“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The article in question is a Playboy interview with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Leonard Yaudes left the May, 1981 issue recently, and Jane has been reading the interview therein once I noticed it and suggested that she review it. Kubler-Ross’s hassles —at least some of them—remind us of our own. I’ll note briefly that late last year, in November-December, Jane attempted to get in touch with Kubler-Ross at the behest of a friend of KR’s who had attended Sheri Perl’s classes. Jane was to call KR at a conference in Wappinger’s Falls, NY; she tried a number of times, always to be put off by a rather unpleasant and officious woman who was always saying that KR was “in conference” and couldn’t be disturbed. Jane wouldn’t leave our private number. KR, we were told, knew that Jane would be calling—indeed, had requested that she do so. The two never did make contact, so we figured it was for the best, for whatever reasons. According to our phone bill, Jane’s last attempt at contact was on December 5, 1980. “Well,” I said, “presumably KR knew you tried to reach her, so since you never got a letter or note later, forget it. That is, if that secretary, or whatever she was, was relaying your messages....”

Both represent systems of belief quite different from our own material in many respects. It is important to realize that in usual terms even great visions need not agree with each other. For they are each viewing experience from a highly concentrated yet uniquely individual standpoint. They each see “reality” from a different angle, and thus create a different view.

(9:13.) Kubler-Ross does not believe as deeply in the existence of evil forces, but is convinced of the importance and necessity of suffering in one way or another as an important means of achieving a good end. (Long pause.) Because your world is built around a certain charged acceptance of beliefs so thoroughly, it usually seems as if reality as you perceive it is the one that must be inevitably perceived, while all others have the status of hallucinatory visions at the very best.

As I have tried to explain, however, your assumptions about reality do indeed form it. You may literally perceive certain elements of consciousness in a personified form, as spirit guides, angels, or even as gods and goddesses. You may perceive them instead merely as undefined and undefinable veiled qualities of thought, ever-elusive and unformed, or as sacred physical portions of the earth, or as charged physical objects.

Overall, it is short-sighted to say that one kind of such perception is truer than the other or more or less factual than the other. The existence of physical objects could be a highly debatable subject in other realities than your own, for example.

The spirit guides are perceptions of other kinds of psychological and psychic activity. In some cases your station of reality automatically transforms them to fit the patterns of your beliefs. They can be dealt with at that level, but that level is to some extent now a superficial one relatively speaking. Kubler-Ross’s system is still highly tinged by beliefs in the prominent necessity not just in the existence of suffering, but that it must for all of its stress upon hope (long pause) end up to a large degree in stressing certain aspects of suffering and martyrdom.

(9:27.) Visions of an entirely different nature, seemingly saying different things, can still be highly legitimate visions, leading in fact by different routes toward other larger reconciliations. (Long pause.) It will be useful if Ruburt remembers this when he views other systems of reality. You make your own reality in “a thousand times.” You put together psychological events in various ways. You merge what is seemingly fiction or fantasy with what is seemingly factual. From those elements you form your picture of the world.

Now, in politics and religion, (Prime Minister) Begin believes it much more practical to deal with the Sinful Self and its “evil prerogatives” than he does with the better self that may indeed represent “the Son of God in man.” He is not waiting around, therefore, by relying upon or overrelying upon, in his view, man’s good intent. The Sinful Self is convinced of its own evil, and the evil intent of others, and so it is driven to protect itself ahead of time.

(I hesitated. “I wasn’t going to ask this tonight, but earlier today I found myself wondering how much of Jane’s symptoms result from my own attitudes and statements about Prentice. I guess I now think she reacted to my ideas there more than I realized.”)