“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

DELETED SESSION

(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.

People felt depersonalized beneath labels, so that they were told: “Oh, yes, you are a victim of ulcers, or anxiety attacks, or whatever,” while the very personal suffering portion of their beings was ignored. So to some extent many people write for an acceptance of their individuality—even if that includes severe problems—and you both must indeed be struck by the vitality and uniqueness of human nature. It does not mean at all that you should concentrate upon the problems people write you about. Yet even those serve as a stimulus to these sessions, and spur you to seek further answers.

End of session —

(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.)