“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You were astonished when Ruburt told you how much money the Gallaghers were making, for if Bill sold his soul, few it seems could have sold it for less. Bill, however, concentrated upon life’s regrettable elements, upon the impediments, the dishonesties and so forth, until it seemed that even if he followed the world’s way he could not succeed. His idea of manliness was such that he insisted upon a conventional job, clear-cut.

(10:07.) Now: the route you chose was far different than your friend’s. You did not choose a job as a life endeavor, where money would be clearly paid for acts specifically assigned, nor did you choose a route for which there was any conventional role for you to follow.

When you pursue new avenues, there are no such easy ways to assess success or failure (intently). Thinking in terms of the conventional world, however, you feel sometimes at a loss, for you want to say, “What am I?” in those terms (underlined)—an artist, or a writer, or a combination of the two? Ruburt wonders, what is he—a writer, a psychic, a combination of the two? The books bear his name, so you feel that they are primarily his, and yet all of those feelings ignore completely the larger realities of your lives and of your work.

Next to that kind of achievement, conventional ideas of success or failure are literally ludicrous in basic terms, though I understand the hold that cultural beliefs can still have upon you.

Now with the various people at Prentice, you will have such tendencies often appearing separately, so that one person will be highly conventional and dislike changes, while another might be responsive to work that was emotionally exciting, avant garde. The publishing house — that publishing house — represents in capsule form the extremes of thought of your time, from the most conventional to the most bizarre. [...]

[...] It knows how to deal with conventional textbooks — but in a fashion our books combine all of those elements, and transcend them. If Prentice were as conventional at heart as its legal department, it would not publish books at all, except perhaps for the textbooks.

[...] (Pause.) Prentice-Hall, in capsule form, so to speak, is a representative of the most diverse kinds of thought currently held in your country — that is, under it’s overall auspices you have the most conventional establishment-oriented textbooks, devoted to continuing traditional ideas. [...]

Now: As I said before, also, when faced with the difficulty, the conventional, rational approach tells you to look at the problem, examine it thoroughly, project it into the future, and imagine its dire consequences — and so, faced with the idea of a disclaimer (for Mass Events), that is what you did to some extent, the two of you. [...]

You knew you would not be after conventional knowledge. To mix your purposes with the conventional family life would have been most difficult, so you chose situations that left you free until you met—that is, of property, children, or important ties.

[...] They are, however, the results of old hangovers, when he is reacting to conventional, quite limited knowledge filled with distortion, about the nature of the psyche, the nature of time—knowledge further polluted by methods of problem-solving that simply add to problems.

[...] You could have done conventionally well, with portraits, and with other kinds of paintings, with your technical knowledge, but as you learned more you kept trying to put more into your paintings, ever demanding more of yourself and of the art, and forcing upon yourself a kind of growth and development that in a way became larger than the art itself—so that the art, you felt, could never be adequate as an expression of the inner realities of which you became more and more certain.

[...] Do not fall for the trashy concepts concerning age—particularly in relationship to art, for there there is far less correlation than there might seem to be, for example, in conventional terms in other areas of life.

[...] I will give you the answers to your questions, but they are not the way to solve your problem—and against all conventional knowledge, reviewing the mistakes of the past does not lead to wisdom.

Against all that conventional wisdom, what I have said sounds extremely simple, simplistic, Pollyannaish, until you try to do it. [...]

[...] In a manner of speaking, your conscious mind, as you think of it, is a psychological convention. [...]

[...] While you believe in conventional ideas of cause and effect, and can discover none in a particular instance, then that event can certainly appear meaningless—perhaps cruel, and certainly the result of an accidental behavior in which all good intent has vanished.

[...] He had sired his children, loved as well as he could, done his job—but there was no contemplative life to look forward to, no greater love than the one with his wife—and that love while conventionally sound enough, did not content him.

[...] This does not mean that they arose often to the conventional conscious mind, yet even then there were fairly frequent-enough thoughts, for example: What will happen if I hit another car when I’m driving? [...]

Now: all in all, the overall systems of conventional belief are relatively simple, and serve to define reality by numbering as truths or facts certain kinds of events, therefore accepting them as legitimate furniture for the mind. [...]

[...] They often do not honor conceptual conventions. [...]

[...] You are still to some extent forced to recognize conventional structures and organizations, including psychological ones. [...]

[...] It is impossible for you to perceive in the same direct fashion the majestic, almost unimaginable field of creative action in which any of those events occur, however, in which each act, however seemingly destructive, has vital creative purposes that may or may not appear within the limited references of your conventional dimensions. [...]

Psychological events have their own integrity, wholeness, but as the dimensions of an object can be more or less ascertained and agreed upon by many, the greater free flow granted to psychological events allows for no such easy conventional recognition. [...]

[...] World events such as those you read about in your newspaper are the result of conventional ideas and beliefs—those with which you were reared. [...]

[...] On the one hand you “believe” that you form your own reality, and on the other you believe that things will most likely go wrong unless you do something to stop them; and this is the most conventional world view that forms the experience of, say, the newspaper world.

In no way should that tending take away from your creative work, but add to it in ways that defy conventional ideas of time. [...]

[...] Do not equate turmoil with excitement and peace with turmoil for these are also conventional habits of thought that do not necessarily apply. Traveling can be external, but you can travel around the world and go nowhere and you can sit in your chair and travel beyond the universe, so do not be taken in by conventional habits of thought regardless of which conventions the patterns follow. [...]

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.

There are good reasons for conventions. [...] Conventions are the results of stratified and rigid “spontaneity.” [...]

So you take a psychic guided tour into other realities; the unknown seems known, so that you are not an explorer after all, but a tourist, taking with you the paraphernalia of your own civilization, and beliefs that are quite conventional.

Ruburt has thus far insisted upon his private vision and his unique expression of the unknown reality as he experiences it, and so he brings back bulletins that do not agree with the conventional psychic line.

[...] It was, simply, that we were wrong to blame imagined excesses of the spontaneous self for her problems—that really the trouble lay in her discovery that with the psychic abilities she was destined to find herself outside conventional creative authority: a person who learned that she would have to protect her very integrity as a person against charges of fraud. [...]

[...] Her reading the NY Times Book Review each week had reminded me recently that her intent perusal of that publication represented a striving toward something she was not about to achieve—conventional recognition in creative writing.

[...] Yet she’d found this deep yearning snatched away with the advent of her psychic abilities—goodbye to all of those accepted reviews, the critical success, even the money, that would go along with the conventional acceptable public image of the successful writer of good quality poetry and/or fiction. [...]

[...] Later he tried straight novels, but when he let himself go his natural fiction fell into the form of fantasy, outside of the novel’s conventions into science fiction’s form—and at that time further away from the mainstream. [...]

It is as ridiculous to prove your worth by working in a conventional sense as it is to prove your worth by not working in a conventional sense. [...]

Think of the slides shown today (by Loren) of postcard Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, USA, home of conventional, American, Protestant values. [...]

[...] They are conventional and stereotyped. [...]

(Pause.) Most men’s abilities are prosaic enough and conventional enough so that their value can be ascertained—or worked out by labor unions (amused). [...]

You threw out conventional religious ideas first, and then conventional scientific ideas, so while these may be a part of your society, they are not a part of your personalized world views. [...]

[...] Nevertheless when you become overly concerned with the seeming shortness or lack of time, it is almost always because you have fallen back to conventional ideas: you have only so many moments in a day. But the conventional version says, really, that those are surface moments; that you, say, run from one to the next, as if time were a moving sidewalk with the past moment vanishing forever. [...]

The mass reader is used to conventional science fiction. [...]

[...] In a way he was rewarded for conventional thought, and punished for unconventional thought. [...]

[...] The experience at the writer’s convention also had an affect there, plus the young psychologist’s remarks later—all of this accepted because of the inferiority feelings of childhood.

[...] The three Christs material particularly affects him that way, for to deny the conventional idea of Christ is to antagonize not merely Catholicism but basic Christian belief. [...]

[...] Many of Frank’s ideas are appallingly shortsided, and while you are working with your own beliefs a visit every other week is enough for now—without courting Frank’s opinions, as can happen when Ruburt wants Frank, in conventional terms, to acknowledge improvements that are definitely occurring, but that Frank is too slow to perceive.

[...] The younger man was, when you met him, afraid himself of schizophrenia, and had a great need to establish his own sanity at the expense of anyone who showed any but the most conventional characteristics.

[...] You approached him because of your own quite conventional feelings, that because he was comparatively young he would be broadminded. [...]

[...] It is simply that in one area Ruburt, and you secondarily, have insisted upon relying upon the conventional levels of existence. [...]

[...] He has also however reinforced your conventional beliefs that muscles and joints must behave thus-and-so, that so much time must pass for such processes to take place; he helped you set up a situation that served handily, for you could not leave Framework 1, nor yet really accept wholeheartedly Framework 2.

[...] Frank’s knowledge can still be helpful, but it should not be allowed, now, to curtail improvements, or limit them, by conventional knowledge of what muscles and joints can or cannot do, or by projecting any particular procedure—as, for example, Ruburt will do this or that, before this or that.

[...] Follow my suggestions, and know that the necessary work is being done completely outside of physical time, so that improvements can occur of a significant nature without any particular conventional expected processes that must first occur.

[...] Poetry will sell if it is conventionally religious, or conventionally arty, or conventionally sentimental.

[...] People like poetry as a rule in your society only when it is dealing with conventional subjects, or directly with nature, so that in a way, now, the intuitions are used “to a rational end.”

Now conventional religion requires tribute and so the men came to you at the door. [...] The conventional religions were symbolized as St. Paul to you. [...]

[...] Is it legitimate whether spoken about in conventional terms through religion, or is it legitimate in the terms spoken about in this room, or is it legitimate in any terms at all? [...]

Now in the back of your mind, and you may yell at me later, conventional religion is symbolized by the Catholic religion because of its fantastic organization. [...]

In, I repeat, conventional ideas of evolution,¹ this would be a period in which your kind of consciousness experimented with a water environment, with fins instead of lungs. [...]

While in conventional terms you think of long centuries’ duration, in which finned creatures rose from the seas, some “becoming” reptiles and finally mammals, many did not make that journey but “fell” along the way. [...]

[...] Ruburt is correct: Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality, as well [as that of birth]. [...]

1. Appendix 12 contains much material on conventional theories of evolution, as well as on Seth’s and my own often countering views.

[...] I am not speaking here of anything so simple as merely allowing women more freedom, or relieving men from the conventional breadwinner’s role. [...]

[...] They are largely the result of the interpretations of religion as conventionally understood. [...]

[...] Beside this, they have lost their conventional sexual roles, in which they earlier expressed their energy.