“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(For the first time in a very long while, most of last week’s mail remains unanswered—sitting in the basket on the table at the end of the couch. Another batch of letters arrived from Prentice-Hall today, adding to the pile. Some of the letters are great, others very depressing. In other words, they range over the usual human situations we encounter. One even took us to task for “obscenities” in Volume 2 of “Unknown.” Jane and I have been talking about how best to deal with the implications of the mail—it often bothers her—but haven’t reached any conclusions. There may not be any simple one way to handle the situation. I ask a question or two about it in my list of questions for Seth.

From a very small amount of physical data, then, certain kinds of developments are deduced, and almost automatically such passageways are activated. (Pause.) A very small example: the smell of an orange may instantly provide you with a mental image of one, so that that received from one sense is picked up in a fashion by the others—all serving in one way or another to give you a more completed picture of the object or event involved.

It is the conscious mind as it is trained in your society that deals with black and white thinking, apropos of one of your questions. The connection between black and white thinking and creativity is legitimate, but it exists the other way around: as a rule the artist or creative person is (underlined) creative to the extent that he or she escapes black and white thinking, for the creative person deals with syntheses, original versions of reality and the consideration of different groups of probabilities—groups that appear otherwise very unlikely together from the standpoint of black and white thinking.

(Pause.) In your creativity you both largely avoid black and white thinking, and automatically leap out of that framework. The conscious mind is quite willing to let go in that regard, for art not only provides it with enjoyment but fulfills its own framework of action. It does not regard art as a game, exactly, but it does not expect the same rules to apply, either, to a painted apple on a canvas and a real one.

His eyes have improved reading. I will try to answer all of your questions in one way or another. Ruburt is working through many issues now well, however I do want to mention that Framework 2 often involves such “displaced” targets, when one desired event may be blocked in one area, but a beneficial event of like consequence instead happens in an area seemingly quite divorced from it.

(9:56 PM. Jane’s delivery had been quite good, although she hadn’t appeared to be too comfortable in her chair. I explained to her that this session offered valuable clues as to how to use suggestion: If one could learn how to direct the suggestions —even through the use of misdirection—much could be accomplished. The use of that misdirection would certainly have it funny connotations, too, I thought.