“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See my notes of July 17, 1980.¹ Seth continued to stare at me as he proceeded in the same manner:)

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.

(“I’d say that a great memory must be involved here, coupled on deeper levels with a shortening of time as we think of it. Seth’s abilities remind me of material I’ve written recently on how certain portions of the personality or psyche must very shrewdly and carefully construct dreams in advance, so that when the dreams are played back they render just the right message to the parts of the psyche that need it. I’m not being contradictory here when I write that the dream is a spontaneous production, also.

“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!

“Boy, Seth,” I thought after tonight’s session, “did I go overboard in that piece! You helped me understand some things, yet what I wrote still contains truth for me, too. I’m angry because I think — I know — that we human beings have the blessed creative capacity to do so much better. So why don’t we?”

“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.”

My art teacher in high school, Miss Bowman, had taught Tom Lantini also — and as she had loaned me money to go to commercial art school in New York City, so had she given Tom financial aid so that he could attend the same school. See my note concerning Miss Bowman at the end of the session of September 10.

“Difficult to recall, and what I do recall makes no sense to me at all. In vivid color: I dreamed that Jane and I were eating at a little table in an open-air restaurant or cafe-type setting. It was a beautiful summer day. Our friend Mary came up to us. She was by herself and I don’t recall her saying anything to us. She was carrying a large sketch pad, perhaps a 22-by-30-inch size. One would expect the pages of the pad to be white, ready for drawing. Instead, as Mary lifted the cover of the pad, holding the pad out for Jane and me to see, we saw that the top page was covered by a lovely large floral pattern of leaves and flowers, as one might see on bedsheets these days. I examined several pages of Mary’s pad and saw that all of them were covered by the same design, in reds and greens, etc. The pattern made the pages of the pad quite useless for their ordinary purpose. I woke up several times with this dream in mind, telling myself to remember it.”