“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“We have our hassles like everyone else, of course. Seth ‘never promised us a rose garden,’ and we have our good days and our bad days as we encounter life’s daily challenges, joys, adventures, and misadventures. In this large group of sessions, Seth addressed himself to several of our individual problems: Rob’s occasional bouts of indisposition when he felt ‘under the weather’ generally, or was bothered by a variety of minor but annoying symptoms; and my own long-standing troubles with severe stiffness. If Seth didn’t give us a rose garden, he certainly did — and does — try to tell us where the weeds come from! This personal material did help give us a much larger perspective on our various challenges, and we’ve made some inroads in overcoming them. Like anyone else, we have to put Seth’s material to use for ourselves. The thing is, often we’re so busy getting the material and preparing it for publication that we don’t have the time to really study it as our readers do. Perhaps Seth was trying to compensate for that in those private sessions, by taking time out from dictation to help us put the material to greater personal use.”

If a man was a sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course. There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences. There were set ceremonies accepted by nearly all for death and birth, and the important stages in between. Church was the authority, and the individual lived out his or her life almost automatically structuring personal experience so that it fit within the accepted norm.

So your present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and you cannot appreciate the differences in your [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now. For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not you might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

(Pause.) Now in medieval times organized religion, or organized Christianity, presented each individual with a screen of beliefs through which the personal self was perceived. Portions of the self that were not perceivable through that screen were almost invisible to the private person. Problems were sent by God as punishment or warning. The mechanics of experience were hidden behind that screen.

(I told her it was fun to get the dictation, that it reminded me that there are other things in life besides personal sessions. It also reminded me of how good the material could be in its more generalized context, and that there were available from Seth reservoirs of information that we’d never be able to fully explore, simply because of our ages and other time-related limitations. My thoughts brought up feelings of regret, of course, but Jane suggested that instead we concentrate upon what we could do. Good advice.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which he seemingly had little control. The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious. Man was seen as divided against himself — a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness. He believed himself to be programmed by his heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.⁴

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged. It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

(10:27. Seth came through with half a page of information for Jane — personal material that’s deleted here — then ended the session at 10:34 P.M. “I’m so unsure of myself it must be terrible,” Jane said as soon as she came out of trance. “I’m so glad he’s back on the book again. I keep asking: ‘Is it good, is it good?’ I know it is, but I’ve got that empty feeling again, because of the suspense….”)