“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Friday evening Jane and I were visited by a psychologist [Ed Ostrander] from Cornell, after an exchange of letters over a period of several months. I’m afraid that the encounter was typical of others we’ve had with the members of academia, and once again we were rather taken by surprise. It wasn’t until the next day that we realized the visit had upset us more than we knew, because of the various connotations aroused. Although we liked him personally, we came to understand that he used words as a barrier to any real communication, asked Jane few questions. At the same time he thought himself liberal-minded, he repeatedly couched Seth’s ideas in the terms used by the respected, well-known members of his profession. He told us often that while he liked a good idea “no matter where it came from,” he wouldn’t use Seth’s name in conversations with others, but would try to work in Seth’s ideas under the guise of others’ works. Jane and I were slow: we didn’t realize that such thinking should have been challenged by us on the spot. Instead, we passively let it go by.

(By way of reactions, we thought of improving our behavior in any such future encounters, insistently if necessary, and of preparing for them by informing would-be visitors that they’d have to read a selected list of books beforehand. We would add that the books alone would indicate how different our thinking was from the usual, and that the visitor wouldn’t find us agreeing with much of what they might want to say. Such an approach meant that we’d be hard to deal with, I suppose, but at least all would be forewarned.

(In connection with all of this, I came across the deleted session for December 18, 1974 while looking for something else yesterday. It fit in so well with the visit last Friday evening, concerning authority versus our interests, that I asked if Seth would comment on both the visit and that four-year-old session this evening.)

When this happens, you become part of a creative surge. Enough people are interested, or the books would not be read, so emotion grows. Many of those people, however, in say businesses or professions, would automatically try to grasp the new ideas with one hand, while protecting themselves from any consequences with the other: “I know these ideas seem crazy, but -” or, in the case of your professor, “I collect my crazies, but those people are authentic.”

Again, that library material fits in excellently here. The ideas that we are promoting would indeed change your society—and to some extent they are—for they are altering your readers’ ideas about reality, and challenging the concepts of science, religion, and to a lesser degree, of government itself.

Again, you both intended this. You knew it would be difficult. You began before our sessions even, in your private lives before you met. Many individuals come into a world for the purpose of changing it for the better, and there is no more efficient way of doing that than by the promotion of ideas—for no exterior altered circumstances can ever be applied from without unless the inner foundations have been laid.

You are in your ways conscientious persons. You would have ordinarily returned your stock to the earth in terms of children, and yet instead decided upon bringing forth a new birth of ideas, so that your extended family is the family of your readership. Those readers teach their children, and so you help create a new mental and psychic atmosphere that in physical terms will long outlast this life.

Religious authority, when completely exercised, can be disastrous, for it sets up an unyielding set of principles as absolute truth, and any dissension is considered dangerous. (Amused:) With my nearly forgotten experience as a minor pope, I can say I would trust a crooked politician far better than a holy but fanatic religious leader.

In certain terms then, and following a given line of probabilities, in future lives you know the outcome of your work now, and you can also ask for advice from your future selves, who are very actively interested, since their reality is so involved with your own. If it were not for such facts, then again in certain terms these present sessions would not be held. Whenever you come into difficulties, it is because you are still relying upon Framework 1’s authority, in which normal cause and effect operates, in which problems are solved by exaggerating them, and in which magical changes or alterations are considered out of context to normal living. “Magical” changes happen all the time. Your very existence is proof of that, for it is a mystery to Framework 1’s understanding. Framework 1 looks to time, and particularly the past, as authority.