“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 10:24.) Physical perception gives you a necessary kind of feedback, but it is also based upon learning processes, so that from a young age you learn to put the pieces of the world together in acceptable fashions. In a way, under certain conditions, some schizophrenic situations can give you righter glimpses of inner psychological mobility, a mobility that was focused and directed as you grew through childhood. Schizophrenia represents a kind of learning disability in that particular respect.

The language is an excellent example of the coded messages I mentioned earlier (as I’d thought). It is supposed to remain secret, you see, yet becomes the symbol of the all-powerful knowledge of the exaggerated superior self, while making the knowledge impossible to act upon. To translate the information would mean a more serious commitment to physical communication than that young man was willing to make.

(Pause.) I will have more to say about such communications, and the ways in which they can point out the greater psychological mobility that is a more or less natural element in children. When you are a child, you are not held accountable for your actions in the same way that adults are, and schizophrenia often begins around puberty, or young adulthood, when people feel that their youthful promise is expected to bear fruit. If they have been considerably gifted, for example, they are now supposed to show the results of schooling through adult accomplishments. If they are nearly convinced, however, that the self is also dangerous or evil, then they become afraid of using their abilities, and indeed become more frightened of the self—which, again, they then try to conquer by dividing. They feel cut off from value fulfillment. In a fashion they begin to act opaquely in the world, showing a divided face.