“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A note: The Democratic National Convention is in its third day. As I typed away after supper, I could tell that Jane was listening to the speeches on TV in the living room. Then I realized I’d goofed: Last Saturday, our local paper had carried a short article to the effect that a psychic we’d heard of had predicted recently that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia would obtain the Democratic nomination for president, after a deadlock between Carter and Kennedy developed at the convention. I read the article and called it to Jane’s attention. I’d meant to save it, but instead the paper ended up bundled up with the trash for pickup this morning. Since the Carter forces won the fight to keep the convention “closed” during its first, Monday session, this assures Carter the nomination on the first ballot. Thus the psychic is wrong in the prediction, which evidently obtained national circulation.

(At least, I told Jane tonight after I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to clip the article for my predictions file, we know where the article is on file, where it can be located if necessary: at the newspaper office. I speculated about the reactions of public personalities when their predictions don’t work out. I hoped their errors are not rationalized, or made just for the publicity, since the psychics have to live with them. We’ll keep a lookout for any follow-up articles on the subject, but I suppose it will die like any other item in yesterday’s news. What do the predictors secretly think in such situations, though? No one is perfect. Jane hasn’t tried to predict similar events. For some of Jane’s predictions see Appendix A.

(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 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.

(9:32.) Each cell (pause) believes in a better tomorrow (quietly, with amusement). I am, I admit, personifying our cell here, but the statement has a firm truth. Furthermore, each cell contains within itself a belief and an understanding of its own inevitability. It knows it lives beyond its death, in other words.

“I could list hundreds of examples of what I mean. This is one of those obvious ideas that seem childish once it’s thought of. I don’t care whether or not it’s a profound thought; it has meaning for me. But as far as I know, we humans are the only species that’s obsessed with ‘change’, and ‘progress’, and ‘controlling or mastering nature’; with learning about our past and with charting our future. We strive toward an impossible, or at least rosy, future in which we will have met all of our challenges, so that we’ll live in some sort of unreal wonderland on earth. What do we do next — or will we give up on that idea too? Perhaps we’ll spend all of our time contemplating each other!

“The rabbits in our neighborhood would continue to live as usual without our help, although they might miss nibbling upon the leafy vegetables in the local gardens. The fish and all of the complex minutiae of the local river bottoms would go on living as they always have. The deer I see in the woods north of the hill house would continue to bound through the brush and among the trees. They’d live the same as ever, since it’s illegal for us to feed them — although they do like to move down the hillside at night and sample certain shrubs we have kindly planted about our houses.

“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.

Tom started school a year after I had, and I helped him obtain a room in the same school-approved boarding house that I lived in, with other students. I told Jane that at first I was somewhat jealous of Tom, probably feeling that in some way he was intruding into my own special relationship with Miss Bowman. Jane said that makes my dream even better. This is her interpretation of the dream: