“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Tonight, during a pleasant supper time, our friends Ruburt and Joseph watched a television production based upon the Cinderella fairy tale. According to the definition I gave earlier, this fairy tale is a myth. Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious adult discussion concerning anything so profound as the creation of the known world. And most certainly, it may appear, no scientifically pertinent data about the nature of events can possibly be uncovered from such a source.

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.

That event resulted in a scribbled manuscript, unpublished, called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.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

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.)

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.