“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today I bought Jane a “water cushion” to aid in her sitting difficulties, but upon filling it after supper we didn’t think it would work. I also bought her three kinds of underclothes to try … Before the session we spent an hour or so watching the Democratic National Convention in New York City. We saw the first session, in which the Carter forces, who wanted a “closed” convention, defeated the Kennedy forces, who wanted an “open” convention.

(I told Jane, joking, that the Democrats might achieve a show of unity in their convention, but that come election time in November they might end up saying something like: “Well, we lost but we were united” against Reagan. To me the political situation, meaning a choice between Carter and Reagan, is almost intolerable, and I wondered why our country had chosen this time of travail, as they say.

(“Well,” Jane said at 8:40, “I’m about as comfortable as I can get, so I might as well begin. I feel him around. At least I feel a lot better than I have been.” We’ve read over the last session several times, and have gone over Seth’s resolutions daily. Jane has also been “walking” twice daily, using her wheeled typing table as a support — though we skipped this evening’s sojourn in lieu of TV watching. The night was humid but not too warm. Through the open doors and windows we heard the great rhythms of the crickets and cicadas. Then:)

Good evening. It is not that you overuse the intellect as a culture, but that you rely upon it to the exclusion of all other faculties in your approach to life. Period.

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.

Now those tendencies are not natural to the intellect, but only appear when it is forced to operate in such an isolated fashion — isolated not only in time and space, but psychologically isolated from other portions of the personality that are meant to bring it additional information that it does not possess, and a kind of magical support.

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.

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).

The thin, cold “rationality” that is recognized as such is instead a fake veneer covering a far deeper spontaneous rationality, and it is the existence of that magical rationality that provides the basis for the intellect to begin with. The rationality that you accept is then but one small clue as to the spontaneous inner rationality that is a part of each natural person.

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.”

This information is factual. I am not saying that I do not use analogies often, or that I am not forced at times into symbolic statements, but when I am I always say so, and even those statements are my best representations of facts too large for your definitions. The intellect, then, can and does form strong paranoid tendencies when it is put in the position of believing that it must solve all personal problems alone — or nearly — and certainly when it is presented with any picture of worldwide predicaments.

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.

In the meantime, of course, quite valid rockbed evidence that does not fit into the picture gradually becomes discarded, ignored, thrown away. It is there but it is not used. It disappears as evidence, becomes inactive. That method of problem-solving, need I say, is a poor one, and if anything it causes far more problems than it ever solves.

(“Do you want to give an example?” I asked Seth, but Jane went on speaking so smoothly that I wondered if he/she had heard the question.)

Ruburt has had some release in the past week of the jaw, neck, and shoulder areas. His eyes at times, on three or four occasions, read remarkably better. For some time his ankles and knees have had greater freedom of motion — in certain motions — but all such evidence is ignored, largely — or worse, it is viewed ironically, since he is not walking any better.

“The statue of the deer represents that idealistic image of the past; finding it broken in Brenner’s yard connects its real environment where Rob lived as a small boy [on Harrison Street] to Wilbur Avenue where he lived later; meaning that he’d idealized both backgrounds. The statue of the deer, an inanimate animal, contrasts with the waste left by a living animal. Idealized ones, statues, don’t leave waste, but they don’t live either.

“It was hard to reduce my insight to words, but when I described it to Jane at our lunch table, she said it made sense to her. The insight was triggered by a remark she made while we were eating, as she read one of the letters I’d just picked up at the mailbox.

“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.