“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

So your physical life is the result of a spectacular spontaneous order—the order of the body spontaneously formed by the units of consciousness. Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities. These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs. Both imagination and reason belonged to the species from the beginning, but the species has used these qualities in different ways throughout what you think of as historic time. There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world.

In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality. You ended up with a true-or-false kind of world, in which it seemed that the answers to the deepest questions about life could be answered quite correctly and adequately by some multiple-choice test. Man’s imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence. In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions.

I have taken two contrasting examples of the many ways in which the powers of the imagination and those of the reasoning abilities can be used. There are endless varieties, however—each subjectively and genetically possible, and many, of course, that you have not yet developed as a species.

Now on the question of “mental disorders,” it is highly important that individual integrity be stressed, rather than the blanket definitions that are usually accorded to any group of symptoms. In many such circumstances, however, such individuals are combining the imagination and the reasoning abilities in ways that are not in keeping with their historic periods. (With some irony:) It would not be entirely out of keeping, though somewhat exaggerated a statement, to claim that men who stockpile nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace are insane. In your society, such activities are, in a way that completely escapes me, somehow under the label of humanitarianism!

Such plans are not considered insane ones—though in the deepest meaning of that word, they are indeed. There are many reasons for such actions, but an overemphasis upon what you think of (underlined) as the reasoning abilities, as opposed to what you think of as the imaginative abilities, is at least partially to blame.

(9:23.) In the case of the man who wrote Ruburt, we have a mixture of those characteristics in which interior events—the events of the imagination—cast too strong a light upon physical events as far as the socially accepted blend is concerned. Again, I am not speaking about all cases of mental disorder here. I do, however, want to make the point that your prized psychological norm as a species means that you must also be allowed a great leeway in the use of the imagination and the intellect. Otherwise, you could become locked into a rigid conscious stance, one in which both the imagination and the intellect could advance no further. It is vitally important that you realize the great psychological diversity that is present within your psychological behavior—and those varieties of psychological experience are necessary. They give you vital psychological feedback, and they exercise the reaches of your abilities in ways that are overall most advantageous.