“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In those terms (underlined), it is quite as truthful to say — as I have said before — that man’s intellect is also instinctive. He begins thinking at once. He cannot help but use his intellect. The intellect, again, operates magically, spontaneously, automatically. Its most keen reasoning processes rise as a result of that natural magical action (deliberately.

(Seth may have made his humorous reference to a cat’s whiskers when he did because our cat, Billy, had just meowed rather frantically as he chased a dusty-looking moth through the living room.)

The idea of heaven, for all of its distortions, has operated as a theoretical framework, assuring the intellect of its survival. Science has believed to the contrary in the utter annihilation of the intellect after death, and since man had by then placed all of his identification with the intellect, this was a shattering blow to it. It denied man a necessary biological imperative (all intently).

All of these reasons lie beneath man’s mass problems, and apply in each life. I want to note, again, that Ruburt earlier decided to bank on his intellect as a child, rather than upon beauty, as he felt his mother had. In his case also, as given in the past, he felt that the feminine qualities were those opposed to intellectual development. (Pause.) He was gifted intuitively and intellectually, however, and naturally was propelled toward growth in both areas — areas that he felt stressed contradictory rather than complementary characteristics.²

(“Seth, of course, not only dictates his magical material — the session — but must keep the whole session in mind while doing so, so that each sentence as he delivers it makes sense compared to its predecessors, and those to follow. Quite a feat on his part, and Jane’s, once you stop to think about it. How is this possible? Seth has no script to go by, nor can he refer during the session to my own notes to check up on what he’s already said.

(“These comments about Seth’s abilities seem obvious when they’re considered as I’ve just described them, yet I don’t think I’ve thought of what Seth can do in just that way before. They make his performances all the more remarkable. See the material after 9:44 in the session of August 13, about the intellect and the ‘undisciplined and unreasonable’ intuitions. Actually, that whole session applies here.”)

1. When I wrote these notes on July 17, I hardly expected that several weeks later Seth would so effectively “put them in their place,” so to speak, as he enlarged upon his discussion of the magical approach:

“I was not conscious of my age, 61, in the dream, nor do I remember anything about being committed to draw a daily strip also. I had a much younger assistant who reminded me of Tom Lantini, an artist friend who had been a year behind me in Sayre High, our hometown school in Sayre, Pennsylvania. In the dream, I’d left certain areas blank in the panels making up the Sunday page, and my nameless assistant had done the art to fill in those places. My main character, a male who wore a tight-fitting Superman-type costume with a flowing cape, occupied a space several panels high right in the middle of the page — quite a daring concept for a comic layout. I knew the character type well because in the early 1940s, in ‘real’ life, I’d been one of the artists who had drawn the very popular comic-book hero, Captain Marvel. My dream character stood confidently facing the reader — except that I’d omitted drawing his head! My assistant had drawn the head, though, on a small separate piece of board, and protected it with a piece of tracing paper. I thought the head was too small, but well done, quite youthful with curly black hair and handsome features, as one would expect such a magical character to have. I also saw that the head was almost too youthful for the strong physique of the character I’d drawn, although I wasn’t critical of this. All that remained was for the printer to fit the head and the body together. I sat at the drawing table examining the assistant’s work.”

“Another great dream of Rob’s. In our sessions lately Seth has been talking about the natural self or natural person, saying that it is also the magical person. In this dream Rob is in the process of working out that idea, visually. His closest connection to magic would be his comics experience when he drew Captain Marvel — a magical character. The resulting image, in two parts, shows that the idea is almost completed in his mind, just needing to be put together. In the dream he sees himself returning to the comics, only the Sunday edition (special), and the superhero character is much more prominent than the comics would ordinarily have it; the smaller head representing, I think, the idea that the intellect’s place is smaller or of a lesser nature than he earlier supposed. At dream’s end Rob says that the head was almost too youthful for the body he’d drawn — maybe a reminder that the natural person is younger in ways than the intellectual self. I think that Rob is himself in the dream, represented by the super character as the magical self; and also that he is the assistant who had prepared the figure’s head.

“A terrific little dream that beautifully states its message: Mary’s ideas of romance and making love (represented by modern-day flowered sheets) are being transposed from the bedroom into the area of her art, and in a way that mars the art itself. The transposition of the flowered designs of bedsheets to sheets of paper is great; Rob chose a sketch pad rather than, say, typing paper, I think, because painting is his art while Mary’s is writing. Also perhaps to make connections with Mary’s sketches of her own life. Maybe by using his own art symbol, the sketch pad instead of the typing paper, Rob reinforced the idea of Mary’s conflicts about the nature of her own work.