“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: In connection with the creation of the universe, and with the creation of public and private events alike, let us for a moment consider a different kind of myth.

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

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.

That event resulted in a scribbled manuscript, unpublished, called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.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.