“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A few notes. When Ruburt forgot to worry because “he wasn’t working,” his natural playful creativity bubbled to the surface, and today he wrote poetry. Poetry, however, did not fit into his current ideas about work, and so that excellent creativity was hardly counted at all.

However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority for facts, then as you know science cannot prove its version of the [universe’s] origin either. It only sets up an hypothesis, which collects about it all data that agree, and again ignores what does not fit. Moreover, science’s thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart—and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident.⁵ The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices (all with much emphasis and fast delivery.

There is a part of man that Knows, with a capital K. That is the portion of him, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body’s “machinery,” ⁶ so in our book we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people write, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material—and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. (Pause.) In a fashion, creative play is your human version of far greater characteristics from which your universe itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific, subjective evidence for the nature of your own reality—evidence that is readily apparent once you really begin to look for it, particularly by comparing the world of your dreams with your daily life.

With all due respect, your friend [the psychologist] is, with the best of intentions, barking up the wrong psychological tree. He is very enthusiastic about his value tests, and his enthusiasm is what is important. The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of mechanical psychology, as if you could break down human values to a kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try (with humor), but representative of psychology’s best attempt to make sense of a poor hypothesis.

When all of summer’s
splendid leafery is gone
then space seems to surround
us everywhere, far and close.
The immense vault of the universe
turns intimate,
reaches to our chimneytops
in shining swirls of sudden openness
just outside of our back doors.
Space from the galaxies
rushes in to fill the new emptiness
where a million million leaves were,
and the valleys hold
natural cupfuls of space,
filled to their transparent brims.

Jane has been doing 3” × 6” sketches in concert with her poetry about nature. She works in brilliant simple colors, obtaining her effects with porous pens whose inks she can partially blend with water. I’d like to frame some of those little pieces, for visually they present the same qualities her poetry does verbally. We usually keep her sketches covered, however, since their colors begin to fade after a few weeks’ exposure to light.

However, for every scientist bold enough to think this way, there are scores of others who vehemently disagree. For most scientific materialists only physical matter is real. For them consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon, the passive by-product of the brain’s physiology and chemical events. They believe that physical death is the end of everything, that ultimately all is pointless. They derisively call their rebellious colleagues “animists”—those who believe that all life forms and natural phenomena have a spiritual origin independent of physical matter. (Such heretics are also called “vitalists,” a term related to animism, and one which also has a long history of scientific contempt behind it.)