“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As referred to in the last deleted session, Saturday evening we were visited for a half hour or so by Scott and Helen Nearing, who were participating in homesteading workshops at Mansfield State Teachers College for several days. They are very nice people. He is 95, she is 78. As Jane said, “Scott conserved his energy, but he seemed to do well enough, although his movements were slow, especially walking and sitting down. But he appeared to have the use of all his faculties. Helen was very agile. Scott Nearing was quite interested in how well the Seth books were doing, whether any of the “leading magazines” had interviewed Jane, and so forth. The reasons behind his interest are brought out in tonight’s session, and in Jane’s own brief summary of the visit in her notes.

(She felt pretty relaxed by the time the movie was over, but wanted to have the session because she thought it would contain material on Scott Nearing.)

Now: Few people would see any connection between William James and Scott Nearing, and yet both were in their own ways peculiarly concerned with “the American soul.”

Nearing was born into the world just left by James, and he saw the industrial developments that at one time William James had anticipated with such vigor and optimism.

Your country, far more than others, has been a country of individualists, do-it-yourselfers—a country of enthusiasts—and of course some fanatics, but a country of pioneers in one fashion or another. As a young mean, Nearing, as he told you, was aware of spiritualism, and of those very aspects that were so explored by James, and he was fascinated. Spiritualism exists with such fervor in your country because Americans like the idea of a communication with the dead on an individual basis, minus the intervention of priests, and hence the pioneering spirit was early tuned to do-it-yourself séances and the like. Americans would explore the spiritual world as they pioneered the physical continent.

Emerson, Whitman, to some extent Thoreau—these were men who spoke of self-reliance, either in the natural or the spiritual world, or both. Gifted young men of Nearing’s period had to some extent then two lines of endeavor.

Nearing is fascinated by mediumship and the like. He enjoyed the thought of mediums defying organized religions, and of women in such a position putting scientific establishment investigators to shame. For all of that, such endeavors, he felt, could not really be brought to any clear resolution in a clear-cut, literally perceived fashion.

He became aware of the growing inequalities of government, and again saw in actuality the early industrial world perceived by James. But James was a gentleman by class, almost in European terms, and Nearing picked, say, the individualism of Whitman or even Thoreau over Emerson’s “inner independence.”

Nearing then wondered how democracy could operate, when—as he saw it then—capitalism kept the poor poor, and added to the gains of the wealthy. He grew sore with the worker’s plight, and felt that thoughts of art, spiritual merit, or pretensions were meaningless if men were ill-fed. Therefore, he turned his efforts to bettering his fellow man’s physical state. He butted his head against the government. In a fashion this involved old Christian principles, of course, as pure socialism does—so that a man shared his goods with his fellows, and all land belonged to the people, so that private property—in those terms—would not exist.

Nearing had to admit that while inequalities still were rampant, the basic conditions of the workers had vastly improved during his lifetime. There were indeed goods for all—yet those goods seemed to produce little peace of mind, and the workers, through strikes and so forth, demanded more and more a cut of the pie—as if to assuage some inner hunger.

Nearing had turned away from such goods and products, yet he had in his earlier years thought that these if were only distributed equally the world would be changed for the better. He is a symbol of the frontier spirit, and many youngsters through the years have been helped through his efforts. He began to understand, however, that more could be offered, that the inner realities of mind, in some fashion, caused the exterior realities of experience. He wanted to meet Ruburt to make sure that someone was embarked upon that search. And that it would continue after his death. And in his own fashion, he passed on some energy to Ruburt as a gift to help him in that endeavor. Take your break.

(10:28. A note: The next day, Jane and I saw the Nearings in color on a national TV broadcast from the festivities at Mansfield. It might also be of interest to note that the younger man—with wife, whom none of us met—knew in Mansfield of the Jupenlasz family. They were probably my parents’ closest friends in Mansfield, and the Jupenlasz girls, Matilda and Gertrude, used to baby-sit for Loren and me. I learned to my surprise from our chauffeur that the father, Fred Jupenlasz, whom I remember well, had only recently died at the age of 85. For some reason, I’m not sure of the first name of Fred’s wife, whom all of us liked very much. In later life she was severely crippled with arthritis. In vivid memory is a picture of her attempting to get out of the family car in front of 704 N. Wilbur Avenue, in Sayre, after Fred had driven the family over to see my parents for a visit—probably on a Sunday.