“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was held Monday evening. Instead we worked on the table of contents for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.

(Stuart was 23 years old—half-inarticulate, dirty, downcast—seemingly a pathetic case. Like some others we’ve seen, he was so locked into his reality that he was really quite unreachable. He lived off a government social-security supplemental program for those who can’t fend for themselves—pretty shrewd, I thought. He’d read hardly anything Jane had written, and I wondered why he’d sought her out. I never heard Jane give better advice, though I doubted if an interview was going to do much about changing what seemed to be a lifetime’s habits.

(The episode upset Jane considerably—more so than she realized it did, at first. Not only because of the lost time and probably vain effort involved, but because as she talked, she knew she was saying things that applied to her as well. “You’ve got to turn your world upside down,” she told Stuart. “If you don’t like the reality you’ve created, change your focus. Give yourself a chance to use your own creative energy....” After Stuart finally left, to stay at the YMCA, she walked in the kitchen, better than I’d seen her do in some time. She slept fitfully, thinking of him often when she woke up. She talked about him today. We wondered what he was doing today. He’d talked about going north, or heading back to San Francisco, where he’d seen helicopters changing their courses in the sky to fly directly at him.

(For the session, we both hoped Seth would at least comment on the Stuart incidents, and in relation to her own challenges.)

I am doing my best to explain. I do not want you to think I am without compassion. Novelists create heroes who must overcome obstacles. Some such characters are brave and upright; some of your heroes are scoundrels. Then there are, say, the hunchback of Notre Dame or Frankenstein. In your living you literally bring your ideas to life. You form the story of your life. You are involved in a study of the full dimensions of experience, in the interpretation of events themselves. You are involved in a living process—but one of such multidimensional activity that sometimes you see of course but one chapter in a saga whose full complexion is far different.

Give me a moment.... A novelist, being himself or herself writing a book, will nevertheless imaginatively live the actions of all of its characters—the villain, the hero, the madman, the saint or whatever—and a true creative gestalt is involved. Then in the author’s mind the characters will interact. The author may know the book’s end, or allow the characters themselves to work out their own solutions. Here we will call the author the whole self, and the characters are real. They are themselves. They follow their own unique intents. They are not coerced, say. The plot is left open, but in the deepest terms the whole self, through its personalities, probes deeply into the meaning of life in all of its manifestations.

The young man is setting himself against society, against its ideas of sanity. He is creating a reality that is in its way highly unique—a creation he feels at least is his own. It is anything but boring. Its very danger keeps him on his toes, and forces him to protect his life. It is saving him from suicide. It is therefore a mental device meant to protect his life.

He must protect himself from threats from without. The threats convince him, again, that he must be important and valuable. Beneath this is the feeling that his life is of no value, that he is in fact worthless, weaker than his peers, and he detests himself enough so that he might take his own life. The threats then convince him of his value. To give them up would be to face his feelings of worthlessness. The situation also allows him to use his creative abilities in terms of fantasy and imagination. He was taught not to express himself, so he only uses those abilities to protect his life, which justifies them. His dilemma makes him important.

You two are involved in the asking of questions, and the acquisition of knowledge. You want to know about the nature of reality.

You are concerned with what is wrong with the world. You want to know why it is not better than it is. You want to know how reality is created—how and why people create lives that seem to be less than desirable.

Your young man gave you an excellent instance—a “case” that the most noteworthy psychologists or psychiatrists, if they had time, would find fascinating. You were able to gain insights that you simply would not have if you were not presented with exaggerated realities. Your young psychologist was a case in point, with his “crazies,” your Andrija Puharich, your young people with the child, about Christmas time.

Now these are not simply people in distress. You are presented with bigger-than-life situations, provided with raw material from life, given exaggerated versions so that from them you can draw the knowledge to help you answer your own questions, and the knowledge to help others whose plights may be less colorful but equally vital.

All of that is quite in keeping with your own intents, and with the study of human nature with which you are involved. You are then further motivated to seek other answers than the official ones.

Always remember the vitality that sustains them, and that supports them. It is not withdrawn, even though the constructions they form may seem to be extremely faulty. There is much left unsaid, simply because some information available to me cannot be translated properly in ways that will make sense to you. There are explorations of emotional content, for example, very difficult to explain, in which intensities of emotion are explored for their own sake, as one might experiment with the values of red or black—not caring what the form of the painting was.