“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

“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.

3. And yes, the situation can be reversed, too: Seth can get irritated/frustrated with Jane and me. This excerpt is from the private session of November 11, 1979: “… the same kind of reactions, however, are involved in all activities, and it is sometimes frustrating for me that you cannot perceive the fascinating facets of any event. You still — and I do not simply mean you two alone — do not feel the unsurpassable force that thoughts have. You do not understand that they do form events, that to change events you must first change thoughts. You get what you concentrate upon.”