“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of “Sayre-environment dreams,” as Seth called them. I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. I’d recently asked Jane if Seth would comment.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s psychology—knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. They are often quite aware of “willing” themselves sick to get out of difficult situations—and of willing themselves well again (with humor).¹

(Long pause.) Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it—and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid the suffering he does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them—as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

1. Seth’s idea that in their play children “try to imagine what death is like” certainly adds an intuitive dimension to my own activities as a child. “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game back in Sayre in the late 1920s, and as we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/or were killed ourselves. We had great fun, and used to play such games to the point of exhaustion.