“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Resuming our chronology: On October 24, 1978, Jane worked out the Table of Contents for Seth’s Psyche, and started her Introduction for it on the 26th; we mailed Psyche to Tam in sections as we put the manuscript together, and finished with that endeavor on November 9. On November 14 Eleanor Friede visited us to renew an old friendship and to go over Emir with Jane. No sooner had she left than Tam arrived, two days later, bringing with him the copyedited manuscript² of Seven Two for us to check; on the 20th, our work completed on it, I sent it back to him at Prentice-Hall. We received the printer’s sample pages for Seven Two on December 4 [we see these for each book, and they show us just how the work will look when published]. On December 7 the copyedited manuscript for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality came; it’s more than 900 pages long, and painstakingly checking every word on every page of that book kept us busy until Christmas Eve; I mailed it to Tam on December 26. Next, on January 13, 1979, the copyedited manuscript for Psyche arrived. Jane and I are still going over it.

Now: The beliefs of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud³ alike have formed together to give you a different screen. Experience is accepted and perceived only as it is sieved through that screen. If Christendom saw man as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see him as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal — a survival, however, without meaning. The psyche’s grandeur is ignored, the individual’s sense of belonging with nature eroded, for it is at nature’s expense, it seems, that he must survive. One’s greatest dreams and worst fears alike become the result of glandular imbalance, or of neuroses from childhood traumas.

(Pause.) It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul. Indeed, for many people the idea of the soul itself became unfashionable, embarrassing, and out of date. Here I use the words “soul” and “psyche” synonymously. That psyche has been emerging more and more in whatever guise it is allowed to as it seeks to express its vitality, its purpose and exuberance, and as it seeks out new contexts in which to express a subjective reality that finally spills over the edges of sterile beliefs.

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.