“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: in basic terms you form your reality, privately and en masse—through your beliefs, of course, and those beliefs cause you to organize your psychic world in certain fashions.

Privately, then, you will to some extent or another have to take up defenses against that reality. As long as you think that your physical information about the world, through newspapers and so forth, presents a fairly adequate, objective view of events, then all of the evidence to the contrary will literally be invisible, for you will continue to organize your view of the world in the old way. You will think, for example, when a story about misuse of political power is concerned “That’s only one story. How many more politicians do the same thing?”

This is not done with any ill intent. Individuals collect the news and write it. To many people, some kind of organization, even one that is wobbly, is far better than facing the task of setting up an entirely new view of reality. The inner structure of most of your organizations and institutions are based on those old precepts. Individual lives have been constructed along those frameworks.

I am, again, not telling you to be blind to physical events, but to realize that the news media, and your organizations, are not giving you an “objective” view of the world, but a view compounded and composed by Freudian and Darwinian beliefs. I would also like to remind you both of the difference between direct experience and second-handed tales. Examine your own personal experience with physical reality now and then when you have a moment (with irony), relying only upon your own experience. It is impossible, I know, and not really beneficial, to try to separate yourselves entirely from the cultural world, but you should understand the makeup of that world, and be able now and then at least to separate your private experiences from it, even though they must occur in its context.

How many crimes have you each personally encountered? How many people have been generally well-disposed toward you? How many have been actively vicious? What has actually been your own experience with war, with prejudice, with hatred? How much of your view of reality has been formed by direct experience, and now much has been formed through secondary sources, such as communications media, or tales brought to you by others?

Your neighbor, Joe, had pneumonia, or a cold, or the snivels (upon returning from Florida last week). To Margaret he had pneumonia, because she organizes reality in a certain fashion, and by slightly exaggerating certain data, she then uses it to reinforce certain beliefs. She then must take steps of course to protect herself against illness, and she is in fear of robbers for the same reason.

To some extent, it is because you have accepted the newspapers’ view of reality as real, that you have allowed yourselves to dwell upon certain attitudes about your fellows—so that for example sometimes the world does not seem to deserve great art; or that you even feel you do not want to share your work with the stupid bastards (Seth said, staring at me. I laughed again).

Use relaxation techniques, as in hypnotic techniques, if you want. I have mentioned this before. Often I do not state the reasons for such suggestions. To some extent —underlined and qualified —you hypnotized yourselves into your view of reality. You helped Ruburt form his. You have not taken my suggestion before for a very simple reason: part of you, Joseph, was not ready to reassure Ruburt in such a fashion, for you were not certain that it was safe to relax in such a world, and you did not want to lie to Ruburt because you believed the newspaper world so thoroughly—with all, now, of its implications, as Ruburt did.

Hopefully, I am teaching you to reorganize your inner lives, so that you attract the best to yourselves from inner and outer reality. Your suggestions to Ruburt along psychic lines were excellent—that he do more energy experiments. His own intention to try out-of-body experiments again is also excellent because it shows a change of intent.

Never compare the sale of our books to the sale of other books. Different realities are involved—and you can then get involved with cross purposes.

(For those reasons I got a charge out of the session. Yet at the same time in a way I feel sorry for Seth, for his unceasing efforts to help seem to usually fall on infertile ground. Perhaps his attempts to reach us are often like battering at a brick wall. Although I liked the ideas in the session, then, in another way I found it discouraging, for it’s also saying that after all this time we’re still left to struggle with the old challenges; it hardly seems that we’ve moved very far off dead center, I guess. I often wonder at the great difference between Seth’s thinking and ours, yet fully agree that the three of us are closely involved. Is it possible then that although we may be closely linked, we’re also quite separate in vital ways? This seemingly contradictory state of affairs may be the best evidence of all that Seth is truly what he says he is—“a personality energy essence, no longer focused in physical reality.”)