Conversations With Seth (vol 2)

335 Pages·1981·9.622 MB·English

by  Susan M. Watkins, Seth (Spirit), Jane Roberts

Susan M. W atkins
L_! __________-
CONVERSATIONS
W ITH SETH
Volume Two
CONVERSATION S
W ITH SETH
Volume Two
SUSAN M. WATKINS
Illustrations by George Rhoads
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Com<eTsations With Seth, Volume Two
by Susan M. Watkins
Copyright© 1981 by Susan M. Watkins
All previously unpublished Seth material copyright
©1981 by Jane Roberts, used by permission.
"Buddha Slumped,” “A Tudor Song,” "The Green Man,” "Caught Up
With,” and untitled poem, copyright© 1981 by Dan Stimmerman, used
by permission.
"Repetition of Our Constant Creations,” "Rule #1,” and two untitled
poems, copyright© 1981 by Barrie Gellis, used by permission.
“Joyful Rain” and "The Inbetweens of Time,” copyright ©1981 by Richie
Kendall, used by permission.
"Children of Always,” "Somewhere,” and "a man i don’t know,”
copyright© 1981 by Jane Roberts, used by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review,
without permission in writing from the publisher. Address inquiries to
Prentice Hall, Inc.,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 07632
Printed in the United States of America
Prentice-Hall International, Inc., London
Prentice-Hall of Australia, Pty. Ltd., Sydney
Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd., Toronto
Prentice-Hall of India Private Ltd., New Delhi
Prentice-Hall of Japan, Inc., Tokyo
Prentice-Hall of Southeast Asia Pt. Ltd., Singapore
Whitehall Books Limited, Wellington, New Zealand
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Watkins, Susan M
Conversations with Seth.
Includes index.
1. Spirit writings. 2. Spiritualism. 3. Reincarna­
tion. I. Seth. II. Roberts, Jane. Ill Title.
BF1301.W226 133.93 80-17760
ISBN 0-13-173G07-4 -CV. AACRl
ISBN D-13-17E0a-S -CV- S> -CPBK.}
for Sean
who unknowing, Knows
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE 291
CHAPTER ELEVEN Health, Healing, and How We Walked Through
Each Others’ Bones 295
CHAPTER TWELVE The War of the Idiot Flowers: In Which Dream
Fish, Spontaneity, and the Draft Are Kicked Around 317
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Love Thine Ego As Thy Self: Drugs, Religion,
and Other Wages of Sin 339
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Togetherness in Space: Class Dreams and
Co-Creations 363
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Further Expeditions: Out-of-Bodies and the
Gates of Horn 409
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Roads Not Taken: Probable Systems and
Possible Selves 431
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Them As Us: Characters Who Passed
Through Class 455
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Who Else Do You Think You Are?-
Counterparts Are Comparatively Encountered 481
CHAPTER NINETEEN If It Isn’t Fun, Stop Doing It!
(And Other Revelations) 505
CHAPTER TWENTY The Girl on the Old Purple Mountain: Does All
This Stuff Really Work?? 535
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Nobody Does it Better: Class and
Un-Class Ever Since 553
EPILOGUE 577
APPENDIX FIVE A Waking Dream: The Probability of Eyau 579
APPENDIX SIX Comments on the Christ Consciousness: A Spontaneous
Seth Session, August 5, 1977 583
APPENDIX SEVEN On Time in No Time: The Incident of
the Train 589
APPENDIX EIGHT Natal Therapy and the Joy of Becoming: Seth
in Class, February 26, 1974 595
APPENDIX NINE Counterparts Who Dream: Libraries of
Probability 605
INDEX 611
PROLOGUE
292 / Prologue
More than two years have passed since I began the preparation and
work for Conversations with Seth. Within that time span, the same
old questions that confronted and confounded class have emerged
anew, different only in the context of their appearance. Hostages in
Iran. Starvation in Cambodia. Wars and revolutions. Energy de­
mands. Three-Mile Island. Pollution. Nuclear weapons. All of hu­
mankind’s works wrought not wisely but well, it seems, upon the
Earth.
And yet, the planet itself, with its natural progression of
days and nights and seasons, maintains its harmony around us. Of
all the worries and fears expressed in class, none of the worst expec­
tations have panned out—and some of our best hopes still seem
hopeful. And in reflecting on the events of the past two years — those
events deemed “newsworthy” by the media as well as those daily
events too “ordinary” to report—the ideas we encountered in Jane
Roberts’s ESP class become an even more natural product of our
species than any of us, I think, realized at the time; perhaps more
“natural” than the wars, crimes, and cruelties we continue to inflict
on our fellow creatures.
For me, the roots of this book grew out of the Flood of
1972, when the Chemung River washed through my Elmira, New
York, apartment and destroyed nearly every book, every manu­
script, every scrap of paper I’d ever written a word on. I remember
standing knee-deep in mud in my shattered living room, looking
around at the mucky mess of papers and plants and clothes and fur­
niture, and thinking, “Well—a clean sweep!” And strangely, there
was something quite reassuring about this sweep (though hardly a
clean one) of nature, and in the absolute simplicity of that moment
in which I stood, utterly without possessions for the first time in my
life; yet alive and well, breathing in the dank mud-stink that
represented, after all, the basic stuff of my own physical body. I felt
strong and secure: the triumph of survival, perhaps; or a glimpse of
the elementary self-awareness that the animals so gracefully possess.
Nearly eight years later, I finished Volume 2 of Conversa­
tions a few weeks after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Driving
along the Oregon coast, I saw the dust and ash that coated every­
thing and clogged workings everywhere; I heard terrible stories of
people and land lost beneath hot ash and rock. Yet I also saw the re­
mains of logged forests and the pitted, raw, devastated mess left be­
hind by the lumbering process. Angrily, I tried to believe that hu­
mankind’s environmental disasters might also be part of nature, just
Prologue / 293
as a volcano was, or a flooding river. But I still felt shame for my
own kind. Why is it that we barely understand the consciousness we
call our own; the body of events we experience even less?
The gouged fields, the ugly stumps, the giant plastic
monument to Paul Bunyan—who had, in the story, chopped down
whole statesful of trees, apparently without remorse—sped by the
car windows, dust and ash swirling up like gritty snow. And then the
redwoods loomed up, so incredible to the eye as to become un­
real— not part of nature at all. Resting in the presence of those awe­
some tree-beings, I began to think how man had indeed created God
in his own image; and how desperately we need new gods now — how
much we yearn for them, in fact. New gods, with a lower-case “g”
and a sense of humor, who would be insulted by groveling and wor­
ship; who would not disenfranchise the snake, who would cherish
the world without guile. New gods who would naturally evoke one’s
powerful, secure, and forever untamable créaturehood—without
shame for its contents and its impulses.
In retrospect, the writing of this book made clear to me
how, all without conscious purpose, Jane’s ESP class brought to­
gether an alliance of people who were ready to make new gods, and
who were willing to take off on a daring and irreverent journey
through their individual identities to find where these new gods
might reside. In doing so, we discovered that each one of us is mirac­
ulously and quite naturally set up to take those journeys, with or
without philosophies or groups—as Jane and Rob’s extraordinary
private experience demonstrates. And so I hope that you who read
this book will dive within it, and yourselves, with exuberance and
sensibility and silliness and desire, as we did. I think that wherever
your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine
patience—and laughter.
Susan M. Watkins
Dundee, New York