“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Ruburt once went door-to-door selling cosmetics. He wrote about his experiences in an unpublished novel.

You are not selling cosmetics now, and now Ruburt does not go door-to-door, but people come to you either physically or through their correspondence, and now you have far more to offer. You are not trying to pretty-up the world. You are trying to restructure the daily experience of the people who live in it.

Now the species does have its life-tasters, rising always out of any given time to check on the overall quality of life, to see what new ingredients should be added—what new directions should be followed, what new ideas or inventions must be planted for future harvest.

(Here Seth refers to an article by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who wrote in Psychology Today for November, 1978 about the decline in his own cognitive abilities. He was busily tracing these out as he aged—he’s now 74—in order to prove out his own theory of aging and senility, about which he’s evidently written extensively. He makes no reference in his writing to the part the negative suggestions he constantly gives himself may have to do with his growing forgetful state—rather amazing, we’d say. The man is regarded as a leading authority, unfortunately; we wonder how many students he’s inculcated with the same negative thinking over the years of his teaching career. The article is on file.)

Now (President) Carter is a man of good intent. He is very cleverly trying to appeal to the misdirected good intent of Sadat and Begin, and by doing so to redirect the policies of the world. At the same time he must deal with the chicanery of politics itself, and the face-saving devices known so well to religion and politics both.

Carter was a cardinal in the 13th or 15th centuries—offhand, I am not sure which—then creatively unprincipled, comfortably lecherous, but he knew how to deal with politicians. And now he dons the psychological garb of a prince of the church.

(Both Jastrow and Hebb are brilliant men, I told Jane as we lay in bed after the session last night, and this brought up once again a basic question I have. Simply put, it concerns the fact that our world society is now run by these brilliant men who think that way. I wondered aloud why other brilliant men weren’t around who questioned people like Hebb and Jastrow, who told them their ideas were severely limited and distorted, who made a case for the kind of thinking Jane and I believed in. Most discouraging, I tell myself, to see that in our society at this time that’s the overwhelming, prevailing view—with no one of stature asking any embarrassing questions. I wanted to know what happened to the loyal opposition, I told Jane. Did it disappear when it found itself badly outnumbered? Did those who could have made a dent in such mechanistic thinking simply drop out of such fields when they realized what the score was? Or hadn’t they ever existed to begin with? Much could be written about these questions.)