“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I’ve had a rough day,” she said as we sat for the session. Actually, she was twice irritated. First had come her reactions to a group of upsetting letters she’d received this noon: One is a 20-page missive from a mental patient who wants returned to him all of the notes, objects, manuscripts, and books of poetry he’s sent her over the years: another is from a woman who informed us that she’s writing a book dictated by Seth: a third is a long letter from a man who’s claiming us as his counterparts, for reasons we can’t agree with. There are others. In these cases, it seems impossible that we’ll ever be able to communicate effectively with the individuals involved, although we’re sincerely trying to understand why each of them contacted us.

And: “I’m pissed off,” Jane said now by way of further irritation. She referred to a “psychic fair” she’d accidentally tuned in to on television, while waiting for me to come into the living room for the session. I saw the last few minutes of the program: At a large open-air site, a medium, evidently speaking for “a great council” sitting on one of the outer planets like Saturn or Uranus, was delivering a ringing, generalized message to us earthlings. The several hundred people present applauded when the medium finished. “If we’d had any inkling of what we were getting into with the Seth material, I’d never have done it,” Jane said. She meant that she wouldn’t have become associated with “the cheap psychic field,” not that she’d have given up working with the Seth material. I had to laugh, as I remarked that we hadn’t sought out such associations; others had made them for us. I asked her just how one could go about speaking for a personality like Seth, yet remain aloof from all of the psychic playing going on around us. I said I think we’re doing reasonably well as it is.¹

For that reason, science—after its first great adventurous era—had its own flaws built in, and so it must expand its definitions of reality or become a tin-can caricature of itself, a prostituted handmaiden to an outworn technology, and quite give up its early claims of investigating the nature of truth or reality. It could become as secondary to life as, say, the Roman Catholic Church is now, losing its hold upon world dominance, losing its claim of being the one official arbiter of reality.

Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.

The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided—all loaded, of course, at man’s end at the expense of the other species, and [with] all thinking in terms of progress along very narrow consecutive lines. Such ideas have much to do with the way you think of yourselves, and what you consider human characteristics, and the light in which you view those who vary in one way or another from those norms.

Now: Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding—a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.

There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned. Such people are not considered retarded, of course. I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both were immeasurably enhanced.

A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded. I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values.

Now as far as the species is concerned, all variations are necessary—and it is as if (underlined) in one instance a member of the species—for its own reasons, but also on behalf of the whole—decides to specialize in one particular area, to isolate certain abilities, so to speak, and display them with the greatest tenacity and brilliance, while nearly completely ignoring certain other areas. In your society, however, the capacities of the reasoning mind have been considered in opposition to the intuitive abilities, so that your ideas of what a person is or should be largely ignore the idea of emotional achievement, emotional understanding.

(10:28.) Now: (Long pause.) Mankind is a species (long pause) that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary. Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes. The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience. It connects your emotions and your reason. All species are interconnected, so, as I said earlier, when you think you think for yourselves, you also specialize in thinking for the rest of nature, which physically sustains you.

1. Jane’s particular mood today, and my own remarks, shouldn’t be taken to mean that we don’t understand why people attend psychic fairs, for example. I think that each person at that gathering shown on television was looking for news about man’s origin and nature—even if, in our opinions, it’s too simplistic to postulate the existence of a great council on one of the far planets of our solar system. To us, that concept is an exteriorized distortion of the “great council” that each one of us carries within ourselves. But there are many ramifications here, and it’s obvious that studying the Seth material is hardly the only way to explore reality. Human beings are far too diverse to be satisfied by any one system of thought, or even by any related group of them.