“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

“The letter-writer described several well-known esoteric organizations that he belonged to — while also asking for personal help from Jane. ‘He wants magic,’ Jane said. Her comment reminded me of some material I’d written last month, and had mentioned to her a few times since — that over very long spans of time the earth and all of its creatures stay the same, relatively speaking, and that only human beings, with their ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ change.

“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.

“The conscious idea of magic, then, is a mask, or contrived version, of the psyche’s innate clairvoyant, telepathic, and precognitive abilities. We permit distorted versions of those attributes to surface as magic, as entertainment — which thus relieves us of the need to take them seriously. That’s the course our species has chosen during much of our recorded history, so far, and for many reasons.