“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 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.