“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane was good, had been back from hydro since 11:00 again. Yesterday we’d received our copies of the Bantam paperback issue of The Nature of the Psyche, and I’d brought a book in to show Jane. She thought it was as terrible — as cheap and sensationalized — as I did. I hadn’t even gotten mad, I told her. I wanted a word from Seth on what our reactions should, or could, be, in light of yesterday’s session about living in the moment.

The ideas themselves are quite ancient, of course. They are expressed by many cultures and religions, esoteric groups and cults from the past, and continuing into the present. Their strength, vitality, and worth has been greatly undermined, however, by distortions, negative ideas, and some sheer nonsense.

In other words, these concepts, so natural to all of creation, have not been practiced by humanity in anything like their pure form. To that extent they do indeed represent a new way. They run directly counter to much of your official knowledge and contemporary thought as far as the mainstream of world culture is concerned. Where such ideas are practiced, they are frequently contaminated by fanaticism, superstition, and expediency.

Your dream did indeed deal with changing the past and the past beliefs, and therefore with inserting a new present, and a newer future. Often hair is a symbol for strength, but in this case it represents the strength of old beliefs, and your father is a barber who cuts away those — whereas in the past he followed many quite negative beliefs and concepts. Jake also represented any beliefs of your own dealing with work in general that can carry you so far and no further. You correctly interpreted the affair between Ruburt and his mother — an excellent omen, by the way.

The Bantam cover in its own way offers in the most positive of ways, despite your natural objections to it … It suggests the most unfortunate sensationalism, of course, yet people attracted to it for that reason are precisely the people it is important to reach. The ideas in the book proper will quite change their negative, charged ideas of psychic activity in general.