“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I finished typing the last half of Monday’s session just before the session tonight. I reminded Jane that I think it’s an excellent one, and that I want to type copies for us of the material between 9:15 and 9:36, wherein Seth explains that the intellect needs to realize that it doesn’t have to go it alone, that it is supported and aided by other portions of the self. I think this insight can help Jane greatly. I also told her I want to quote portions of Monday’s session in Seth’s current book, Dreams.

I have myself heard it said that other creatures behave with a natural grace, save man. I have myself heard it said that all of nature is (pause) content unto itself save man, who is filled with discontent. Such thoughts follow “naturally” the dictums of so-called rational thought. When you think such thoughts, you think of them at the most strained level of intellectual speculation — that is, the thoughts seem self-evident to the intellect that is forced to operate by itself, relatively speaking, divorced from the self’s other faculties. It then does indeed seem that man is somehow apart from nature — or worse, an ungrateful blight, almost a parasite, upon the face of the planet.

That view itself is a symptom of the intellect’s difficulty. In the position in which your culture places the intellect, it does (underlined) see itself quite alone, separated both from other portions of the personality, from other creatures, and from nature itself. Therefore science, for example, says that creatures — except for man — operate by blind instinct, and that term is meant to explain all of the complicated behavior of the other species. Therefore the gulf between man and animals, the intellect and nature, seems to deepen.

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.

(Pause.) The intellect has been taught to divorce itself from its source. It realizes in that regard a sense of powerlessness, for to some extent it is philosophically cut off from its own source of power. When it looks, therefore, at the world of political events, the problems seem insoluble. Man makes many decisions that may seem quite wrong to the intellect because of its belief systems, and because it is so cut off from other sources of information. A goodly number of those mistaken decisions, or “poor moves,” often represent self-corrective actions, decisions taken on knowledge not consciously perceived, but this escapes your consciousness.

(9:14.) In the same way, some private-life decisions or events may appear disadvantageous to the intellect for the same reasons, while instead they are also self-corrective measures that you are not able to perceive because of your beliefs. The rational approach, as it is now used, carries a basic assumption that anything that is wrong will get worse. That belief of course is highly detrimental because it runs against the basic principles of life. Were this the case in your terms of history, the world would never have lasted a century. It is interesting to note that even before medical science, there were a goodly number of healthy populations. No disease rubbed out the entire species.

When you believe that the worst will happen you must always be on guard. In your culture people use the term “intellect” almost like a weapon to protect themselves against impending disaster. They must be alert for dangers of all kinds. They begin to collect evidence of danger so that any other kind of orientation to life seems foolhardy, and to be a realist means in that framework to look out for the worst.

First of all, if you realize that the intellect itself is a part of nature, a part of the natural person, a part of magical processes, then you need not overstrain it, force it to feel isolated, or put it in a position in which paranoid tendencies develop. It is itself supported, as your intuitions are, by life’s magical processes. It is supported by the greater energy that gave you and the world birth. That power is working in the world, and in the world of politics, as it is in the world of nature, since you make that distinction.

That rational approach is, of course, connected now with scientific ideas mentioned earlier: life surrounded by chaos, the struggle for survival, and so forth. I do not mean to put down the intellect. It is highly important, but it is, if you will forgive me, as natural as a cat’s whiskers. It is not some adjunct to nature, but a part of it.

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

(Long pause.) He also felt that the questioning power of the intellect was not just one of its functions — which it is — but its primary purpose, which it is not. In your terms the intellect’s primary function is to make clear deductions and distinctions involving the personality’s relationship with the world. Your society, however, has indeed considered the rational approach to be the masculine-favored one — so Ruburt had an additional reason in that regard to be such a proponent of the rational approach. All of the beliefs connected with the sex were of course erroneous, but they were part and parcel of that “rational” framework itself.

(9:44.) It is certainly too simple to say what I am going to say, yet it is almost as if you would be better off turning the entire rational approach upside down, taking it for granted that all of its assumptions were false, for they are indeed more false than true (intently). Again, you see, the divisions are arbitrary on your part. The intellect is, again, the result of highly spontaneous processes of which it itself knows nothing, and the intuitions that are considered so undisciplined and unreasonable are based upon calculations far more spectacular than those of which the conscious mind can conceive. The intellect could not follow them, so the distinctions are not basic: They are the result of beliefs and habitual usage. Therefore, of course, I speak of them separately, as you think of them.

Ruburt’s [recent] mental conversation with “Mary,”⁴ and your own dream about Mary with the sketchbook sheets⁵ — all of these experiences are indications of the exquisite kind of reasoning that goes on at the levels of awareness that are usually considered unreasonable. That kind of material enriches the intellect and reassures it.

(“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.”)

“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.