“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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).

(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.)

“In vivid color: I lived in my parents’ house at 704 North Wilbur Avenue, in Sayre, Pennsylvania. I was my present age, 61. That the house had long been sold, that my parents had died in the early 1970s, and that Jane and I had been married for 26 years and lived in Elmira, New York, were irrelevant in the dream. Jane and my parents were not in it, nor were any members of the Brenner family.

“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.

“Now I saw, again to my surprise, that the deer had been broken in pieces and lay in the Brenner’s front yard, where the hickory tree had stood a moment ago. I exclaimed to Floyd Waterman that vandals had done the damage — young kids that I knew were causing trouble in the neighborhood. They’d broken off the animal’s legs. The Brenner’s front door was open and I saw the warm yellow light in their living room. I knew that I had to run into their house and tell them about the poor broken deer lying in their front yard.”

“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.

“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. …”