“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

They experiment very often, and quite secretly, since their elders are at the same time trying to make the children conform to a given concrete reality that is more or less already mass-produced for them.

Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience. They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences. They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes have upon daily events. This is a natural learning process. If they create “bogeymen,” then they can cause them to disappear also. If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it is their own creation. This learning process is nipped in the bud, however. By the time you are adults, it certainly seems that you are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of your lives.³

(10:02.) The tale of Cinderella becomes a fantasy, a delusion, or even a story about sexual awakening, in Freudian terms. The disappointments you have faced indeed make such a tale seem to be a direct contradiction to life’s realities. To some extent or another, however, the child in you remembers a certain sense of mastery only half realized, of power nearly grasped, then seemingly lost forever — and a dimension of existence in which dreams quite literally came true. The child in you sensed more, of course: It sensed its own greater reality in another framework entirely, from which it had only lately emerged — yet with which it was intimately connected. It felt itself surrounded, then, by the greater realities of Framework 2.

The child knew “that it came from somewhere else” — not by chance but by design. The child knew that in one way or another its most intimate thoughts, dreams, and gestures were as connected with the natural world as blades of grass are to a field. The child knew it was a unique and utterly original event or being that on the one hand was its own focus, and that on the other hand belonged to its own time and season. In fact, children let little escape them, so that, again, they experiment constantly in an effort to discover not only the effect of their thoughts and intents and wishes upon others, but the degree to which others influence their own behavior. To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adult behavior.

Children understand the importance of symbols, and they use them constantly to protect themselves — not from their own reality but from the adult world. They constantly pretend, and they quickly learn that persistent pretending in any one area will result in a physically-experienced version of the imagined activity. They also realize that they do not possess full freedom, either, for certain pretended situations will later happen in less faithful versions than the imagined ones. Others will seem almost entirely blocked, and never materialize.

(10:46.) Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness, with his or her behavior condoned. The child may know that the illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand. Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parents’ assessment of the situation. Little by little the fine relationship, the precise connections between psychological feelings and bodily reality, erode.

I do not want to oversimplify, and throughout this book we will add other elaborations upon such behavior. The child who gets the mumps with a large number of his classmates, however, knows he has his private reasons for joining into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adult who “falls prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his own reasons for such a situation. He does not understand the mass suggestions involved, or his own reasons for accepting them. He is usually convinced instead that his body has been invaded by a virus despite his own personal approval or disapproval — despite his own personal approval or disapproval (most emphatically). He is therefore a victim, and his sense of personal power is eroded.

When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he [or she] usually grants his recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given. Or he may think that he was simply lucky — but he does not grant himself to have any real power in such an affair. The recovery seems to occur to him, as the illness seemed to happen to him. Usually the patient cannot see that he brought about his own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he cannot admit that his own intents were responsible for his own illness. He cannot learn from his own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.

Dictation: Some years ago, before our sessions actually began (in late 1963) — though immediately previous — Ruburt (Jane) had an experience that he has described in his own books.

That event resulted in a scribbled manuscript, unpublished, called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. His desire and intense intent to understand more of the nature of reality triggered the production of that fragmentary automatic manuscript. He found himself as a young adult, at the time of the President Kennedy assassination, in a world that seemed to have no meaning. At the same time, while conditioned by the beliefs of his generation — beliefs that still tinge your times — he held on to one supporting belief never completely lost from childhood.

His belief, illogical as it sounded when spoken, contradictory as it seemed when applied to daily life, stated that the individual somehow could perceive the nature of reality on his or her own by virtue of innate capacities that belonged to the individual by right — capacities that were a part of man’s heritage. In other words, Ruburt felt that there was a slim chance of opening doors of knowledge that had been closed, and he decided to take that chance.

Forgive the terminology, but you each believed in “magic,” or the sessions never would have started. You believed that reality had more to it than the senses showed. You believed that together you could achieve what had not been achieved earlier — that you could somehow or other offer meaningful and real solutions to the world’s problems…. (End at 11:34 P.M.)

3. The 806th session proper can be found in Chapter 2, but in the deleted portion of that session Seth came through with some comments relative to children that fit in well with his material this evening: “The point of power is in the present. Whenever possible, minimize the importance of a problem. Forget a problem and it will go away. Dumb advice, surely, or so it seems. Yet children know the truth of it. Minimize impediments in your mind and they do become minimized. Exaggerate impediments in your mind and in reality they will quickly adopt giant size.”