“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.

You use such belief organizations to concentrate upon certain data and ignore other, so that consciously and unconsciously you organize inner and outer stimuli so that it makes sense according to your beliefs, and forms therefore a more or less dependable framework in which action and response are possible.

History is written according to the present beliefs of a historian in his time. As you know, your western world followed its own mixture of Christianity, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology. Because those ideas still are largely in the mainstream of your society, your television news, newspapers, and magazines are invisibly slanted. The news is invisibly organized to fit certain patterns, so that when you read or hear it, it carries the seemingly indelible mark, confirming the basic beliefs of the culture.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

Collecting such distorted data about inner or outer worlds can only make an individual build up defenses, or want to. The newspaper world is, then, highly distorted, organized in such a manner that its data reinforce negative beliefs, and constantly give evidence only of negative patterns. These then are taken as an objective picture of the fact world.

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.)