“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.

(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.)

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.

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.