“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:30 this evening we got our answer. Stuart was back at our front door. I refused to let him in. He’d washed his face and looked fresher. He told me that within the last five hours something had happened that he’d feared all his life: he’d lost the last of his energy. His inner self was exposed and vulnerable. Yet he’d walked the two miles and more to our house from the YMCA, I thought ironically. His tale showed that Jane’s efforts of the night before had largely been futile. I told him she couldn’t help him, that we didn’t have the time. He accepted docilely, and gave me his address in San Francisco. He left, and Jane still had the impulse to have me call him back in another effort to help him. I said no in any event. Stuart didn’t know when he’d leave town, so I said he should return to his friends in California. He said he probably would.

We now have a young man who is quite important. He is so important that others pursue him psychically. His abilities and powers are so great that others, seemingly now, try to rob him of them. Far from living a colorless life, he wanders through the country, in the midst of an exciting psychic chase, pursued by magicians, evil powers, and the most sophisticated weaponry of giant corporations and the government.

He does not have a nine-to-five job. He is constantly in midst of drama, fleeing for his life. The system supports him, and it would not do so under other conditions. He has some financial sustenance, then, some freedom, as he understands it, and he is the hero, the good guy who is, however, seemingly at the mercy of his enemies.

I mentioned the Cinderella myth—and there, everything will come out all right in the end, somehow. Its opposite is a feeling that nothing will ever come out all right because the universe itself is meaningless. Life is meaningless. Our young man believes this.

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.

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.

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.

Your idea of judging the quality of life, or of a life, is highly limited, however, for it may not lie in events as you usually think of them on many occasions.

(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.)