“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The boy was filled with guilt, but a guilt that had no name, no label—a psychological guilt that was the result of his upbringing, and that perhaps involved the existence of a brother. He felt inferior to a sometimes terrifying degree.

There is nothing in man’s nature that makes such behavior essential. A true realistic exploration of the nature of experience would automatically study that kind of emotional interrelationship, but while your society delineates the inner particles of matter, it avoids the inner psychological “particles” that form the most intimate experiences of your lives.

(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.

There are many new affiliations that will be developing in the future, new fields of endeavor. It is far more important that psychology understand our work, for example, than that your current physicists do.