“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was held Monday evening. Instead we worked on the table of contents for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.

(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.

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.

You two are involved in the asking of questions, and the acquisition of knowledge. You want to know about the nature of reality.

You are concerned with what is wrong with the world. You want to know why it is not better than it is. You want to know how reality is created—how and why people create lives that seem to be less than desirable.

Your young man gave you an excellent instance—a “case” that the most noteworthy psychologists or psychiatrists, if they had time, would find fascinating. You were able to gain insights that you simply would not have if you were not presented with exaggerated realities. Your young psychologist was a case in point, with his “crazies,” your Andrija Puharich, your young people with the child, about Christmas time.

(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.

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.

(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.)