“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.

(Jane, for her part, said she didn’t particularly feel like having a session tonight, that she was “doing it just to do it.” I suggested that by all means she have it. She’s been feeling better at times, so our new program is getting some kind of results.)

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

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.

The magical approach takes it for granted that the human being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the animals do, whether or not those purposes are understood. (Pause.) The magical approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow. The magical approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally. Overall, that approach operates in your world. If it did not, there would be no world. If the worst was bound to happen, as the scientists certainly think, even evolution, in their terms, would have been impossible, of course — a nice point to put somewhere (all intently).

(This is certainly magical — Jane’s performance as Seth, in the sessions. This note, which I wrote a couple of days later, was inspired by Seth’s material in this session:

“Anyhow, each morning when I scatter birdfeed in the driveway of the hill house, the cardinals and the mourning doves, the chickadees and the blue jays and the other birds are waiting in the nearby Russian elms, the oak tree, or lined up on the telephone wires. Their behavior is the same each morning. If Jane and I and our house evaporated between one day and the next, and our lot was magically transformed into its native habitat, the birds would simply switch to ‘natural’ seeds instead of consuming the sunflower seeds, millet and other grain products that our marketplace so conveniently packages for them.

2. This session was held on August 13. Thirteen days later, Jane and I were most intrigued to read an article in a national publication in which researchers show, after eight years of tests, that not only do women do most things as well as men — they actually outperform men in many areas, both intellectually and intuitively.

“In vivid color, as usual: I dreamed that in New York City I had gone back to my first love, drawing comics. Not comic books, however, but a syndicated fantasy-adventure story to be run in color and take up a full Sunday newspaper page. Very unusual. I saw my art for the first page, perhaps half again as large as the printed version would be, lying on a flat drawing table. It was in black ‘line’, but also with flat washes of color. For comic books, I had drawn only the black plate. The printer had furnished the color plates.

“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.”

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:

“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.

“… later in the night, last night, I became aware of a mental conversation between Mary and myself. She was saying that she wanted to visit, and then said she wanted to stay overnight. I became somewhat alarmed and the conversation bled off. The feeling I had was that something had happened between Mary and her new husband, an argument. She wanted to stay here for the night, perhaps leaving her son with her husband — which I didn’t think was a good idea. I’ve picked up on Mary’s relationships before.…

“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.”