“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Ruburt once received a few interesting pages from a world view, in which the author spoke, in archaic terms, of being a person who was a “life-taster,” sent by God to taste the quality of man’s experience, so that God might know what new ingredients might be added.

(9:27.) Your evolutionary science, combined with your psychologists, so served to rob men and women of a sense of dignity and meaning that their problems and difficulties were in a way depersonalized. For example, they became part of the species’ natural aging processes, as per your psychologist’s article. It would make no difference who or what you were. The problem, say, of senility, would be an objective phenomenon that happened to you as a result of the body’s slowing down. Certain mental problems would be called schizophrenic —period—with little attempt being made to understand that a certain unique individual had drastic problems differentiating between realities.

(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.)

(Seth’s information on President Carter was unexpected by us, since we hadn’t asked for anything like it. However, it fits in with much of our questioning of late, in connection with the Middle East peace talks these past few months, and the behavior of the three who met at the summit, held at Camp David: Carter, President Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Begin of Israel. Recently Jane and I found it the height of irony that Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—evidently, we sarcastically concluded, because after thirty years of fighting Israel and Egypt weren’t shooting at each other—at least for the moment.

(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.)