“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At noon she’d received another upsetting letter. I was most interested tonight as Seth discussed the implications of the letter, along with two thoughts Jane had picked up from him a week ago Monday, on the day she held the 915th session: “Alone, reason finally becomes unreasonable. Alone, imagination becomes less imaginative over time.” I wrote in the closing note for the session that I was disappointed because Seth hadn’t brought up those two points in the session itself.)

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.

(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.

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.

I do not mean to idealize him either, or others of his kind, but to point out that you can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do. In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable—a matter I will discuss later in the book. The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it. That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves the imagination.