“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Stuart was 23 years old—half-inarticulate, dirty, downcast—seemingly a pathetic case. Like some others we’ve seen, he was so locked into his reality that he was really quite unreachable. He lived off a government social-security supplemental program for those who can’t fend for themselves—pretty shrewd, I thought. He’d read hardly anything Jane had written, and I wondered why he’d sought her out. I never heard Jane give better advice, though I doubted if an interview was going to do much about changing what seemed to be a lifetime’s habits.

(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’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.)