“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE RATIONAL APPROACH. SCIENTIFIC HARDBED REALITY. THE INTELLECT AND THE MAGICAL APPROACH.

The intellect is brilliant, but on its own, now (underlined), it is indeed in its way isolated both in time and in space in a way that other portions of the personality are not. When it is overly stressed, with all of the usual frameworks or rationales that go along with it, it can indeed become frightened, paranoid, because it cannot really perceive events until they have already occurred. It does not know what will happen tomorrow, and since it is overly stressed, its paranoid tendencies can only fear the worst.

The so-called rational approach to life, as it is practiced, is a highly pessimistic one, carrying along with it its own methods and “solutions” to problems, its own means of achieving ends and satisfying desires. Many people are so steeped in that approach to life that they become psychologically blind to any other kind of orientation. Such is obviously not the case with you and Ruburt, or you would not be having this session, or any other such activity.

The rational approach of course suits certain kinds of people better than others, even while it still carries its disadvantages. You have been living in an industrialized, scientific society, so that the benefits and the great disadvantages of the rational approach appear everywhere in the social and political world. Artists of any kind find such an approach the least friendly, for it directly contradicts the vast thrust of man’s creativity in several important areas. You, however, and Ruburt, do have evidence that hardbed reality is quite different. In the past you have both felt at some disadvantage yourselves, feeling our work to be theoretically fascinating, creatively valid, but not necessarily containing any statement about any kind of “scientifically valid” hardbed reality. (All with much emphasis.

There have been numerous fascinating bits of evidence in your own lives, apart from these sessions, though certainly to some extent stimulated by the knowledge you gain in the sessions. They remain isolated bits, odds and ends, in which case they begin to present you with a larger factual representation of reality.

All of this material applies to your lives in general and to Ruburt’s physical condition, because you must be clear in your minds as to your own status in that regard, and much of this material will clear the air and dissolve lingering doubts; doubts that cause both of you — but Ruburt in particular — to hold on to the rational approach in a misguided effort to maintain what he thinks of as a balanced viewpoint and open mind. It seems, because of the definitions you have been taught, that there is only one narrow kind of rationality, and that if you forsake the boundary of that narrow definition, then you become irrational, fanatic, mad, or whatever (all very emphatically).

Now: In one dream when you were asleep, when you were seemingly not rational, when your intellect was seemingly not operating, you perceived information about your past physical environment. You saw your old neighborhood (on June 10, 1980)¹ — the Brenner’s place, with animal and industrial waste all over the yard. Symbolically you saw the situation in your own fashion, but you knew that the Brenner’s property had been polluted. You still have a love of that area. You are in a certain correspondence with it. In a fashion, you keep your eye out for information regarding it.

You are also somewhat idealizing the past, however, so you did not simply get the information “straight on,” but you received it in such a fashion that it made its own psychological points also, and was furthermore wound into other action not only within that dream, but in a series of dreams.

(9:15.) The dream made its point, whether or not you read the article that later appeared (in the Elmira paper). The dream made its point, in fact, whether or not you remembered it, though you did. You remembered it because you wanted to bring into your conscious range instances of your own greater knowing. The portion of you that formed the dream knew of the pollution; but also knew of the award, the newspaper article, and of your habit of reading the evening’s paper. All of that involves a psychological motion of natural, magical import. It shows you that the rules of the rational world are filled with holes. It shows you that the rational world’s views do not represent the bulwarks of safety, but are instead barriers to the full use of the intellect, and of the intuitions.

Ruburt, having interpreted your dream, looked wide-awake but relaxed through his studio into the kitchen. He thought of asking you to take a snapshot of the table with your camera, showing the partially-opened front door, so that later he could paint the scene. Your camera could not take in all of that, a fact he never thought of. Less than two minutes later, you came out into his studio with the camera that you had not used for months. Ruburt had also been thinking newly about the magical approach from ideas in your own notes² that he had just read. You came out as if in answer. As if to say, “Yes, the magical approach does indeed operate, and this is how.”

Ruburt’s state of mind was in correspondence with your own state of mind, even as you are in some kind of correspondence with your old environment, so in these cases you have a free flow of information at other levels.

Now when you understand that intellectually, then the intellect can take it for granted that its own information is not all the information you possess. It can realize that its own knowledge represents the tip of the iceberg. As you apply that realization to your life you begin to realize furthermore that in practical terms you are indeed supported by a greater body of knowledge than you consciously realize, and by the magical, spontaneous fountain of action that forms your existence. The intellect can then realize that it does not have to go it all alone: Everything does not have to be reasoned out, even to be understood.

This brings about an atmosphere in which the problem is compounded. The intellect on its own — so it seems — must deal not only with the problem today, but with its effects in the projected disastrous tomorrows. This well-intentioned concentration, this determination to solve the problem, this rational approach, then causes an even deeper sense of inadequacy. The concentration upon the problem brings about a kind of mechanical repetition, a repeated type of hypnotic focus.

You picked up the information about the Brenners because you were in correspondence with that environment. You picked up inner evidence in that regard. You ignored countless other bits of information. Ruburt picked up your own camera activities because he was in correspondence with you. He must be in correspondence with the evidence of mobility that his body tries to give him, so that it can build up a new picture of his body.

If you understand this session thoroughly, and if you have the intent to really change your orientation, then the atmosphere will automatically be created in which desired changes occur.

(I suppose my own irritation because of the points listed above communicated itself to Jane easily enough. We had a lively and beneficial discussion because of our feelings, though, so all in all the session is a very good one³. I want to arrange my approach to Seth’s latest book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, so that I can quote part of this session in a note.)

“Years ago, after my brothers and I had left 704 to follow our own life paths, the Brenner family had built a house next door to our parents’ place. This represents a contradiction in the dream — or, rather, that I tried to combine two spans of time. On a summer evening after dusk in the dream, I went for a walk with Floyd Waterman (I’ll call him), a ‘real’ friend from Elmira who was visiting me. Floyd is a contractor.

“As Floyd and I cut across the court I saw that the Brenner’s lawn was despoiled with a mixture of animal and industrial waste, like pollution. ‘What’s that?’ I exclaimed to Floyd, as I saw a large dark shape near the hickory tree. At first shock I thought it was a deer that might have been killed by a car the night before, say. It lay on its side with its back to us. Then to my amazement I saw that the supposed animal was actually the broken remnants of a hollow, life-sized metal statue of a deer that had stood for years in the front yard of a house on Harrison Street, in Sayre, at the other end of town. The house had been owned by the Maynards, who had no children. When my next-youngest brother and I were in grade school, our family had lived a few houses down Harrison from the Maynards. Mr. Maynard had been a carpenter. He and his wife and my parents had been friends. All of us kids in the neighborhood had been fascinated by the deer, which had been painted brown. We had climbed all over it. My father had photographed it.

On July 23, 1980 — 13 days after I had my dream — the writer of a story in the Elmira Star-Gazette described how the Brenner family won an out-of-court settlement of over $10,000 from the Borough of Sayre and a large store owned by a well-known supermarket chain. The store is located a couple of blocks from the Brenner home, and just off North Wilbur Avenue. Construction at the store had overloaded sewage pipes and caused them to back up after rain storms, filling the basement of the Brenner house with sewage several times.

“Floyd Waterman represents someone who has a connection with living animals in the present [on his farm], and connects the times in the dream, since he also is in the construction business and does carpentry work —and the man who owned the deer was a carpenter. Rob’s also had other dreams involving Floyd and animals. …”

“The insight that flashed into my consciousness was that human beings haven’t changed either, really, that our more complicated mental processes only make it seem that we have. Coupled with this is the idea that magic, as we call it, reflects a basic part of our natural mental equipment and abilities, but that our present course of action, our focusing upon the material and the intellectual — the ‘reasonable’ portions of our psyche — has created artificial divisions, in which magic seems quite ‘unreasonable’ or unreal. Actually, our need for magic is a very real, vital, and integral portion of our psyches.

“Added a little later: Jane said this material on the magical personality ‘… really turned me on.’ She’s been doing some writing of her own on our magical orientation. I told her that her material could easily go into a chapter of one of her books.”