“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 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.

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.

You change your focus point. You change what you consider significant. This session brings us to the beginning of a discussion of the magical approach to life, to the solving of problems. I hope to stress what to do, rather than what not to do, although at times I must make the distinction clear.

“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.

“To reach Wilbur Avenue we cut across the tennis court, of grass, that my father had built for his teen-age sons so long ago. In physical life the Brenner house sits where the court had existed. Just beyond the court, and next to the sidewalk, grew an old shagbark hickory tree that I had always loved, and still remember vividly. The tree would be in the Brenner’s front yard now.

“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.

“I think that I brought my magical insight into consciousness also because of some of my recent dreams, that seem to contain precognitive and/or clairvoyant elements. The Brenner dream is one of those. Jane has been doing invaluable work for me recently, interpreting those dreams. Indeed, she’s the one who’s dug up many of the dream and real-life connections.