“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The poems show my attitude toward life in general just before my psychic experiences began. When you see the type of poetry that I was writing then, you will understand immediately why the ideas in “Idea Construction” were such a revelation to me. Incidentally, I considered these poems as aesthetic creations. I made no effort at the time to examine my own subjective states — I simply expressed them as best I could and then criticized the poems on their aesthetic merits. The way I saw life was the way life was! It never occurred to me that my own attitudes had anything to do with it.

This next is not as good a poem, aesthetically, as the others, but it was written to Rob and clearly shows the growing sense of panic with which I viewed the passing years. I remember writing it — half in tears.

[...] But many of these actions are also mental manipulations or aesthetic realizations and even aesthetic performances. [...]

[...] Since these were an aesthetic people, the walls were lined with paintings and drawings, and sculpture was also displayed along these inner byways.

[...] The personality, for its own reasons, may decide upon choosing a body that is not aesthetically pleasing. [...]

[...] Your questioning nature would have followed the aesthetic life with devotion and without deviation. [...]

[...] Wealth as opposed to art or aesthetics. [...]

[...] I stood at the window and dashed out this poem — far too emotionally unrestrained to be aesthetically a good one but an excellent example of my feelings at the time.

In my notes introducing Volume 1, I wrote about placing the basic “artistic ideas” embodied in the Seth material at our conscious, aesthetic, and practical service in daily life. [...]

Now our Florence is working with her own ideas of good and evil, searching for what she thinks of as an aesthetic and moral code that she can rely upon. [...]

Dream investigation or manipulation as an aesthetic pursuit — as an art, embarked upon for its own sake — this is something else again and is sometimes suspect because of its solitary nature. [...]

Such inner therapeutics may occur at various other levels of consciousness, where they may be sparked by exterior stimuli of an aesthetic or pleasing nature. [...]

[...] See the verse from her early poem, Summer Is Winter, which precedes these notes.) As I see it, her task with the Seth material is to place these basic artistic ideas at our conscious service, so that their use in our daily lives can change our individual and collective realities for the better; and by “artistic ideas” here I mean the deepest, most aesthetic and practical — and, yes, mystical — truths and questions that human beings are capable of expressing, then contending with. [...]

[...] That is, the individual will grow outward toward the world, encountering and forming a practical experience, traveling outward from his center in almost vinelike fashion, forming from the fabric of physical reality a conglomeration of pleasant or aesthetic, and unpleasant or prickly events.