“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.

(Odd notes: Today Jane received the contract for Emir from Delacorte, but is not about to sign it yet. She wants to talk it over with Tam. And Tam was interviewed today by Jim Poett who is still tracking down witnesses relative to the article he’s doing on Seth and us for the Village Voice. Tam is to call Jane following the interview, or if it’s too late Jane will call him Tuesday morning—which she did. She learned much about both the contract and the interview.

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.

(I should note here that SN was evidently born in 1883, and that WJ died in 1910—which leaves a period of some 27 years during which their physical lives overlapped. So either Seth is in error here, or his words carry a symbolic meaning. But SN never met James, he told Jane in reply to her question.)

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.

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.

(10:14.) He was too spiritually violent for the socialists or the communists. He was too socialistically inclined by far for the establishment, and when he turned finally to the land, it was a proud and yet defiant retreat. He would show how the individual could operate as divorced as possible from government. He was an esthetic in workingman’s clothes, despite himself, espousing the old Protestant virtues of diligence, hard work, and no nonsense and no frills.

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 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.

You personally expressed feelings that both of you had had, and then both of you were appalled by the feelings and used them as springboards. Ruburt realized that he had been afraid to try walking again. He recognized fear, challenged it, and found himself surprised. The expression of feelings was therapeutic, and a part of the entire healing process, as far as it involved the both of you.