“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This flexibility also generates some challenges, however, for the great amount of material we’ve accumulated during the Mass Events hiatus gave us the urge to see what we could do about getting at least some of it published, so that others could benefit. The problem — the challenge — would be to find the physical time to do the necessary editing and notes to put such a manuscript in shape for publication; this would be a job that could easily take a year. Jane and I considered combining that hypothetical book with Mass Events, but figured out that the resulting volume would almost surely be too long; longer even than Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, which in our opinion is bulky enough.

(Then, in a private session held on the evening of September 17, 1977, Seth came through with a very exciting concept called “Framework 1 and Framework 2.” Jane and I were so struck by the practical, far-reaching implications of this proposition that we began a concerted effort to put it to use in daily life. Briefly and very simply, Seth maintains that Framework 2, or inner reality, contains the creative source from which we form all events, and that by the proper focusing of attention we can draw from that vast subjective medium everything we need for a constructive, positive life in Framework 1, or physical reality. We’ve already made known to Seth our desires that he go into his Frameworks 1 and 2 material much more extensively in Mass Events, since those concepts are so closely involved with the individual and collective experiences surrounding the lives of everyone.³

(Finally: Just before tonight’s session Jane said she thought Seth might do some work on Mass Events. She had a question about herself, and I asked for a few lines from Seth on whether she just might have been born left-handed. I want to use the material in connection with a passage I’m putting together for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. [See the excerpts from Session 211, in Appendix 18 of that work.] However, Seth didn’t answer my question.)

Once again, the elderly were singled out. It seems obvious that they are more susceptible to diseases. That susceptibility is a medical fact of life. It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s biological reality. It is a fact brought about through suggestion. The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.

Their belief systems, therefore, you must admit, are quite practical. Nor are they surrounded by medical professions. Later in the book we will return to the subject. Here, you have, however, what almost amounts to a social program for illness — the flu season. A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved. Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner groceries — all of these elements are involved.

You are literally expected to come down with the flu. It can serve as an excuse for not facing many kinds of problems. Many people are almost consciously aware of what they are doing. All they have to do is pay attention to the suggestions offered so freely by the society. The temperature does rise. Concern causes the throat to become dry. Dormant viruses — which up to now have done no harm — are activated.

Science has seen man as an accidental product of an uncaring universe, a creature literally without a center of meaning, where consciousness was the result of a physical mechanism that only happened to come into existence, and that had no reality outside of that structure. Science has at least been consistent in that respect. Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.

Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality. The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or of any other group, are not thrust upon you, therefore. They are the result of your mass beliefs — isolated in the form of separate disciplines. Medical men, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those specific health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved. The idea of prevention is always based upon fear — for you do not want to prevent something that is joyful. Often, therefore, preventative medicine causes what it hopes to avoid. Not only does the idea [of prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.

As I sorted through the mass of material Seth-Jane has produced these last weeks, I found myself once again charmed and mystified by the challenges contained in the art of writing. The painted image can be taken in at a glance, at any stage of its development, but the cognition of the written word takes much more time, no matter how fast one reads or absorbs new material. With a single look the artist has an immediate grasp of the entire work before him; he (or she) can tell what he’s done and has to do, what he may have to change or “fix up,” even if he fails at it. Not so the writer, who while reading must pass up the artist’s simultaneous perception for his own linear cognition as he makes a multitude of decisions involving sentence structure, what to use or eliminate, and so forth.

Sometimes the artist in me visually comes to the aid of the writer by laying out pages of material and notes side by side upon a table or two. Then I can see what I’m trying to do as a whole, and half intuitively, half intellectually make decisions about how to organize passages I may be having problems with. This process is always very challenging and thrilling to me. It always seems to work, although progress may still be slow at times. This method also helps greatly in counteracting that initial impatience the artist part of me strongly feels when my writer self comes upon a complex situation.

I’m well aware of current scientific theories about the supposed separate functions of the two hemispheres of the brain: The left half is said to control logical activities like writing, while the right half is responsible for the intuitive artistic abilities. Perhaps — but after all, writing can be intuitively based, and art can be logically produced. At least the whole brain (its hemispheres are connected deep within by the corpus callosum) must contain that necessary basic creative ability that may then be apportioned out — but only to an extent, I think — between the hemispheres. Barring physical injury/surgery, there must be more communication between its halves (via the corpus callosum) than the brain is given credit for. There’s so much we don’t know yet about the brain (let alone the mind!). What about telepathy between the hemispheres? I think the divisions charted for the brain so far may be too strict, that beliefs about such separations may get in the way of our perception of the brain’s beautifully whole operation.

3. I should also note that Seth has made one short, rather mysterious reference to the existence of Frameworks 3 and 4. Two days after he’d first talked about his concept of Frameworks 1 and 2, he came through with the following statement in another private session. Jane and I have yet to ask him to elaborate upon it: “There is, incidentally, a Framework 3 and a Framework 4, in the terms of our discussion — but all such labels are, again, only for the sake of explanation. The realities are merged.”