“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We were visited over the weekend by Robert Monroe and his wife, Nancy; they live on a farm in central Virginia. Bob Monroe is the author of Journeys Out of the Body,¹ the book that Jane and I regard as the premier work on the subject. Among many things, he wanted to tell Jane about the research complex, tentatively called The Mentronics Institute — or System — that he’s building on his farm. It will be used “by just a bunch of guys” to study various phases of psychic activity. These “guys” then will be doctors, parapsychologists, psychiatrists, and members of other scientific disciplines.

(“Sunday afternoon before our visitors came,” she wrote, “I’d begun reading a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson [the poet and philosopher who lived from 1803–82]. I came across his essay, The Poet, in which he talked about the ‘speakers’ as being those who use their inner abilities to ‘speak the inner secrets of nature.’ The essay impressed me strongly, seeming to echo elements in my own writing and psychic characteristics; and of course I thought of Seth’s ‘Speakers’ as he described them in Chapter Twenty of Seth Speaks. [According to Seth, Emerson was a Speaker too!] Then Bob Monroe and his wife arrived, and we had a busy evening. Seth came through, and so forth.

(“From my desk in my study I faced the windows of our small kitchen. I could look through the treetops beyond them — we live on the second floor — and down to the street on the next block. Not three-dimensionally, but in another way more vividly, I … saw … sensed … massive figures standing around the edge of that physical view; and around the edges of the world. My eyes were open, of course. With my inner sight I felt that one of those forms, sturdy and impossibly massive, might bend down and with his gigantic face peek into my kitchen window … though I was also aware that all of this was my interpretation of what I was receiving.

(No session was held Monday evening. Instead Jane used her “own” abilities to tune in on the diagram of a machine that Bob Monroe drew; he had seen this on one of his out-of-body journeys. Questions involving physics arose — the Fermi gap [having to do with the movement of certain electrons], and so forth — and Jane ended up drawing diagrams of her own. She enjoys using her abilities this way.

Such individuals are trained to consider any alterations of consciousness, any seemingly “passive” endeavor as dangerous to one degree or another. An artist will be tolerated — only if his work sells well, for example, in which case it will be thought that the artist is simply trickier than most in discovering a way of making money.

The writer is put up with if books result in either fame or fortune. The poet is scarcely tolerated, for usually his or her gifts bring neither.

The dreamer, whatever his age, job or family background, is considered most suspect, for it seems that he doesn’t even have a craft to excuse his moral laziness. People with such beliefs will find it most difficult to understand the creativity of their own being. The work done in dreams, the multitudinous experience encountered there, will be invisible to them. They will have little regard or respect for the dreamers or visionaries of the world, and will be the first to leap upon those in their own generation who display such tendencies.

Even the intimate body experience alters. You may say that you are you, but which you are you? In the most personal terms each individual creates his own world. The biological equipment of your creaturehood directs your mass experience enough so that agreement is reached, but only along certain general lines.