“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.

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.

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.

These were all exterior versions of his inner spiritual journeys, for he now looked to nature for support, sustenance, and strength. He looked to nature’s virtues. It was not greedy, nor would he be. He revived within himself, and within others, the American pioneering spirit, with its distrust of government, its individualism, and its eccentrics.

As he grew older, however, he remembered more and more that scent of spiritual exploration, the encounters with spiritualism, and he began to wonder if after all it were possible that spiritual nourishment of itself would better man’s state. Had he put the cart before the horse? And what good was the most equitable arrangement of land or property, of food or goods, if the ordinary worker was still somehow basically discontented?

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.

(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.

It is very important that your readers also do not latch upon “you make your own reality” in such a way that they reinforce old beliefs about poor self-worth, sin, or iniquity. Your joint reactions last week, following our session, are perfect examples of two things. First of all, of course, you both voiced the fears and beliefs that were still causing the difficulty. And secondly, because of your progress the affair was instantly turned into a creative one.