“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

“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.