“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In their own ways, these are heroes representing the detective who is out to protect good against evil, to set things right. Now these characters exist more vividly in the minds of television viewers than the actors do who play those roles. The actors know themselves as apart from the roles. The viewers, however, identify with the characters. They may even dream about the characters. These have their own kind of superlife because they so clearly represent certain living aspects within each psyche.

For example: Say that you have a certain Wilford Jones, who is a character in one of the soap operas. This Wilford, while carrying on within his own drama as, say, a sickly grocer in Iowa, with a mistress he cannot support, and a wife that he must support (with amusement) — this poor, besieged man on station KYU is also aware of all the other programs going on at the other stations. All of the other characters in all of the other plays are also aware of our grocer. There is a constant, creative give-and-take between the day’s various programs. Period.

When our Wilford dramatically cries out to his mistress: “I am afraid my wife will learn of our affair,” then the symphony playing on another station becomes melodramatic, and the sports program shows that a hero fumbles the football. Yet each character has its own free will. The football player, unconsciously picking up the grocer’s problem, for example, may use it as a challenge and say: “No, I will not fumble the ball.” The crowds then cheer, and our grocer in his soap opera may smile and say: “But it will all work out after all.”

It is very easy of course to expand our analogy, changing the radio to a television set. In this case the projections on the screen would be fully dimensional, aware of each viewer in each living room. (Pause.) Not only this, but the screen people would understand the relationship between you the viewer, and, say, the other viewers in the same town. Behind the scenes not only would the performers, as performers in all of the programs, all know each other, but the characters portrayed by them would know each other and be aware of each other’s roles in the programs, and even now and then stray into one another’s dramas.

[...] Without the loyalty that you are learning as a woman, your character had many defects — and there, I said I would not get into anything serious.

[...] At one sitting she wrote 20 or so pages of material in which she understood her relationship with Seth, Seth Two, the Sumari, the characters in Seven, and other psychic concepts — all as aspects of a larger self that was independent of space and time. [...]