“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.

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

(I thought for a moment. “Why was Tam so upset about “Unknown” Reality being too long?”)

He was not upset in that regard. He was upset with Prentice on some other matters, and then began to worry that “Unknown” might be too long — might run into difficulties. Tam likes to please, so often he runs into problems if he tries to please too many people at once.

(9:58 PM. “Jesus Christ, that was short,” Jane exclaimed, looking at the clock, “but it doesn’t feel short....”

(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.)