“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.

(Seth goes into a couple of other topics also, which I’ll do notes for at the time of mention.)

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.

Some people write to you in their triumphs and in their despairs, giving you, all-in-all, a library of unique, private reading matter, capsule biographies of the people of your time and country. This provides you with a far more comprehensive picture than, for example, any TV series could, or any neutral, scholarly study of hypothetical human beings.

(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.)

(9:45.) Give us a moment.... You should also remember that each person is also immersed in Framework 2. The good intent and the creativity that individuals may at times be unable to express adequately, still exists and enriches the psychological atmosphere.

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.

(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.

(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.)