“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Any purpose is better than none, and any intended personalized threat is better than an existence in which no life is important enough to be individually threatened, so these imagined threats serve to convince our young man that his life must have meaning or purpose—otherwise others would not be so intent on destroying him. He is clothed and fed. He lives with adventure, threat, and must forever be on guard. He sees himself fleeing across the continent—again, a hero in a vast drama, a romantic picture. He does not want allies, for he dramatizes his isolation.

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.

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.

The people who come here are concentrated, dramatic examples of the human species at large. Their beliefs appear so drastically that you can use them as blueprints for others in whose characters the beliefs will appear more modified, and perhaps nearly unnoticed. You see the beliefs, the motivations, the feelings, of those whose beliefs are carried to extremes, so that you can follow them as if they were psychological clusters or cultures—isolated, so to speak. Then you can study their behavior in others.

Give us a moment.... Be sure you do not close your eyes to the miracles of the world. Your point was a good one—the young man walked a good way—the energy was there to sustain him even over his delusions. Beliefs show themselves, however, far more clearly, and can be examined better, through the type of experience those people bring.

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.

(I’d say that we can follow Seth’s analogy about the emotional intensities, above, okay, and also that we try not to be blind to values in life that might not be readily apparent in ordinary terms. I think I’ve wondered more than once, for instance, about what purposes a given life may be serving that we’re quite unaware of, or blind to.)