“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

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.

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.