“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

The latest of course is the fear of cloning, but our young man does better than any fear-mongers, for he has the personal cloning people in their eerie vans with antennae, chasing him through the streets. He becomes a sponge for numberless such attitudes, only to him they become critically immediate. He is, however, still alive after each threat, and this convinces him that he will indeed survive. For look what he has survived so far, even though the threats grow more monstrous.

When the entire affair really frightens him, he will look for another solution, and it is too bad your institutions of therapy do not help. Guided imagery could help him, for example, but he would need supervision. Ruburt was quite right in the method he used in speaking to him, and my presence would not have served. He would only have used it, as Ruburt said he would. The creative challenge is there for him, and it is one he chose himself.

(10:10. During break I asked that Seth say something about why Stuart had “picked on Jane,” out of all the people in the country. There are many “psychics” in the San Francisco area, for example. I didn’t think he’d read her books but very little. 10:18.)

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.

(10:30.) You always help those you see—and they present themselves to you not only for themselves, but for others. You are examining the human condition, but seeking answers from the highest reaches of its capabilities. These are goals you set yourselves. If you set out to discover what was right with the world, you would be on a different path. There is much right with the world.