“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of the reasons for such activities are sketched in our new book. But what you have is a learned pattern of face-saving self-deception and nefarious (with amusement) techniques, taught by parents to children; so often you pretend to want one thing, and you may say that you “will it” to happen—perhaps because what you really want is unacceptable, or so you have been taught: it is demeaning, or evil, or whatever. So in many cases people’s true motives “escape” them.

Such individuals, however, want poverty. They use both will and imagination to seek their goal. They may think that poverty is demeaning or humiliating or threatening, yet want it despite those conditions for other reasons that may or may not have anything to do with money, per se. So the question in such a case is, of course, “Why do I want to be poor?”

The imagination usually gives you a pretty good picture of what you really want. It usually escapes all of your attempts to cow it, to reason away its pictures. It is a mirror of your wants, and it is also the mirror of your will — for in it you see what you want to see, even if afterward you say that its pictures are unbidden, or against your conscious intent.

The Village Voice is probably read by more creative young people, and more people in the arts, than any other New York paper. To those people the new journalism is transparent. They see it as the current necessary way to write—the in things, but most of them unconsciously understand the reasons behind the techniques, as I explained them earlier.