“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENTS, AND POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE MASS BEHAVIOR. RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC CULTS, AND PRIVATE PARANOIAS

Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people. The events are “distorted,” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings….

You must of course interpret events in a personal manner. You create them. Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world. With most mental aberrations, you are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible. These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish between a private and a publicly-shared reality.

Many such people are highly creative and imaginative. Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world. I am speaking in general terms now, and in those terms such people are leery of human relationships. Each person forms his or her own reality, and yet that personal reality must also be shared with others, and must be affected by the reality of others….