“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Let us look at the invisible organization behind such material, however. I do not want to shock you, but there are quite as many cases of honest heroism as there are crimes committed. There are patterns of highly constructive change that never show, as far as your media is concerned. There are as many people recovering from diseases, even by themselves, as those who succumb. There are compensating, creative earth patterns occurring in terms of energy, but these do not show.

If you do not understand this, then you will take your newspapers and other news unthinkingly, thinking that a fairly adequate picture of world events is being portrayed—a picture that only deepens the negative feelings that are behind the invisible organization of such data. In such a way you miss any significant evidence to the contrary.

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?”

For the newspapers also act in a suggestive fashion, further programming your expectations. In a way you organize your physical experience as you do your inner life, through association, through emotional association. I am not simple speaking of sensationalism in newspapers or on TV. When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

(With gentle irony:) You made a remark earlier this evening to the effect that the individual could do nothing in the face of such organized behavior—a remark that by now I’m sure you regret voicing. (I laughed.) Those ideas to begin with began with individuals. The people who make and report the news are individuals. The people who read or view the news are individuals. To some extent through the books you are helping people alter their psychic organizations, to look at the world in a different fashion, and therefore to view a different world—a world in which their experiences are different than they would have been otherwise.

People generally have been taught to play down their own heroism, and to concentrate upon man’s weaknesses, and so your newspapers contain categorized fact upon fact, emphasizing man’s errors and stupidities. It has become virtuous to keep track of these, as if concentrating upon errors will do anything but compound them.

Those ideas do not exist alone. They have an emotional effect.

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).

All of the heroism, the private and even mass triumph, and the good intent, have been left out. The world is seen as a patient, sick in body, insane of mind, a thing that needs treatment, a Freudian and Darwinian monster. Even with your own changed beliefs, the two of you still see that mirror when you read a newspaper, and do not realize the invisible organizations behind the news. It makes it seem foolhardy to relax, doesn’t it? (Ironically, leaning forward for emphasis.)

All of these things to some extent stand in the way of Ruburt’s recovery. They point precisely to those areas in which both of you heartily agreed, though Ruburt’s way of getting work done was not yours. This session must be taken into consideration with other ones, for I am making certain points here that are important, but that do not of course stand alone.

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.

I want you to encourage his bodily relaxation in the same manner, creatively. You do not take chances, creatively or any other way, unless you allow your curiosity and exuberance some free play.

If the world seems too unsafe, you set up projections often against shadows, because you have accepted those shadows unthinkingly as facts. Those ideas, mentioned earlier, even inhibit the free creative flow of our books into the world to some extent, for you do not have as clear a channel as possible.

Do you have any questions?