“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.

(Today we received a very disturbing letter from Miss Bowman. She’s selling her home and leaving the valley; she has a painting I gave her years ago that she wants me to have back, so Jane and I will probably make the trip to Athens, PA this Sunday. Miss Bowman was my art teacher in high school. She lent me the money to go to art school in New York City. I paid her back out of my wages in the Air Transport Command when I was drafted to serve in the military in World War II.

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.

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 It is not withdrawn, even though the constructions they form may seem to be extremely faulty.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.