“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

EDUCATION AND CULTURE. THE NATURAL PERSON.

You might combat those beliefs, struggle against them, but they still carried great weight. You still believed them to an important degree. The entire idea, or fear, that Ruburt had at one time of leading other people down the garden path, was based upon those old beliefs. Those ideas have vanished. You are approaching a state of mind, individually and jointly, that represents far more closely one that is natural, with which the natural person is innately equipped.

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child how to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

Your educational systems, however, for all of their idealism, have largely ended up (pause) smothering the natural individual bents and leanings of children, and overemphasized instead the cultural organization. It became more important, then, for the child to conform to the culture rather than to follow its own individual natural leanings. Its own characteristic ways of dealing with nature were frowned upon, so that education does not work with the child’s abilities, but against them. Education then often goes against the grain of the natural person.

(9:12.) This does not mean that some children do not do very well under your system. (Pause.) I do not mean to imply, either, that children do not need an education, or that some discipline and direction are not beneficial. Children, however, will concentrate for hours at a time on subject matters and questions that interest them. They are often taken from such pursuits, and their natural habits of concentration suffer as a result.

You are unlearning right now, and discovering that this particular unlearning process is indeed highly educational (with emphasis). You are encountering your own natural knowledge.

(Pause.) In many instances, of course, you learned too well, both of you. The natural person that is yourself loved to draw and paint. You did that apart from what you had to do in school as a boy. You were lucky in your relationship with Miss Bowman.¹ Your talent brought you into correspondence with her. You can trust your natural inclinations. These sessions, in that regard, came naturally, as the expression of natural abilities and tendencies, finally emerging despite your official views at the time, jointly.

(9:23.) The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with. As I have said often, evidence of clairvoyance, telepathy, or whatever, are not eccentric, isolated instances occurring in man’s experience, but are representative of natural patterns of everyday behavior that become invisible in your world because of the official picture of behavior and reality.

The body’s natural healing processes each day rid people of diseases, repair emotional or bodily illnesses — and such instances go largely unrecorded. Ruburt accepted the magic of a poem, but not the magic of health or mobility, because he was convinced that mobility stood in the way of his other abilities.

Ruburt’s body is then magically and naturally repairing itself in a function just as creative, of course, as the inner work that goes on in the production of a book or a poem — a fact he is finally getting through his head. When your proofreading is over, and Ruburt’s recovery even more fully demonstrable, we will return to a book session a week, and continue this series the other [weekly] session. We can also expect some improvement in vision, as that area is now being worked on.