“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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:)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(9:56 P.M. As soon as she was out of trance I told Jane the session was an excellent one. I was also quite irritated, because Seth’s information had the ability to make things seem self-evident; from that point one was always left wondering how anything so basically clear and simple could be so easily missed and/or misinterpreted by those who most dearly wanted to put it to use. I’ve experienced these phenomena often in personal sessions, and each time end up resolving to do better next time — to see more clearly, to do all of those things that will easily and effortlessly bring the desired results. Jane often feels the same way, though I don’t think she has so much lately, judging from certain remarks she’s made. Yet this kind of material gives one hope, and considering it can lead to at least momentary feelings of true understanding and concomitant hope, on my part, at least. The thing is, I really believe the information is good, and that it can work, that basically it’s the best kind of information people can get.

“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.

On July 23, 1980 — 13 days after I had my dream — the writer of a story in the Elmira Star-Gazette described how the Brenner family won an out-of-court settlement of over $10,000 from the Borough of Sayre and a large store owned by a well-known supermarket chain. The store is located a couple of blocks from the Brenner home, and just off North Wilbur Avenue. Construction at the store had overloaded sewage pipes and caused them to back up after rain storms, filling the basement of the Brenner house with sewage several times.

I hadn’t consciously known about the situation in any way. Indeed, I haven’t been to Sayre in many months, even though my old home town is only 18 miles away. Jane hasn’t been in our car for some time now, and I leave her alone in the house as little as possible.

“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. …”

“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.