“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Four months ago I wrote in Note 1 for Session 885 that through a series of misunderstandings the people at Ankh-Hermes, a publishing company in Holland, had violated their contract with Prentice-Hall by issuing a condensed translation of Seth Speaks. Our editor at Prentice-Hall, Tam Mossman, insisted that Ankh-Hermes publish another, full-length edition of Jane’s book in the Dutch language. Now Tam has just forwarded to us correspondence showing that Ankh-Hermes will do this—the new publishing date for Seth Spreekt is still uncertain, however.

(To me:) You spoke today, or this evening, about some [world] statesmen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve (pause), but who open new horizons in their later years. They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world’s needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not.

Some in your society feel that the young are kept out of life’s mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily. As a consequence some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable. They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology’s offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father’s footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life’s mainstream. He was needed.

(9:34.) The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming (underlined) exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture. Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality—activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in your society many people never reach that point—or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons….

(9:53.) Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes—that it has a face-saving quality in your society—so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

(“I was just going to ask you about doing that.”

“In brilliant, limpid color: I dreamed that a ship—a freighter colored a warm gray and a rust-red-orange—sank in the ocean. I was underwater, to one side, and viewed everything as an observer. I watched the ship sink on an even keel through the blue-green water to the smooth yellow and tan and brown sandy ocean floor—but instead of settling motionless there the ship began to ‘sail’ or plow its way across the ocean bottom, almost as though it were a car moving along a road. I saw waves of sand gracefully rise up from the bow of the freighter. I saw no people or fish—just the ship, the ocean, and its floor, which was free of obstacles to the ship’s easy passage. The fact that the ship could navigate that way underwater was a revelation to me, and I knew that in some way this boded well for my future. I was very pleased. The colors were beautiful. I’d really like to do a painting of this dream.”