“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane continues her improvements, although she’s been having periods of worry and doubt. Now she waited impatiently for Seth to come through: At first I’d thought she would pass up the session. Finally she felt her boy around. “I’m glad,” I joked. “I was afraid he might only get as far as Coleman Avenue — a block away — or someplace like that. I didn’t want to sit around waiting, and wasting my time. …”)

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity. That word was large enough to contain man’s experience. It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience. It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences — not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace. They were considered evil instead. (Pause.) The vast range of psychological expression, however, had some kind of framework to contain it. (Pause.) The saint and the sinner (pause) each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair. Psychological reality, for all of the religious (pause) dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience. It was in fact because the church so believed in the great range of psychological activity possible that it was so dogmatic and tireless in trying to maintain order.

(Long pause at 9:33.) Unfortunately, with the development of the scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened. As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality. What could not be proven in the laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

Anyone who experienced “something that could not exist” was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged. There is no doubt that the accepted dimensions of psychological reality began to shrink precisely at the time that modern psychology began. (Long pause.) Modern psychology was an attempt to make man conform to the new scientific world view.

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself. Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast it in its uneasy role. (Pause.) There is no doubt that the church cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin — but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage — a heritage genetically carried, that led finally only to the grave. (Long pause.) Psychological activity was scaled down in between life and death, then, even while the possibility of any after-death experience was considered the most unreasonable and unintellectual of speculations.

(Long pause at 9:43.) Any man might rise in your democracy from a poor peasant’s son to be the President. Outcasts might become the socially prominent. The unlettered might become highly educated. The idea of achieving greatness, however, was considered highly suspect. The self was kept in bounds. Great passion, or desire or intent — or genius — did not fit the picture.

Now, in the world you (to me) early formed your own beliefs and strategies. In midlife you were presented with our sessions — or [the two of] you presented yourselves with them, if you prefer. You recognized the overall vitality of our material (long pause) — but again, you did not realize that it meant a complete reorientation of your attitudes. You did not realize that you were being presented, not merely with an alternate view of reality, but with the closest approximation you could get of what reality was, and how it worked, and what it meant.

(10:14 P.M. Jane had no idea of most of the material in the session — that is, she hadn’t known Seth was going to deliver it. Now, however, she remembered that just before the session she’d picked up the idea that Seth would mention effortlessness in connection with her own situation.)