“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

Now take any other person — or rather, more to the point, any other woman — in the so-called psychic field. Ruburt tries to prove that he is reasonable, rational (underlined), where such people, he feels, have never learned to use their powers of reason, and instead trust every stray thought that comes into their heads. So to doubt himself was protective.

(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.

(“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.

For example, women test as equal to men in sensitivity to sound; clear, logical, and rational thinking; accurate reading and writing; memory for design in areas like drafting and illustration; number memory; tweezer dexterity; foresight, as in the flow of ideas; subjective personality links to specialized 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.