“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Your many civilizations, historically speaking, each with its own fields of activity, its own sciences, religions, politics and art—these all represent various ways that man has used imagination and reason to form a framework through which (underlined) a more or less cohesive reality is experienced.

(9:02.) Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination. Inner events are stressed over exterior ones. The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning. In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content.

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.

Ruburt (Jane) today received a letter from a man who would certainly be labeled a schizophrenic. Ruburt was distressed—not only by the individual’s situation, but by the philosophic implications. Why on earth, he thought, should someone form such a reality?

(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.

The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world. He hurts no one. He supports himself a good deal of the time. His view of reality is eccentric from most viewpoints. He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there.