“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

When you follow that so-called rational approach, however, you are bound to feel threatened, divorced from your body. Your thoughts and your body seem separate. Divisions seem to appear between the mental and the physical, where again each are supported by those magical processes. That rational approach goes against what I can only call life’s directives and life’s natural rhythms. It is contradictory to biological integrity, and again, it does not make sense.

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 magical approach takes it for granted, in the simplest terms, that the life of any individual will fulfill itself, will develop and mature, that the environment and the individual are uniquely suited and work together. This sounds very simple. In verbal terms, however, those are the beliefs (if you will) of each c-e-l-l (spelled). They are imprinted in each chromosome, in each atom. They provide a built-in faith that pervades each living creature, each snail, each hair on your head. Those ingrained beliefs are, of course, biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

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

“In my darker moods I find myself thinking that I love the earth and everything upon it except the increasingly destructive activities of human beings — and sometimes I wonder about the human beings themselves! I love the deserts and forests, the oceans and rivers and lakes of the earth, the plains and the poles, the marshes and the mountains. And I know that in the Puerto Rico trench in the Atlantic Ocean, life in the sea at more than 8,000 feet down goes on just as it has for many millennia. It’s been like that for all of the sea creatures and the flora of the oceans. It’s been like that for all of the interwoven life forms of the poles and the tropics, of the deserts and woodlands and prairies. Each species lives within its environment, whatever its conditions. And I think that in its way each life form must know that and love its home, and has no desire to change or destroy it.

“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.”

“In the dream the assistant is a fellow student. I’m not sure of the connection unless it means that at the time he knew Tom, as youthful artists both Rob and Tom believed in the magical aspects of life — which now come to Rob’s aid, assisting him by drawing the character’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.