“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(She hasn’t typed her dreams of yesterday yet for the last session. Today, however, she did get several more notebook pages on a “Speaker’s manuscript”—an idea she began to receive material on last Thursday, she thinks it was. She usually takes down that material while sitting on the bed. Today, as she has often lately, she worked on painting a small acrylic landscape.

(She sat in her usual place on the couch, and I faced her in her chair across the coffee table. Behind me in the fireplace we heard once again the mysterious scratching or chucking or chirruping sounds we’ve become aware of lately, as though a family of animals or birds has young hatching our or growing in a nest on the other side of the closed damper. I’d heard the same sound a few days ago, but since it had been a windy day I’d thought the noise was caused by branches rubbing against the house or fireplace outside. We don’t know exactly what should be done about the situation, if anything. My present concern is that if there are young birds in the fireplace they may be trapped, not having room enough to learn to fly. But why would birds build a nest in such a place, assuming they could get to it to begin with? It didn’t seem natural for any creature to do that. We’ve also been under the impression since we moved in here that the fireplace had a screen sealing off the chimney from such possibilities.)

Straight-laced people have often frowned upon the use of the imagination, considering it most disruptive. (Pause.) From the beginning Ruburt has questioned whether or not our material gave a true explanation of reality—or at least presented one that was as approximately true as possible. Or were only creative hypotheses being offered? Was the material true or false?

The idea of the Sinful Self came into play here, for if the material was not true, then in that framework it must necessarily be false—or at the least very misleading. This led to many questions. Is creativity itself involved in a kind of mischievous lying? All of those questions make sense in a framework in which the dictums of one belief system—Christianity—are accepted as true, and everything that does not agree with them is accepted as falsehood.

(9:01.) When you are dealing with that kind of philosophical investigation, you are more or less forced to look for other definitions. (The noise from the fireplace was now quite loud.) Your very ideas of the nature of reality change. You are still to some extent forced to recognize conventional structures and organizations, including psychological ones. At the same time you search for greater evidence of a vastly different kind of reality. (Long pause.) The larger facts about psychological reality, for example, cannot be fitted to the world’s definitions. You can only get versions and interpretations. Translations and dramatizations that serve to give you glimpses of psychological structures whose very natures do not fit the facts of the world (all intently.