“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I admit that for some mysterious reason of my own I let Bill Baker, as I’ll call that youngish individual, fool me when he knocked on our back-porch door yesterday afternoon. He was very well dressed and very well spoken, and I didn’t pay enough attention to the doubts I sensed when he told me about hearing voices in his head, and asked if Jane did the same thing with Seth. I said no. After introducing him to my wife, I went back to my writing room. I could understand what they were saying by concentrating upon the murmur of their voices from the living room, but I seldom did so. She almost called me, Jane said later, when she realized that Bill Baker is a disturbed⁹ person. He told her he’d been hospitalized several times for mental problems, and demonstrated his ability to speak very fluently a “nonsense” language he cannot decipher. [Later I remembered hearing a bit of that.] Our caller had received a number of pages of information from Jesus Christ. He described how he’s relating the Seth material to his sexual fantasies involving young girls, and detailed other instances in which he’d been strongly rebuffed when trying to physically actualize some of Seth’s ideas. There was more. Jane caught him in a number of contradictory statements.

(Long pause at 10:08.) Give us a moment…. Remember, we are dealing with a scattered force, various elements of the personality sent out to do different tasks—and in a fashion they are caught between the superior self and the debased self. There is, then, no clear line for action to follow. It must also be camouflaged. Instead of clear impulses toward action that intersect directly with consciousness, you have bursts of impulses that emerge as orders to act, coming from another source, or from other sources. These may appear as voices telling an individual to do this or that, as “automatic” commands through writing, or as perceptions that would be called hallucinatory. In this way the individual need not take responsibility for such actions. They do not seem to be coming from himself or from herself. The terrible possibility of failure is there to that extent, in that situation, momentarily relieved.

“My own ideas must be colored to some extent by my place in time also, and middle age seems to be an excellent spot for such a study because theoretically time stretches as far ahead as it does behind. That is, there is as much anticipated time as there is remembered time.

“In childhood we have little past time to remember. We seem to come from darkness, taking our parents’ memories on faith for proof that there was time before our birth. As we grow toward old age, we have past time to play with—we know where we came from in usual terms—and the darkness that once seemed to stretch behind our source or origin seems to be our destination. Certainly an examination of the mind and reality from the standpoint of old age will be invaluable.”