“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Regardless of appearances at sometimes, fanatics do not rule the world. Otherwise there would be none—meaning no world. [...] While you are ahead of your times, therefore, it is very important that you realize that the world is not against you. [...]

The world is composed of individuals. [...] It is a give-and-take world. [...]

(9:57.) The world is not leaping to listen to those people. [...] If you try to retire from the world in whatever fashion, then it is easy to exaggerate such threats, while never encountering one, or giving yourself the opportunity of easily conquering it.

[...] Those people, for example, do not represent the world or any fundamentalists in particular. [...]

Despite all appearances, conditions of an exterior nature do not cause wars, or poverty, or disease, or any of the unfortunate circumstances apparent in the world. [...] To add your own energy, focus, and concentration to dire circumstances in other portions of the world does not help, but adds to, such situations.

Each of you is couched now in the natural world, and that world is couched in a reality from which nature emerges. [...]

[...] Waking and sleeping reality is therefore balanced in the world mind — not the world brain.

Diverse cultures are thus able to communicate as the cultural knowledge of various parts of the world is given to the sleeping portion of the entire organism. When they sleep, the waking nations add the day’s events to the world memory, and work out future probabilities.

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rockbed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. [...] For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

[...] While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. [...] In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom — a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. You will instead live in a world where events happen to you, in which you must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see yourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

[...] As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds. [...]

Your father expected the worst of the world. [...] If they were true the world simply would not have lasted this long. [...] If anything, it adds to my argument—for if those theories really held sway, one nation or another by now would have already destroyed your world. [...]

He reacts practically, then, by avoiding what he thinks of as conflict, and you do not help in that regard, for by temperament you are not particularly attracted to the world. [...] The bridge here involves the natural world, his love of nature, the connections between poetry, strolling the natural world as opposed to the social one.

The world responds to such people’s acceptance. [...] They are part and parcel of the social world.

[...] Your feelings about the world—to some extent—are mental and hypothetical. [...] You use an emotional aloofness with the world, and he has become physically aloof instead.

[...] If you do not like the looks of the adult world, then you had better change your own expectations now. The world in which your parents live is a world which they created. [...] It existed first as the stuff of dreams, and from this they spawned their universe, and from this they made their world.

For the thought shall seed the world and the world shall seed the universe. [...] He must live in the world he has created, and it is a miserable and cruel world.

It is the world in which you now will live, and if you will not face their problems, if you cannot solve their dilemma, it will be not their fault but your own. [...] The young generation sits by, apparently helpless while the parents rule the world. [...] They become adults, but what about their world?

Those of you who would change your world, then I tell you, listen: for if you would change your world you must listen to the voice within yourself. [...]

In one area, that of money, Ruburt is fairly free, finally. You consider taxes as a symbol of the creator’s support of the mass world—that is, you feel forced to contribute to a world with which you do not agree. You feel that that world threatens you, and yet you must support it. 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.

[...] With all of its evils and ignorances, that Caesar’s world allows a framework in which artists, writers, garbage men, physicians, wise men and fools can exist—and my dear friend, let me tell you: fools have a right to exist. It does you little harm to help uphold their world, and in your terms, time and life without their world would not exist, for there are webworks that unite fools, prophets, wise men and kings. [...]

[...] On the one hand you “believe” that you form your own reality, and on the other you believe that things will most likely go wrong unless you do something to stop them; and this is the most conventional world view that forms the experience of, say, the newspaper world.

[...] When you believe that the world is indeed chaos, then you are thankful for any portions of order or creativity you find within yourself.

[...] Both of you constantly question the world, and both of you in different ways protected yourselves, so that you would not be tempted by the world’s usual ways.

[...] You would share what you learned with the world —but he who seeks knowledge must first of all be himself or herself, for most members of the world cannot follow such a course.

[...] The sessions also imply the promise of a contact with a larger reality than your own—one large enough to contain the world that you normally recognize.

[...] Each of you conspired to share your knowledge with the world, so that other lives were also enriched.

(Pause at 10:17, eyes closed.) Conclusion: You are individuals, yet each of you forms a part of the world’s reality. Consciously, you are usually aware only of your own thoughts, but those thoughts merge with the thoughts of all others in the world. [...] At other levels, however, you carry a picture of the world’s news, [one] that is “picked up” by signals transmitted by the c-e-l-l-s (spelled) that compose all living matter. When you have an impulse to act, it is your own impulse, yet it is also a part of the world’s action. In those terms, there are inner neurological-like systems that provide constant communication through all of the world’s parts. [...]

(Through all of our personal activities, Jane and I are intensely conscious of the cultural, scientific, artistic, and economic aspects of the world we’ve chosen to live and work in. [...] Right now, we’re very much aware of all of the good things the people of our world are providing for us and for millions of others, every minute of every day — yet a certain portion of our joint interest in that “outside” world is also directed toward the situation at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us. [...] The whole world was a spectator at the worst accident in the history of our country’s nuclear power program.

[...] You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.

[...] If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better. [...]

You do not have the responsibility to change the world for the better. That is, changing the world for the better is not your personal responsibility. You have a natural need to impress your world—to act through it, with it, and upon it, to illuminate it with your own vision, in which case you automatically change it for the better. [...]

If you think that it is your personal responsibility alone to change the world, then you are always bound to feel a burdening sense of failure. The world is being changed through our work—but because that work is primarily a creative endeavor in the fullest, deepest meaning, now, of the word creative. [...]

[...] It also made him think, however, that he was not changing the world in any way that mattered in any important degree—that those in authority did not even read them, and that even my latest work (Mass Reality) would make no inroads. [...]

[...] A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world. [...]

While I was trying to define Seth that way and questioning whether or not he was a spirit guide, I was closed off to some extent from his greater reality, which exists in terms of vast imaginative and creative power that is bigger than the world of facts and can’t be contained in it. Seth’s personality is quite observable in our sessions, for example, but the source of that personality isn’t. For that matter, the origin of any personality is mysterious and not apparent in the objective world. My job is to enlarge the dimensions of that world and people’s concepts of it.

In the meantime all I can say is this: We live in a world of physical facts but these spring from a deeper realm of creativity, and in a real sense facts are fictions that spring alive in our experience. [...] Seth, then, is as much a fact as I am or you are, and in a strange way he straddles both worlds. I hope that Aspects will also span the world of facts and the rich inner realities from which they come, for our experience includes each.

My idea briefly is this: Our usual orientation is focused pretty exclusively in what we think of as the “real” world, but there are many realities. [...]

For years I’ve been confused, trying to define Seth in the usual true-and-false world of facts. [...]

[...] Ideally (underlined), your impulses are always in response to your own best interests — and, again, to the best interests of your world as well. Obviously there is a deep damaging distrust of impulses in the contemporary world, as in your terms there has been throughout the history that you follow. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] They had been taught not to trust the outside world, and little by little the gap between misguided idealism and an exaggerated version of the world’s evil blocked all doors through which power could be exerted — all doors save one. [...]

[...] The businessman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his ideal of surviving in a competitive world — he suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.

In the same way each of you form an overall dream world in which there is some general agreement, comma, but in which each experience is original. The dream world has its reaches as the physical one does. [...]

THE DREAM LANDSCAPE, THE PHYSICAL WORLD, PROBABILITIES, AND YOUR DAILY EXPERIENCE

Now: Give us a moment… (Whispering:) Chapter Twenty: “The Dream Landscape, the Physical World, Probabilities, and Your Daily Experience.”

The dream world operates as a creative situation in which probable acts are instantly materialized, laid out in actual or symbolic form. [...]

[...] Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities. [...] There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world.

[...] The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning. [...]

The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world. [...] He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there.

[...] If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell.

[...] You were (pause) each present at the beginning of the world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. [...] I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. [...]

In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity’s composition. [...] You are tuned into earth’s orchestration [you might say], and your perception of time is simply the result of habits—habits of perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. [...]

[...] The world then came into physical existence. [...]

[...] The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of your world. [...] You interpret the phenomena of your world according to the mythic characteristics that you have accepted. [...] The physical body itself is quite capable of putting the world together in different fashions than the one that is familiar to you.

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that you know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framework 2. In a manner of speaking your factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, and imagination, from which all of your detailed paraphernalia emerge. [...]

[...] They involve symbols and known emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that that world is never the same again.

Before we can begin to consider such questions, we must take another look at your own world, and ascertain its source, for surely its source and nature’s are the same. [...]

You want to make the material workable in your world — a natural and quite understandable desire: The proof is in the pudding, and so forth. Yet of course you are also participators in an immense drama in which the main actions occur outside of your world, in those realms from which your world originated — and you are, foremost, natives of those other realms, as each individual is; as each being is.

[...] You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience. Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world. [...]

[...] But [this was] then carried over so that you wanted to keep your Roman (reincarnational) world and this [present] one separate and not merge them through association — as you did — so that it was difficult to know this when you did your sketches. Subjectively you wanted to put the worlds together, to explore the similarities and so forth, but practically you wanted to divide them for your notes.

As I try to increase your capacity for understanding, and to expand the scopes of your abilities, so in other kinds of worlds I do the same thing. [...]

That book, The World View of Paul Cézanne, was published by Prentice-Hall in 1977. [...] The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James came the same way, like mental dictation; only where the Cézanne world view had specialized in art, the James world view was more comprehensive. It commented in depth upon our world since James’s death, and covered American history as it was related to spiritualism, psychology, and democracy.

Seth began discussing world views in his “Unknown” Reality. Simply put, a world view is a living psychological picture of an individual life, with its knowledge and experience, which remains responsive and viable long after the physical life itself is over. So, the material I received didn’t come from Paul Cézanne per se, but from his world view.

[...] He certainly is alert, active, responsive, concerned about people individually and in general, and about the world. And yet I feel that only a portion of his consciousness is here during sessions — the part expressed through me — so that whatever the nature of Seth’s native experience, his performance in our world only hints of a psychological complexity quite beyond our present understanding.

Is Seth actually my trance personality, though — a native of timeless psychological realms, who sends his messages to our time-tinted world? [...]

(Pause at 10:27.) The overall private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your beliefs and therefore your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. [...] You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

[...] You seem to be at the center of your world, because for you your world begins with that point of intersection where soul and physical consciousness meet.

[...]

[...]

Dictation: Chapter Fourteen: Which You?” Beneath that (gesturing horizontally:) “Which World?”

If you want to change the world for the better, then you are an idealist. If you want to change the world for the better, but you believe it cannot be changed one whit, then you are a pessimist, and your idealism will only haunt you. If you want to change the world for the better, but you believe that it will grow worse, despite everyone’s efforts, then you are a truly despondent, perhaps misguided idealist. If you want to change the world for the better, and if you are determined to do so, no matter at what cost to yourself or others, no matter what the risk, and if you believe that those ends justify any means at your disposal, then you are a fanatic.

[...] They want to change the world. [...] One young lady wanted to quit her job, stay at home, and immerse herself in “psychic work,” hoping that her part in changing the world could be accomplished in that manner. [...]

In the meantime, he looks with horror and disgust at the older men who have worked there for years, “getting drunk on Saturday nights, thinking only of the narrow world of their families,” and he is determined that the same thing will not happen to him. [...] He doesn’t believe that he can change the world by beginning where he is, and yet he is afraid to count upon his own abilities by giving them a practical form of expression.

[...] If you are idealists, and if you feel relatively powerless in the world at the same time, and if your idealism is general and grandiose, unrelated to any practical plans for its expression, then you can find yourself in difficulties indeed. [...]

In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes into your universe is as new as if (in your terms) the world were created yesterday—a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980 was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning of the world.

[...] The Arab world still needs the West, and again, it is better that those issues come to light now, while they must to some extent consider the rest of the world.

[...] Because mass events are concerned there is not a completely different year, of course, for each individual on the face of the planet—but there are literally an endless number of mass-shared worlds of 1980 “in the wings,” so to speak.

[...] But within the range of workable probabilities, private and mass choices, the people of the world are choosing their probable 1980s.