“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Such creative “architect’s plans” are often unknowingly picked up by others, altered or changed, ending up as entirely new productions. Most writers do not examine their sources that closely. The same applies, of course, to any field of endeavor. Many quite modern and sophisticated developments have existed in what you think of now as past civilizations. The plans, as models, were picked up by inventors, scientists, and the like, and altered to their own specific directions, so that they emerged in your world not as copies but as something new. Many so-called archaeological discoveries were made when individuals suddenly tuned in to a world view of another person not of your space or time. Before you have the confidence to leave your own particular home station, however, you must be secure within it. You must know it will “be there” when you get back.

These “other,” reinterpreted world views form a matrix from which new creativity emerges. The same thing applies in more mundane endeavors in ordinary life. For example: You may be in a predicament that seems beyond solving. It may be highly individual, since it is yours. It is unique, and has happened in no other way before. No one else has viewed your particular dilemma through your eyes, yet others have been in similar situations, solved the challenges involved, and gone on to greater creativity and fulfillment. If you can momentarily abandon your private world view, that focus from which you experience reality, then you can allow the experience of others who have had similar challenges to color your perception. You can tune in to their solutions and apply them to your particular circumstances. You often do this unconsciously. I do not want you to think, then, that such occurrences work only in esoteric terms.

Give us a moment … You are so used to your own private interpretation of reality that when you allow yourselves to stray from it, you immediately want to interpret your new experience in terms that make sense to your familiar orientation. You are also highly involved with symbols. In ordinary life you often hamper your own creativity. When you use the Ouija board or trance procedures, you frequently free philosophical areas of your mind that have been frozen. The resulting information then definitely seems to come from outside of yourself, and because you are literal-minded you try to interpret such experiences in a literal way. The material must come from a philosopher, therefore (amused), and since it certainly seems profound to your usual mundane organization, then it appears that such information must originate with a profound mind certainly not your own.

You may signify this to yourself symbolically, so that the board or the automatic writing designates its origin as being Socrates¹⁰ or Plato. If you are spiritualistically oriented, the information may come from a famous psychic recently dead. Instead, you yourself have momentarily escaped from your accustomed world view, or home program; you are reaching out into other levels of reality, but still interpreting your experience in old terms. Therefore much of its creativity escapes you.

For example, Jane began Politics by describing how impatient she was, how “disconnected” she felt, because she hadn’t been inspired since finishing Adventures two months previously. Indeed, she was very upset over this, and quite serious in her feeling, as she later wrote in her new book, of being abandoned by her inner self. In Volume 2, now, the reader can note the many events Jane was actually involved in before she began Politics (on October 23), and see just how objective her perception of her activities was — or see, really, the demanding standards of creativity against which she constantly judges herself

In Volume I, see Session 680, with notes 1–3. My father, Robert Sr., who died in 1971, was very gifted mechanically. According to Seth, a still-living probable self of Robert Butts, Sr., is “a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment.” Although my father’s “sole intent” was the very challenging one of raising a family in this reality, still he may have often exchanged ideas about automobiles, motorcycles, welding torches, cameras, and so forth, with that other inventor-self.