“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Who knows?” I said. Later I started a poem on the idea, but couldn’t follow it through. “I can believe that almost anything is possible, theoretically or … philosophically,” I said. “When I think of the same thing in practical terms, apply it to life, that’s when I pull my horns in.”

Then strange dull sounds; commotion. Startled, I went to the window, hardly able to believe my eyes. The police were shooting down the starlings that always nested in the treetops. Real fury rushed through me. My eyes brimmed over with tears. I stood at the window and dashed out this poem — far too emotionally unrestrained to be aesthetically a good one but an excellent example of my feelings at the time.

I wrote four more poems of varying merit about that one event and behind the whole affair was defiant recognition of the value of any consciousness, whatever its form. And the deeper question: Why was it ever annihilated, at least in our terms? Why was life constructed to be destroyed? I knew, even then, that I had to find my own answers — that each of us does. And yet at that point, I felt duty-bound to question my own experiences, Seth and the sessions because I refused to hide in self-delusions.

Unknowingly, in my poetry I had barely begun to form some concepts that would help me. Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another: