“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane finished reading last night’s deleted session at 9:00 PM—I’d worked most of today typing it from my notes. She thought it was great, and so did I. It had produced almost immediate relief for my symptoms, of that I was sure. I’d slept very well.

(“But now where’s all that stuff I was picking up from Seth today?” she demanded. “Here it’s session time and I don’t have an idea in my head....” So after all this time she still preferred to know in advance what was coming up in a session.

(“I’m just waiting,” she said. “That’s what shits me—and here last night and this morning I was getting it all so clearly.” Then a bit later: “What I’m getting now are just disconnected things.” So something was there after all. “Come on, Seth,” she said with unconscious humor, “for Christ’s sake let’s go. Now I’m getting something over there [to her left] that’s entirely disconnected from what I was getting two minutes ago over here. You know what it’s like when you test water with your finger to see if it’s the right temperature before you jump in? Well, things have to come together in a certain way before I feel right....”

(It’s difficult to describe, but Jane’s voice in trance was pitched a bit lower than it usually is. and it was very clear and precise and quiet in a strange way. Her diction was easier to understand, her pace quite deliberate.)

Art was often used in the way you are using it now—at least to some extent in your case—as a method of defining such dream images, which were not necessarily to be found in the immediate environment at all. Some cave drawings are an example.

Art as painting or drawing was then an important element in what you think of as man’s evolution. When several different persons of a given tribe, say, dreamed of and drew similar animal images, then the people began to look for the physical materialization. Men dreamed their own maps in the same fashion, one man dreaming perhaps a certain portion, and several dreamers contributing their versions, drawing in sand in the waking state, or upon cave walls.

Drawing and painting during such periods was considered both sacred and immensely useful at the same time. There is indeed a kind of communal dream life, then, in which each individual contributes—a dream life in which both living and dead play a part, in your terms.

(Pause.) The Roman Catholic Church seized upon art, inserted its own strong symbolism, provided art with a recognizable religious, social, and political value. (Pause.) It became, however, a supercharged symbol itself of churchly opulence, and this applies also, for example, in the past to architecture. What good were ornate cathedrals, replete with carved angels, saints, and gargoyles, gleaming with glazed colorful windows, when the people lived in hovels and labored in the fields? So the buildings in America were to be prim and proper, undecorated, when the country was established. Even clothes began to become less colorful, as for example in the Puritan’s straight garb.

(9:48.) In those previous “decadent” European centuries, a man’s or a woman’s worth was indisputably settled by the circumstances of birth. Nothing from that point on could change the intrinsic value of the individual. There were endlessly complicated, multitudinous religious and cultural justifications for such a situation, so that the entire affair seemed, often, even to the most intelligent of men, self-evident.

The peasant was poor because he was basically brutish as a result of his parentage. The gentleman was accomplished because a certain refinement came into his blood because of his royal—or nearly—parentage. The ownership of land of itself provided not only built-in social status, but an entire built-in world of privileged beliefs. A man of property, whether he be a scoundrel or a fool, was first and foremost a man of worth.

God made the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the non-privileged, and therefore it was obviously up to man to continue that status quo. If a man had wanted—I am sorry: if God had wanted all men to be rich, he would have them all born in castles. That was more or less the reasoning.

When all that was changed, as indeed it should have been (pause), the world underwent great changes. It may not have been much, but a yeoman’s son in the past would always be a yeoman’s son. He would follow in his father’s footsteps. He was not of equal value with a prince, either of church or state. His position was a poor one, yet its freedoms and limitations were known, and his value, whatever it was, was accepted as his station in life. He might be a good yeoman or a poor one, but a yeoman he was.

The world of art or literature, or music or learning, was closed to him. When your country began its own saga, each individual was to be considered equal, regardless of birth. Many of these same people had been denied advantages in Europe. They were upstarts. What they did was establish equal starting lines for an incredible race in which each began with an equal position and then tried to outdo the other, freed of the class distinctions that had previously hampered them. Because there were few ground rules, and because it takes time to develop a culture, this rambunctious group set out to tame the continent, to show Europe that Americans could do Europe one better, without a king and without pomp.

(10:12.) If men were considered equal, however, the ideas of Darwin and Freud came along to alter the meaning of equality, for men were not equal in honor and integrity and creativity—or heroism: —they were equal in dishonor (louder), selfishness, greed, and equally endowed with a killer instinct that now was seen to be a natural characteristic from man’s biological past.

A man’s purpose seemed to be no more than to put bolts together to make an automobile, to spend hours in a factory, working on an end product that he might never see—and because many such people felt that there was little intrinsic value to their lives, spent in such a fashion, they began to demand greater and greater compensation. They could then buy more and more products, purchase a house and show through their possessions that their statuses meant that they must be the men of worth that they wanted to be.

I do not know if I am expressing this clearly. Ruburt tried in the family to express independence, to show that he was (underlined) a writer, and at the same time he tried to express dependence, to show that he was a good wife, and this applied to many social relationships as well. If he succeeded as a writer, it seemed he was less the loyal wife, and sometimes in the past—the distant past—you felt the same when you tried to be “the male provider,” and take a job to satisfy that narrow role.

(10:48. “I had no idea if that was the stuff I was getting this morning or not,” Jane said. “I was pretty far out of it. It was fun—as if you were looking at another culture and seeing that that was how those people were living. Yet you didn’t have to pay that much attention to it. I couldn’t say what I got just now.”

(Jane was also surprised at the amount of time that had passed. She’d had no sense of time passing, whereas at other times she might have quite a definite sense of “the psychological distance,” or time that had passed.

(“I don’t know why I get that directional thing.” she said. “but before the session I was getting that Negro material over there [to her left] and the cave drawing stuff over there [to her right], and I had to wait for them to come together....”)