“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Throughout the ages people have taken such journeys. The snapshots⁵ are developed in the “darkroom” that exists between your world and those visited. The people who have journeyed into the unknown reality have always been adventurous. Yet many had already seen the snapshots sent to your world by others, and so they began to clothe their own original visions of their journeys in the guise of those other pictures. A group of handy ideas, concepts, and images then formed. The clear vision of such explorers became lost. Those travelers no longer tried to make their own original snapshots of the strange environments and realities through which they passed. It was easier to interpret their experiences through the psychic penny postcards.

There are inner conventions, then, as there are outer ones. As the exterior mores try to force you to conform to the generally accepted ideas, so the interior conventions try to force you to make your inner experience conform to preconceived packaging.

“I don’t believe in them,” Jane said in answer to my question. “At least not in that fashion — so what am I doing tuning in to a psychic library?” She laughed. “I’m having enough trouble explaining my own ideas. I’ve got to figure it all out.”

8. And “those travelers into unknown worlds” can still be called outcasts, strange, weird — or worse. Jane has had her share of such reactions from others (as have I). When combined with her own natural-enough questions about her psychic abilities, as sometimes happens, such episodes aren’t any fun. In accidental ways that would be quite humorous if they weren’t so personal, we’ve also learned what negative ideas others can have about us: A person will inadvertently reveal to us, during a conversation, or in a letter or over the telephone, the unflattering opinions his or her mate, or parents, or friends, really have of Jane and me and the work we’re engaged in with the Seth material.