“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In my Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I explained how Jane acknowledges the mail we get from our readers by sending them copies of letters from Seth and herself; to the latter she adds a few personal lines for each correspondent. She also encloses a list of her books, which many readers ask for. Seth dictated his letter in April 1975, just after finishing his part of the work for Volume 2 of “Unknown,” and I presented it while introducing Volume 1. Jane still handles most of the mail herself, and she continues to send people Seth’s letter because we still think he presented excellent ideas in it.

(Pause.) Men can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning. Religion has made gross errors. At least it held out an afterlife, a hope of salvation, and preserved — sometimes despite itself — the tradition of the heroic soul. Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless. This is a direct contradiction of deep biological knowledge, to say nothing of spiritual truth. It denies the meaning of biological integrity. It denies man the practical use of those very elements that he needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he is at life’s center, that he can act safely in his environment, that he can trust himself, and that his being and his actions have meaning.

The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s primitive “unconscious” drives. The private unquelled thrusts toward creativity were seen as the unbalanced conglomeration of chemicals within a person’s most private being — a twist of perversity. Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’s hatred for his father. The meaning of life was reduced to the accidental nature of genes. Science thought in terms of averages and statistics, and each person was supposed to fit within those realms.

To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period. Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s duplicity. Suddenly people with paranoidal characteristics, as well as schizophrenics,² emerged from the wallpaper of this slickly styled civilization. The characteristics of each were duly noted. A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored. Even the weight of guilt is better than no feeling at all. If the paranoid might feel that he [or she] is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers,” then at least he feels that his life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it? If voices tell him he is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him that his life must have value.

At the same time, the paranoid person can use his creative abilities in fantasies that seemingly boggle the minds of the sane — and those creative abilities have a meaning, for the fantasies, again, serve to reassure the paranoid of his worth. If in your terms he were sane, he could not use his creative abilities, for they are always connected with life’s meaning; and sane, the paranoid is convinced that life is meaningless. It did little good in the past for Freudian psychologists to listen to a person’s associations (pause) while maintaining an objective air, or pretending that values did not exist. Often the person labeled schizophrenic is so frightened of his or her own energy, impulses, and feelings that these are fragmented, objectified, and seen to come from outside rather than from within.

Creativity is an in-built impetus in man, far more important than, say, what science calls the satisfaction of basic needs. In those terms, creativity is the most basic need of all. I am not speaking here of any obsessive need to find order — in which case, for example, a person might narrow his or her mental and physical environment — but of a powerful drive within the species for creativity, and for the fulfillment of values that are emotional and spiritual. And if man does not find these (louder), then the so-called basic drives toward food or shelter will not sustain him.

I am not simply saying that man does not live for bread alone. I am saying that if man does not find meaning in life he will not live, bread or no. He will not have the energy to seek bread, nor trust his impulse to do so.

These brief definitions are very general: A paranoid is afflicted with systematic, logically-reasoned delusions of grandeur or persecution; the personality can be relatively stable otherwise. A schizophrenic suffers from a division between thought processes and emotions. The cause of schizophrenia is unknown, and the victim usually ends up hospitalized because of the severity of symptoms, which can include motor malfunctions, perceptual distortions involving hallucinations and delusions, strange behavior, and a withdrawal from reality. Yet the schizophrenic can also keep the use of his or her primary intellectual capacities.