“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.

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.

I am not speaking strictly of political parties or political newspapers, or of any specialized journals or magazines, but of the overall pattern displayed by all of your mass communications. You can see easily, however, the highly specialized, intensified view of the world that is apparent in scientific journals. These are in sharp conflict with, for example, religious journals. If you look you can easily become aware of these specialized worlds.

Regardless of these differences, the overall picture is largely the same: you cannot trust yourself, your body, the natural world. You are everywhere presented with the evidence. The headlines speak of problems between nations, mass and private crime, illness. The misuse of animals, man’s stupidity and cruelty, so it seems that the species is nearly insane.

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?”

(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.

(10:14.) Many people are already beginning to alter their picture of the world, but they are afraid of trusting their own intuitions. Consider the lengthy letter from the young English gentleman. In a large measure, the world in which he now lives is a highly more enjoyable and productive one than it was before.

His experiences are entirely different than they would have been. In terms of probability, he took a new probable road, which means that his individual impact upon the world, and everyone he meets, will also be different and more creative than it would have been before.

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.

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).

I am trying to induce Ruburt to drop his muscular armor. In the world of his experience he does not need it. His direct experience has not included it, the cruel adult world that he must protect himself against. It certainly does not include a frightening psychic world, actually or otherwise. Any fears he had there he picked up through reading, or through the reports of others, so let him also separate his private experience in that respect.

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.)

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.

(11:01.) The newspapers act as hypnotic suggestion of a potent kind. There is no one present who can confirm the newspaper’s evidence. You cannot ask questions of a newspaper, or of a news program. The entire pattern of these latest sessions deals with your inner reactions to your beliefs about yourselves and the world. Tonight I am dealing with a specific area. To some extent, however. These newspaper beliefs shut you off from full utilization from Framework 2’s potency.

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.

(11:18 PM. Jane’s trance delivery had marched right along through the evening. I thought the session an excellent one. I’m still surprised, I guess, that even after all his efforts, Seth can creatively come up with fresh approaches to try to help us—this time through our examining our worlds through our personal experiences. This may not be the first time he’s ever mentioned this approach, but still it’s presented tonight with a new twist. I can only partially put what I mean into words.