try to understand me—the threat does not exist in that world, but only in your beliefs toward it. You are in that world of threat only according to the degree of power you allow it to have over you.

[...] Because you feel that the world is a threat you rouse to battle against it. [...]

(4:30.) For all of man’s fear of disease, however, the species has never been destroyed by it, and life has continued to function with an overall stability, despite what certainly seems to be the constant harassment and threat of illness and disease. [...]

Later we will discuss what this means to you, the individual person, but for now I want to stress the fact that while it may seem natural enough to consider disease as a threat, an adversary or an enemy, this is not the case.