“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE RATIONAL APPROACH. SCIENTIFIC HARDBED REALITY. THE INTELLECT AND THE MAGICAL APPROACH.

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.

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.

(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.

The rational approach, built up around this framework, insists that the best way to solve a problem is to concentrate upon it, to project its effects into the future, to ruminate upon its consequences, “to stare at the bare facts head on.”

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.

(9:36.) The intellect is a great organizer — along certain lines, now — so if this concentration is continued it begins to organize its perceptions and experience along the same lines. It is a kind of misguided attempt to find order by finding data that agrees with itself. It collects evidence, then, to prove its point, because the rational mind, as you understand it, must have an acceptable reason for everything (underlined) (all intently).

What happens, of course, is the process I have just outlined. Other quite real, quite physical evidence — always, now, apparent in his body at any given time — is ignored as nonessential, too trivial to bother with, or take seriously, because it does not fit into the so-called rational picture that has been developed.