“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones. The child carries with him [or her] the impetus and supporting energy provided him at birth from Framework 2, and he knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not. His natural impulses naturally lead him toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses. The child is innately honest. When he gets sick he intuitively knows the reason why, and he knows quite well that he brought about the illness.

Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him — either the outside environment, or [something] working against him from within. The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet.” Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Sally.” He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his body itself was invaded despite his will. He learns that such beliefs are acceptable. It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.

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.

The results, appearing initially in that now-yellowed handwritten script, made him initially see that he had chosen the events of his life in one way or another, and that each person was not the victim but the creator of those events that were privately experienced or jointly encountered with others.

In that literally power-packed few hours, he also knew that the physical senses did not so much perceive concrete phenomena, but actually had a hand in the creation of events that were then perceived as actual.

1. At first Jane and I thought Seth was in error when he said “chariot” instead of “coach” or “carriage.” But from the dictionary we learned that in archaic terms a chariot could be a four-wheeled lightweight carriage, used either for pleasure or on certain affairs of state.