The Years

Awakening from a slumber,
over and over again-
When did I doze off?
And if I thought myself awake then,
what now?
Is it more dreaming
from which I will
awaken soon?

I know I was awake!
And you were there,
and you, and you-
but now when
I look at the photographs,
I no longer recognize
me or you.

But you woke me up,
didn't you?
Wasn't it you
who laughed and shook me
entreating me to wake up?
Did we fall back to sleep together?
Did you go
to the deepest sleep ever?
I don't know
when I will find you gain.
Do we find one another again?

The years-
the months, days, hours, minutes, seconds,
Time,
never enough-
goes too slowly
the waiting and hurrying,
the years-
for what?

Someone else is waking me up,
he is laughing as he shakes me
entreating me to wake up.
I must stay alert,
pay attention this time.
How unobtrusively slumber
can come upon us.
How can you fall asleep
during the movie?
I didn't know I had.
What did I miss?

Someone else is waking me up?
How can this be?
When did I fall asleep?

The years-
The months, days, minutes, seconds,
Time,
never enough,
goes too quickly
the waiting and hurrying,
the years-
for what?

Oh the love!
Now I remember,
the beauty-
the dawn,
star-filled nights
the wild wind,
scudding clouds across
the face of the brilliant full moon-
such beauty!
yes, yes, yes
the song of the birds,
the smell of jasmine,
the warmth of the Gulf-
Your kiss,
You
who have awakened me again-
the love.
The years-
the months, days, minutes, seconds,
Time,
for beauty,
for love.

I must stay alert,
pay attention this time.
And you, and you,
and you,
Awake?

Once again into the breach

The body, using its sense date, becomes more aware of itself and more fully alive as it constantly creates and then perceives its life. The freer and more extensive our physical expression, the more leeway we allow our mental and emotional life. The more the body is used and enjoyed, the greater the responsiveness and its sense of being-in-life and within-the-world, and the greater the feedback and stimuli for further physical and mental expression.

I don’t believe that we become more spiritual by denying the flesh, or that we can expand our consciousness by not using the kind of consciousness we have, hoping that if we close our eyes to this world we’ll see another world more clearly. Instead, we must begin by learning to use the great flexibility available to us—a consciousness that we can turn in many directions while still keeping our earth focus clear and brilliant. Exploring our creaturehood and all its abilities may teach us some basic truths about the really valid mystical elements of nature that we seem to have forgotten.

For reasons beyond the scope of this book, our religions have emphasized repression, restriction, and penance rather than benediction, expression, celebration, or love. They have generally failed to help us love “God,” but have taught us to distrust ourselves and our physical existence instead. They have consistently taught us to deride our creaturehood; and nearly all religions, Western and Eastern alike, have shown a suspicious willingness to surrender the conscious self—the focus personality—either to a bland heaven or Nirvanic blessed imbecility.

Seth maintains that this tendency has to do with the development of our consciousness more than anything else. Sometimes we find the freedom of conscious decision and contemplation too much, and yearn “back” toward what we imagine to be unconscious bliss.

If God is individualized in us, then it’s precisely that God-given-identity, that God-knowing-Itself-as-us, that we want to throw off. Even in our terms we’re a combination of conscious and unconscious activity. Are our cells blissful? Why do we seem to think that self-consciousness can’t contain the experience of bliss, while it seems to have no trouble feeling the greatest kinds of horror?

No wonder so many of the poor saints were nearly insane, forced as they were in their system of beliefs to interpret their revelations through such a dark mirror. Attain godliness by mutilating or denying the body—that miraculous manifestation of spirit made flesh in the world of time and seas ns? Self-surrender? Far better, surrender to the self and the joyful development of its abilities.

The focus personality is whatever godhead there is, individualized in earth life. Perhaps we’ll find a god that we don’t have to crucify, and a concept of selfhood that doesn’t see perfection as dependent upon its own annihilation. But neither of these abilities can occur until we trust our own nature and no longer find our individuality a burden. When we let ourselves be ourselves, we may discover that when we think we are sacrificing ourselves, we actually have nothing to give. Even a god would suspect a gift so desperately offered.

And to what great acts and heroism have such ideas led us?—to fanatically held concepts of Good for which we have gladly killed; to dogmas that are based on the premise that we are damned by reason of our creaturehood, by the very fact that we are alive. Many of our greatest crimes are committed when we think we are most in the right, yet seldom do we question our ideas of right and wrong.

When we think we’re wrong, at lest we often stop to consider; we’re hesitant and sometimes even humble. Yet when we’re self-righteous and feel ourselves justified, we often become cruel and unthinking. Certainly we’ve run rampant across the planet with little respect for it or other kinds of life, because we’ve believed we were given a mandate from God to use the earth as we see fit.

Yet, often we trust nature but not ourselves. As I type this, for example, the shadows are lengthening. It occurs to me that this happens with no help from me. Last week my cat, Willy, sustained a bad wound; the injury healed itself easily, in the same secret way that the evening comes and goes or the light changes and the shadows lengthen. I took it for granted that the cat would heal himself. And most of us trust the seasons in their coming and going. Why do we find it so hard to trust ourselves in the same way?

I stew and fret, and sometimes it seems I never give myself a moment’s rest; yet I know that my breathing in and breathing out is as natural as the tide’s rhythm and that life is breathed in and out of me all the time, without my knowing. I know that my existence is as inevitable and right as my cat’s, and that all of us ride on the great given breath that sustains us. I know that my personal life rides on the same sure order, my life opening up to a particular time and place in the same way that a leaf opens. Surely the leaves trust the trees, Willy certainly trusts himself; his every motion is bathed in the knowledge of the rightness of his being.

If a cat trusts the universe, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you? The cat trusts his catness—his leaping and his chasing of birds, his appetites and desires. And these qualities of catness add to the universe, and I bet those characteristics are reflected through it in a million unknown ways—as they are in our world, with the panther and kitten and my specific housecat.

So why don’t we trust our peoplehood? Or, more to the point, why don’t we trust our specific personhood as it’s reflected through our unique individualities? Why can’t we trust that in nature’s greater order, all of our The cat in killing birds does no wrong, but fulfills himself and in so doing helps nature regulate itself.

I’m certainly not trying to justify murder, but most of us have the idea that, left alone, our natural feelings are somehow wrong, and that left alone we’ll ruin everything for ourselves, privately and en masse; that all nature is right but us; and that we’re the one blight on nature, the mistake that still survives.

Yet some part of me insists on my right to that same grace; to sleep and waken with the animal’s supreme innocent trust. And my cat, Willy, incidentally, doesn’t have to pray, “My Father who art in Heaven.” He doesn’t have to imagine a cat god or do sacrifice or homage.

I can’t begin to explain our atrocities or our cruelty to one another, yet I can’t see why nature would be right—in every other respect showing order and rightness—and be wrong when our race emerged. Are we an experiment gone askew, to be destroyed, its parts disassembled or loaned out to others, distributed safely, defused, to a thousand other species? Are we never to happen in the same way again?

Everything in me shouts out against such condemnation.

Then why do we condemn ourselves? And how can we look at our history and not condemn ourselves? I don’t know. But as I sit appreciating the deep sensual integrity of this particular moment, I know that the kind of creature who can have such perceptions can’t be something to condemn. Right now I thrill to the shape of my hand on the white paper, the shadow of my pen and arm on the card table, the mountains of light and shadow piled on the white walls. And no creature with that kind of appreciation can be bad. Maybe the universe needed to appreciate it. Maybe we are nature’s mirror.

From Jane Roberts Adventures in Consciousness 1975 p.192-195

August 4th

Each morning of late I have been reading out loud to my comrade in reality from the Seth materials. Yesterday as I was reading this section, I was overcome with emotions. Perhaps it is just for me, but in case it is for someone else as well, I wanted to share these words. Thanks. Oberon Skye