“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today I finished typing final copy for Session 733 of “Unknown” Reality—leaving just 11 to go to finish the book. Last Tuesday I mailed to Prentice-Hall Jane’s second novel on Seven. Since she seemed to be at loose ends, I suggested we have a session tonight, to “give her something to do.” She was going to pass it up again. As it turned out, I think the session was well worth having.)

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.

It is very important to know what you want. You may discard or dismiss “what you want” as unworthy, evil, but you must first be aware of your motives. This sounds quite simplistic, and yet it is quite practically true, but you have people professing to desire wealth while obviously doing everything possible to insure the continuance of poverty. They may state their purpose as often as they wish, and yet their imaginations carry vivid pictures of future deprivation, so it seems in such cases that the will and the imagination are in conflict.

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.

Give us a moment.... Again, you have a joint reality, in all aspects. Apply what I said about wealth to health. The creative abilities are always released when the will and the imagination are together, in whatever area.

That is enough for now. When we return to our ordinary schedule I will more than keep you busy—but the unknown reality applies in such cases, so that unknown motives can become known and dealt with.

(I suppose the two-part article marks the end of our involvement with the media, though this opinion may change. Not likely, though. We’re left feeling that it’s largely a waste of time, and fraught with a lack of understanding. It’s practically impossible, for example, to get free of the connotations of the worst elements of the whole field: the moment the subject comes up, we’re associated with all the history of mediumship in the most banal of terms. This fact is indicative of both Poett’s own inexperience, and the way association works generally. To have Jane’s work studied and respected for what it is, on its own, is evidently asking the impossible of most people. It appears that intuitively at least Jane has made the right decision, to concentrate upon the books; at least they offer something the way she wants it to be. Unfortunately, I suppose, this also means that we set ourselves outside the mainstream of activity in the field, and that our readership is likely to be pretty much confined to the “average” individual. The “authorities” aren’t going to pay any attention.)

Poett and the photographer, however, believe the same; only they regard “spookiness” and strangeness as highly commendable qualities that contrast with what they think of as the blandness of the common man.