“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I hadn’t had time to buy Jane’s birthday presents, although we both know what she wants—hot plate for the kitchen, and a summer bed spread. We’ve had a succession of visitors, all but one of them unannounced, and have lost work time as a result. Saturday, for example, I wasn’t able to get out of the house to go food shopping.)

In that respect they are grassroot, coming from the people themselves. Those people interpret our books from their own levels. They regard the books as their discoveries. They buy the books for friends and relatives. They try to pass on the ideas to parents or children, and to interpret them through home life, and through areas of work and community. They invest time and enthusiasm—and that kind of grassroot development is in the long run more apt to change the beliefs of a society than any authoritative dictums from the specialists, whatever their field. You are reaching tomorrow’s “authorities.”

To reach today’s authorities you must make too many concessions, and that is true of anyone who hopes to produce great work in any area. Men in the sciences have years and years invested in a particular system, upon which their reputations, self-respect, and livelihood depend. They have inbuilt leanings, then, quite understandably if regrettably, that mitigate against their looking with clear eyes upon work that shows the gaps in their own understanding or systems.

Your work, in any case, is the interpretation of reality through your own experience, providing a new and creative view of man and the universe. You want that view for yourselves. It has always been your individual and joint search —a private determination to glimpse what you could of the nature of man, that was not glimpsed before.

Your original purpose was the purpose of the creative artist or of the mystic, and that kind of purpose automatically brings you in rebellion against official authority. Your original purpose did not involve gaining the respect of those authorities, and it is, if you will forgive me, overall shortsighted to worry about the approval of such people in your time. It can make you bitter for no reason, for this kind of creative work exists outside of its time, and will still be read when the old authorities no longer exist, in your terms.

Your pendulum work continues to be a help, because it keeps such issues before your eyes. Ruburt should read our last session particularly, once or twice a week, for it will reinforce your pendulum work.

As you read this session, however, try to see how those attitudes that I mentioned do clutter up your minds to some extent. You set yourselves, if you will forgive me, eternal goals. Along the way your livelihood has been provided for, and you have a framework in which to work. Many people hold you in respect and regard. In larger terms, however, your goals are not temporal, so do not become overly concerned—overly—with temporal considerations. They impede your private psychic experiences, for they add stresses you do not need.