Each being experiences life as if it were at life's center

[inavalan]

When I speak of natural law, I am not referring to the scientists' laws of nature, such as the law of gravity, for example — which is not a law at all, but a manifestation appearing from the viewpoint of a certain level of consciousness as a result of perceptive apparatus. Your "prejudiced perception" is also built into your instruments in that regard.

(Pause.) I am speaking of the inner laws of nature, that pervade existence. What you call nature refers of course to your particular experience with reality, but quite different kinds of manifestations are also "natural" outside of that context. The laws of nature that I am in the process of explaining underlie all realities, then, and form a firm basis for multitudinous kinds of "natures." I will put these in your terms of reference, however.

(Long pause.) Each being experiences life as if it were at life's center. This applies to a spider in a closet as well as to any man or woman. This principle applies to each atom as well. Each manifestation of consciousness comes into being feeling secure at life's center — experiencing life through itself, aware of life through its own nature. It comes into being with an inner impetus toward value fulfillment. It is equipped with a feeling of safety, of security within its own environment with which it is fit to deal. It is given the impetus toward growth and action, and filled with the desire to impress its world.

(9:21.) The term "value fulfillment" is very difficult to explain, but it is very important. Obviously it deals with the development of values — not moral values, however, but values for which you really have no adequate words. Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center. The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.

In those terms, animals have values, and if the quality of their lives disintegrates beyond a certain point, the species dwindles. We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning (intently). Life is meaning for animals. The two are indistinguishable.

(Pause.) You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. (Long pause, then with humor:) It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of your beliefs. The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider's part — and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well. (Louder:) It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs. You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

(Pause at 9:20.) What about the poor unsuspecting fly? Is it then so enamored of the spider's web that it loses all sense of caution? (Whispering, and dryly:) For surely flies are the victims of such nefarious webby splendors. We are into sticky stuff indeed.

(Still in trance, Jane paused to pour herself a little wine.)
For one thing, you are dealing with different kinds of consciousness than your own. They are focused consciousnesses, surely, each one feeling itself at life's center. While this is the case, however, these other forms of consciousness also identify them with the source of nature from which they emerge. In a way impossible to explain, the fly and the spider are connected, and aware of the connection. Not as hunter and prey, but as individual participants in deeper processes. Together they work toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled.

(Pause.) There are communions of consciousness of which you are unaware. While you believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then you put together your perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories. You will see no value in the life of a mouse sacrificed in the laboratory, for example, and you will project claw-and-fang battles in nature, completely missing the great cooperative venture that is (underlined) involved.

--- NoME #863

[Deb]

I remember someone (Tolle? Chopra? Dyer?) years ago explaining this to where I first understood that concept of everyone being the center of their universe. The 360° view of reality from our subjective perspectives.

I love the spider web analogy and Seth's description of the spider's perspective—"You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical." Lol. I can envision each of us being the spider in the center of a multi-dimensional web. Anyone/thing that enters our "web" works "toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled." Beautiful.