“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today we received probably 30 letters from Prentice-Hall, some of which were dated in early October. We don’t know why the delay, but the batch makes up for what we’d taken to be a drop in the volume of mail over the last month; Jane had worried about falling sales, or some such thing. She wrote impressions on the back of each envelope, and of the first few she checked out, found some good “hits.” At the same time, by session time she was quite upset and irritable—appalled, really—at the content of some of the letters she’d read—this, we agreed, because we usually would focus more on the one negative letter compared to the ten positive ones—and by far most of them were very positive, friendly, sometimes even adulatory. A few mentioned the articles in the Village Voice.

(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.)

(Another point I want to mention in connection with Seth’s material earlier in the session on psychology: His reference on page 3 to “evolutionary science” stems probably from our reading lately an article on Robert Jastrow, an astronomer connected with NASA. Jastrow cites the big bang theory of the creation of the universe as a proven fact, whereas it’s only the latest theory, as far as we know. The article, in Penthouse for November 1978, is on file. In it Jastrow goes on to talk about how silicon-based computer life is going to replace man and his messy emotions—theories quite in keeping with current “scientific” thinking about man’s innate worthlessness and his accidental creation. Jastrow thinks we’ve reached a dead end in terms of evolution. A note: Seth gave an excellent answer to Jastrow’s kind of thinking two years ago in either chapter 7 or 8 of Psyche.