“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I made just a few notes on the Saturday night material after our guests left. We’d been discussing current population problems when Seth came through to tell us that in the fourth century, infanticide — at least to his knowledge — had been quite common. Before a child was baptized it was considered to be the property of its parents, who could do with it as they wished, with no stigma attached.

(Surplus children, who would have been “an impossible burden” upon the economy of the times, its housing, food supply, etc., were simply killed before baptism. Once the child was baptized, however, it became a sacred being, possessing a soul and the right to life….

(Seth added that our records of those early centuries are confused as far as the Church, baptism and children are concerned. There was quite a bit more to the session but I didn’t think my memory of it was clear enough for accurate notes.)

The conscious mind was [therefore] expected to perform alone, so to speak, ignoring the highly intuitive inner information that is also available to it. It was not supposed to be aware of such data. Yet any individual knows quite well that intuitive hunches, inspiration, precognitive information or clairvoyant material has often risen to conscious knowledge. Usually it is shoved away and disregarded because you have been taught that the conscious mind should not hold with such “nonsense.” So you have been told to trust your conscious mind, while at the same time you were led to believe it could only be aware of stimuli that came to it from the outside physical world.

(10:10.) In Western culture since the Industrial Revolution (after about 1760), the idea grew that there was little connection between the objects in the world and the individual. Now this is not a history book so I will not go into the reasons behind this idea, but will merely mention that it was an overreaction, in your terms at least, to previous religious concepts.

Nature became then an adversary that he must control. Yet underneath he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because in cutting himself off from it he also cut himself off from using many of his own abilities.

It was at this point that the nature of the conscious mind itself became so misunderstood, and those unrecognized or denied powers were assigned to unconscious portions of the self by ensuing schools of psychology. (With emphasis:) Very natural functions of the conscious mind, therefore, were assigned to the “underground” and cut off from normal use.

(10:29. Jane had been very well dissociated, with her delivery intense and often fast. She shook her head as she came out of trance. “Wow, was he ever going strong. Boy … I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to talk about tonight, but then I saw that he had one whole block of stuff to get through before he gave us any break….”

(All through these pages Jane’s delivery was most absorbed and energetic. I easily felt Seth staring at me through her wide-open eyes.)

(11:26. To me, Jane’s very deep trance had seemed to be quite impervious, her delivery fueled by a driving energy. She confirmed that she hadn’t been bothered in the slightest by anything, and added that Seth was really able to continue until dawn. It certainly seemed so.

(Moreover, she sat waiting for me to finish these notes so that Seth could return. He was ready with some personal data for us, she said, and this would be followed by more book dictation if we stayed up for it.

(Seth did return at 11:35 with some information deleted here. He also gave some unrecorded material during a freer exchange between the two of us; I described this to Jane after the session while it was fresh in my memory. At 11:52 Jane sat quietly, still in trance, while I wrote a few lines. Then she resumed book dictation at 11:55.)

(A note added later: “I was wrong about this being the title of the next chapter,” Jane wrote in November, “but I know it will be one….” However, not only was the end of this chapter not so imminent; Seth never did use Jane’s suggested chapter heading.)