“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I hadn’t read today’s local paper until I had a minute to scan it while we waited for the session to begin. Jane had read it, however, yet missed the article I called to her attention. It’s attached to this session as page 302 and describes what seems to be in ordinary terms a senseless and horrendous story: A 20-year-old drunken driver crashed head-on into another auto, killing two people, the father and an aunt, and putting the other five passengers, all members of the same family, into the hospital. Since the article is attached, we can pass up the details here. Jane and I talked about the feelings of guilt and blame that are fated to surround the survivors for the rest of their lives, particularly the teenage children and the drunk driver. It seemed that they would carry a heavy burden for perhaps half a century, say. For my part, although I believe Seth’s contention that there are basically no accidents, I was still torn between understanding of that premise, and outrage that a young drunk could wreak such havoc on a seemingly innocent family of seven people. I didn’t know whether to attempt to forgive him or demand life imprisonment, for example. In short, I thought it grossly unfair that the cause of the accident was still alive—although hospitalized —while two “innocent” victims were dead, with a whole family damaged beyond repair, for life. It seemed too much to bear, and quite unexplainable in ordinary conscious-mind terms. I thought it a classic example that could be explained in Seth’s terms, though—the type of new information that at least could try to make sense out of such seemingly random happenings that we see as so tragic. In that way, then, my discussion of the event touched upon pretty basic premises of the Seth material.

First of all, a few necessary preliminaries with which you are acquainted. In a manner of speaking, your conscious mind, as you think of it, is a psychological convention. In that regard your society, your civilization, your way of looking at reality—all of these at that level also represent highly conventionalized behavior and learned responses.

You organize experience in certain highly ritualized patterns. Your conscious mind perceives these clearly, while you pretend that this official version is all that exists. Your conscious mind, generally speaking, interprets reality according to your private beliefs and those of your civilization. As long as the civilization maintains certain beliefs, then events must be perceived in a complementary fashion.

While you believe that death represents the end of personal consciousness, then death must indeed seem the ultimate tragedy or surrender. While you believe in conventional ideas of cause and effect, and can discover none in a particular instance, then that event can certainly appear meaningless—perhaps cruel, and certainly the result of an accidental behavior in which all good intent has vanished.

He was looking for someone like the young boy, someone whose actions would result in his death, but in a death without malice, a death that would in its way serve an important purpose. For the “accident” saved the young man’s life, and this was our father’s final gift to the world. The boy was inclined toward suicide. He would not have taken anyone with him. He wanted to die, but also in an indirect fashion, in that he could not consciously shoot himself, while he could kill himself in an event that seemed to be accidental.

(10:11.) Now all of those motives and feelings were well-known to the participants. This does not mean that they arose often to the conventional conscious mind, yet even then there were fairly frequent-enough thoughts, for example: What will happen if I hit another car when I’m driving? Or how can I get out of this predicament—on the father’s part—while still saving face? How can I die without becoming ill, which I abhor, or without having my death labeled a suicide before my children?

The conventional conscious mind pretends, and pretends well. It pretends that accidents are possible, that death is an end, and it tries to ignore all of the great threads of feeling and intent that do not fit into that picture. It is a game of hide and seek, for emotionally all of the participants in that “accident” were aware of the approaching event, and at the last moment it could have been avoided.

(I told Jane that the farther back the author could reach for his studies, the better, so as to have more room for study as far as the passing years were concerned —say that he interviewed a man of 40 whose father had been killed while the boy was 19, say. The idea actually embodies several ideas, or books. A detailed study of one large family group so involved in a tragedy could easily take up an entire book. Another approach would be half and half: First the family story in usual terms; then that same family story studied with Seth’s ideas in mind. The insights that could result, Jane and I agreed, could have excellent psychological and social implications toward understanding of such seemingly senseless accidents. I think that Seth’s insights into the accident discussed this evening are a good capsule case in point, and much more penetrating than could be arrived at in usual terms.

(So I felt a keen regret, actually, that the idea, one of the best I’ve ever had, will probably never be used. Neither Jane nor I have the temperament for it, or even the time if we did want to do it. It could be developed as a novel. We talked about the difficulties that might be involved in getting family members to talk openly to strangers, too, about what had happened to them. Some we thought would be glad to, others most vehemently not. Also, how would one explain to a family that with Seth’s ideas in mind certain other family members had chosen, or planned, their deaths? Not an easy thing to do at all, unless lots of time was available, and perhaps an exceptional willingness to learn on the parts of such families. I suppose that part of any such survey could also go into the refusal of certain families to restudy what had happened to them in the light of Seth’s ideas.

Apropos of your remarks: you should do your work, as you used the term, first of all because you both want to do it. As you know, in a fashion you are appealing to portions of peoples’ minds that exist “beneath” the conventionalized version of consciousness that they take for granted. The words are perceived consciously, but the concepts run directly counter to many usual beliefs—not just scientific ones, but to the beliefs that underlie the accepted establishment of the world.

The books reach people in many fields of endeavor, and they strike a strong chord. They begin to play new notes of consciousness that change reality to whatever degree from the inside out.