“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

2. Jane and I watched an adaptation of the Westernized Cinderella fairy tale, of course. I almost didn’t bother looking it up, but I’m glad I did, for we learned that the power of Cinderella has been much longer-lasting and more pervasive than we’d realized: The Cinderella tale reaches back to China in the 9th century, and exists in hundreds of versions around the world.