“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.

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.

(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.

The honesty and the good intent of most of the people holds the world together. The letters are meant as an education. Learn what you can from them.

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

(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.)