“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent, creativity involves you (pause) in a contradiction with the evidence of reality within your world. It puts you in a peculiar state of being—or in a peculiar relationship with the accepted world of factual evidence. The state of creativity can (underlined) be discussed as if it were (underlined) a separate state, like waking or sleeping. It can, in fact, involve waking dreams. In the usual awake state, in the terms now of this discussion, you deal with the available physical evidence of the world as it appears to present perception, that is, or with what you can see or feel or touch, either immediately or through physical instruments.

Ruburt may suddenly have an idea for a book. He wants to write it. In physical terms that book is not before his eyes. It has not been written, it has not been published. The evidence says physically that there is no such book. It is not a part of the world’s physical evidence. The idea for the book may come from a dream, or in that state of creativity where dreams reach toward physical actualization. Now Ruburt could say “I cannot write that book, or wonder how many pages it might have,” or think of the endless impediments that might prevent the book from being written. Instead, he simply ignores the physical evidence of the book’s absence, and creatively begins to write.

(9:35.) In your painting, you are constantly involved with bringing some event into the world that was not there before. You fill the gap. You recognize the absence in the present of the physical painting you want to produce, and your creativity brings that painting into reality. With ideas, with our books, you deal, both of you, with such issues all the time. There is so much physical evidence in the world. It has been put together through the centuries, in your terms, in countless ways, bringing pictures of reality, each vivid, each contradicting the other to some extent. When man believed the world was flat, he used his thought processes in such a way that they had great difficulty in imagining any other kind of world, and read the evidence so that it fit the flat-world picture.

[...] They are the most concrete-seeming evidence, you see. It is in this area then where the physical evidence most strongly appears, and it can seem overwhelming.

You are used to “trusting your physical perceptions,” taught to accept physical evidence above all as the mark of reality. [...] When he finds himself in such physical circumstances then it is difficult for him to fly in the face of such “physical evidence.”

To some extent this belief of his is quite shared by you, and if his symptoms seem so self-evident to you, imagine how self-evident they seem to him. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Anytime you use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, you are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more “convincing” and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. [...]

[...] It is because you have used other methods that much evidence escapes you—evidence that would show that the physical universe exists in quite different terms than is supposed.

Evidence for reincarnation is quite available. There are enough instances of it, known and tabulated, to make an excellent case; and beside this there is evidence that remains psychologically invisible in your private lives, because you have been taught not to concentrate in that direction.

In the meantime, of course, quite valid rockbed evidence that does not fit into the picture gradually becomes discarded, ignored, thrown away. [...] It disappears as evidence, becomes inactive. [...]

In terms of Ruburt’s condition, he often thinks that he is “faced with the evidence” that his condition is not improving, that it is growing worse, that all the evidence says such conditions do deteriorate rather than improve. [...]

[...] Any improvement, unless stated, is almost overlooked, not considered as much hard evidence, while any difficulties definitely are considered hard evidence because they fit into the overall data-collecting intellect, as stated above. [...]

[...] With physical conditions already apparent in the present, you can at least realize that while these present you with a certain evidence, the evidence will indeed change—and can change, and is changing the minute that you realize that the evidence, while present, is not inevitably all the evidence available. [...]

[...] He had confessed to her death several times, but no one believed him—until the last time, evidently. [...] Jane didn’t ask for details on the case, but instead explained to the lawyer something of Seth’s ideas so that the attorney could use that material in his defense, making it clear that above all Seth was not for violence, even though the prosecuting attorney was evidently trying to make the defendant sound as though it was okay to kill because reincarnation was a fact: Since we all lived other lives, no one could really kill anyone. [...]

He becomes overly serious, overstressing the entire picture, as you can at times, so that the affair seems hopeless: the evidence before your eyes, and so forth. [...]

[...] Look for evidence of them everywhere. [...] Curse your ignorance, and search for evidence of man’s sinful nature. [...]

[...] Now you know that people who simply refuse to accept the existence of clairvoyance, say, will not find any evidence for it. They will not allow it to invade their world, even though they may say they seek such evidence. [...]

I say the same thing to you so often because in one way or another I hope to get through the opposite accumulation of seeming evidence to the contrary, for you are everywhere surrounded by it. [...]

The evidence of much of the writing, the records and so forth, vanished, for some of these civilizations did indeed have paper, of a kind, and printing presses of a kind. As a result, your evidence shows the much later reemergence of writing on more durable objects.

There were languages then long before your earliest evidence of them, and in written form. [...]

Unfortunately, the evidence for the existence of modernlike societies does not physically remain, for buildings, for example, were not constructed to last. [...]

[...] If you would simply for once, and for once Joseph I am not referring to you particularly, if you would for once demonstrate an openness and a willingness to accept such data on its own basis, without insisting upon evidence from the regular senses, then and only then will you have evidence that the outer senses can recognize.

[...] For any so-called extrasensory perceptions you insist upon twice the evidence, and under circumstances when the evidence is vivid in its own terms and must be translated first, before you will accept it, into the alien outside senses, which simply are not equipped to receive it. [...]

[...] I give you this very slight evidence of my humor merely to show that I am not after all one to carry grudges.

The point I wanted to make earlier was that evidence of what you call ESP will be arrived at. But as you receive evidence of sound through the ears and do not ordinarily expect to see through your ears, so the evidence must come through the correct channels. One of your main difficulties is that you will not accept as evidence anything which is not perceivable in one manner or another through the outer senses. [...]

This does not mean that evidence cannot be found, and overwhelming evidence, for the existence of the inner senses. [...]

The fact is that when you insist upon evidence through the outside, regularly accepted senses, that you almost automatically turn off the inner sense apparatus. [...] Once you take this first step of spontaneity, you will actually receive evidence that even your conscious mind will be forced to accept. [...]

[...] In those areas where you have not been effectively successful, you often seem faced with evidence to the contrary—and that evidence can appear to be quite concrete, because it is of course reinforced daily.

Such evidence can be of small or large measure. [...]

(Also after supper it developed that Miss Callahan, the retired school teacher who lives in the front apartment on our floor, had evidently had an attack of some kind and was in urgent need of help. [...] She had also taken several falls, and evidently had not been eating.

(Evidently, this morning, I had my first small success in autohypnosis. [...]

The young woman, Frances (Gardella), who wrote Ruburt, with no evidence was certain she would be followed—tomorrow if not today. [...] This should be obvious, because for example there are healthy people also, with no evidence of any disease, who have utter faith that disease is hidden within them, or swiftly approaching.

[...] Now she told me that Seth’s recent prediction that her eyes would show noticeable improvement shortly has evidently come to pass; she wanted me to note that here. [...]

[...] In usual terms, again, there is no direct evidence, otherwise you would have no need for faith.

[...] You are everywhere presented with the evidence. [...]

[...] In such a way you miss any significant evidence to the contrary.

[...] As long as you think that your physical information about the world, through newspapers and so forth, presents a fairly adequate, objective view of events, then all of the evidence to the contrary will literally be invisible, for you will continue to organize your view of the world in the old way. [...]

[...] Instantly the person might leap up, convinced that that was evidence of the pursuit of the FBI or other agency.

The point is, that in such circumstances the person will try to use evidence from the outside world to prove that he is indeed being pursued.

(A couple of days ago Jane received from Tam a letter written to Tam by Saul Cohen, the editor at Prentice-Hall who’s evidently been assigned to shepherd Jane’s work through production. [...]

[...] It then became evident that a lot of her poor feelings lately have been connected to worries over work, what Prentice-Hall would or wouldn’t publish, etc.—an old reaction that I should have been more prepared for, I guess, but had lost sight of in our day-to-day hassles. [...]

[...] I told you also lately that your new standpoint would also be showering benefits from Framework 2 in other areas in your lives, and of this of course the letter gives clear evidence. [...]

[...] He reports feelings of certainty, yet overall you have a tendency, shall I say (with irony) not to focus upon those new significances, those new coincidences, for you think still “in terms of the evidence.” Yet now in so doing you are not being true to the evidence.

[...] I told Jane that I was somewhat surprised to hear from him so quickly, and by his evident interest.

[...] This organization is personally, intimately tuned, in that it gives evidence of a spectacular psychology on another scale that organizes events in a manner that is for each individual personally significant.

When Ruburt took your second apartment, he did so taking it on faith and against all physical evidence to the contrary that he would have the money to afford it, and the money came. Yet whenever you begin a new situation of physical improvements with Ruburt, after the first enthusiasm the both of you instantly revert to the old “test-it-out-at-once, check-the-physical-evidence” kind of thinking. [...] When you feel that way then it seems sheer Pollyanna to believe in improvement, for you are again faced with the evidence upon which you focus your attention.

(11:15.) In your reality it seems only practical and sane to accept the evidence of your senses. [...]

Some of this is difficult to explain, but as the world of appearances presents its own evidence, on the level of sense, so your inner reality presents as strong evidence of its reality. But that evidence remains largely invisible, because you have not trained yourselves sufficiently to be alert to those manifestations. [...]

[...] I said I though much evidence had been collected already, and that more was certain to be gathered before our deaths forty or so years from now, granting his dates were correct. Seth agreed, but said the evidence might convince scientists and investigators long before it convinced the average man, who knows little about such things now.

[...] After saying that Jane would live into her eighties also, he said that we would be instrumental in offering conclusive evidence for the survival of the personality after physical death. [...]

(As he stated in the 68th and 170th sessions, Seth said that should he materialize in full view in the middle of the room it would not be considered as evidence by those who did not wish to believe it possible; they would ascribe it to mass hallucination, etc. I planned to ask Seth about photographic evidence of such an event, following break, but did not get the chance to.

(Nor according to Seth would the voice effects be accepted as any kind of evidence, until certain measuring instruments were used in a scientifically-controlled experiment. [...]