“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE INTELLECT AS A CULTURAL ARTIFACT. CREATING ONE’S OWN EXPERIENCE.

Your species shares with the other species a feeling of kinship for its kind. There is a great give-and-take of ideas. You end up, then, with a consensus, generally speaking, as to what a reasonable picture of agreed-upon reality is. Your system has frowned upon many experiences, considering them eccentric behavior in an adverse fashion, since your belief systems have so regimented behavior, and so narrowly defined sanity. (Long pause.) The intellect, I want to stress, is socially oriented. It is peculiarly suited, of course, to react to cultural information. (Pause.) It wants to see the world as it is seen by the minds of others. Through that kind of action it helps form your cultural environment, the civilization of which you are justly proud.

(8:54.) The intellect, then, helps your species translate its own natural purposes and intents — the purposes and intents of the natural person — into their “proper” cultural context, so that those abilities the natural person possesses can benefit the civilization of its time. Those purposes and intents literally change the world. The intellect’s expectations and intents spontaneously and automatically trigger the proper bodily mechanisms to bring about the necessary environmental interactions, and your intent as expressed through your intellect directs your experience of the world.

(Pause in an intent delivery.) I am doing my best to explain the very practical aspects of the intellect’s beliefs, and their strength in drawing experience to you. At one time you both had difficulty with understanding some of these ideas. (Pause.) Your own relationship, your private beliefs about the sort of persons you wanted individually for mates, brought about incalculable actions that led finally to your meeting — yet it all happened “quite naturally,” of course. Your beliefs bring you into correspondence with the elements likely to lead to their affirmation. They draw from Framework 2 all of the necessary ingredients. They elicit from other people behavior that is in keeping with those beliefs.

Your own attitudes, for example — and beliefs — about foreigners, Prentice-Hall, people’s stupidity and lack of integrity, put you in correspondence with those same beliefs on the part of others, resulting in the translation fiasco.¹ An entirely different kind of behavior could have been elicited from those same people. Like attracts like in that regard. Those same people, for example, all have, as you do, beliefs in people’s trustworthiness, and so forth — but under those conditions, at that time, you each — or rather you all — were in correspondence at many levels. The books were published. They have helped many people, and that is because you were also in correspondence as far as many of your more positive beliefs are concerned, and those did outweigh the others.