“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I should note here that last Friday evening we were visited by the Gallaghers and Sue Watkins. As the evening progressed we became involved in some pretty heated and involved discussions about Three Mile Island, man’s greed for money, his basic good intent, and related issues. Bill and Sue especially got going pretty good, and Peggy said she didn’t like that. I think I made some good points; even Bill said he probably exaggerated man’s greed, yet he wasn’t about to change his views. Sue was upset. Jane was too, yet tried to take it all in. I probably spoke more frankly than I had in the past, yet was oddly unbothered by it all.

(Then while doing the dishes before this evening’s session, Jane said she “got” that Friday night was the “playout” of my dreams involving Bill Gallagher and Sue, which had taken place separately. The playout wasn’t literal, Jane said, “So I don’t think most people would have made the connections. But I picked up that Seth would go into those dreams tonight, and I asked that he give the best information that he could.”

Now: let us see how recent events reflect the dream, and how they appeared in the dream in symbolic form. The physical events I refer to are the encounters with the Gallaghers and Sue Watkins Friday evening—the discussion of philosophy, the sense of conflict and mixed emotions.

In the dream (of March 29) Bill Gallagher offers to take you out to dinner, and you say you have good food at home. Here the word “food” refers to nourishment. He offers the nourishment of the world—but the world as he perceives it, and instead you prefer your private nourishment. Bill Gallagher sees a dog-eat-dog world, and, as mentioned earlier, animals have an entirely different meaning to Bill.

Now: Bill Gallagher, with his beliefs about that world, in his mind joined it. He felt that he betrayed himself, that he performed acts that he should not perform in order to fit into its context, and he felt that he must do so in order to survive.

You were astonished when Ruburt told you how much money the Gallaghers were making, for if Bill sold his soul, few it seems could have sold it for less. Bill, however, concentrated upon life’s regrettable elements, upon the impediments, the dishonesties and so forth, until it seemed that even if he followed the world’s way he could not succeed. His idea of manliness was such that he insisted upon a conventional job, clear-cut.

You succeed sometimes in spite of yourselves, for it does not escape the Gallaghers of course that you are very well off financially as the very result of the very unconventionality of mind that it seems you sometimes find at least a bit regrettable.

The ideas of age bring this kind of thing into focus. They make Bill Gallagher for example more bitter about his life, for he feels cheated of the rewards when he followed the system. Conventional ideas of age, however, can limit your own ideas of your own creativity. You start thinking “How much time is available?” when the very creative thoughts themselves make more time available.

Now: beside other reasons, the taxes serve as a focal point, because you feel you must pay tribute to the world that is described by Bill Gallagher—and in that world you feel you have no specific (underlined) conventional role, as earlier mentioned.

(Seth’s reference to a letter to a congressman came about, I think, because during our conversation on Friday night Bill Gallagher said that no one present had done anything to protest the conditions in our world that we didn’t like—forgetting, of course, that the books themselves are full of protests, and of suggestions for the better. But Bill doesn’t read the books, and to that extent lives in a world closed off from such ideas.)