“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] The idea of personhood is a highly vital one, uniting peoples and societies. The idea of personhood held by the Roman Catholic Church affected the history of the world for centuries, and that idea of personhood is intimately involved, of course, with the idea of personhood’s source. [...]

[...] At Christmastime I discussed with Jane the idea of seeking medical help, and asked her to tell me what she thought of this idea later, but she has yet to bring up the subject. I knew she’s not in favor of it, but as I said at the time, this seemed to mean that she was indulging the idea of spending the balance of her life sitting down —quite immobile for all practical purposes. [...]

(That topic ties in with my idea that I mentioned to her this afternoon, about it hardly being a coincidence that many events in our lives are coming to a head at the same time: Our deep upset about Jane’s condition; the trouble with the disclaimer idea for Mass Events; Prentice-Hall’s reorganization into the General Publishing Division, in which all of their narrative books will be phased out, thus eliminating any real need for Tam and his job; indeed, Tam is looking at other job offers even now. [...] And the irony of the situation is that, even though we detest the idea of the disclaimer for Mass Events, we see it as another means of protection in the public arena.... [...]

[...] The latter idea is a cover-up for the previous one. [...] This fear may be based on outmoded ideas—as Seth has mentioned at various times—it may make no sense, or whatever, yet as long as it exists it must be dealt with. [...]

[...] Help him to trust the spontaneous self, and as you shall see, these ideas are indeed directly opposite to those of your educations, so do not be impatient.

Fear of the self, itself, can lead people to the horrendous experiences mentioned in tonight’s session, so you are working with some revolutionary ideas, and trying to apply them to daily living.

(To me:) You are doing well and ideas and beliefs are changing places in your mind, to good import. [...]

[...] He felt also that my ideas in Mass Events, and his ideas in God of Jane, were almost bound to bring about some controversy from the beginning—for reasons he largely worked out for himself—and they are related in his book. [...]

[...] All of this goes back to ideas that existence must be justified, and Ruburt’s early ideas that writing would justify his life—but writing should express life, and is an expression of being, an expression of spontaneity, an expression of emotion, of body as well as mind (all intently). [...]

[...] Twice today we had rather short discussions about our ideas of why the symptoms linger after all these years: nothing new, I’m afraid, although she said she felt better afterward—before getting blue again. [...]

Though the following advice runs counter to all accepted ideas of common sense, at such times look for what is right in your lives, rather than becoming overly concerned (underlined) with what is wrong. [...]

In my other books I used many accepted ideas as a springboard to lead readers into other levels of understanding. [...] (Pause at 11:35.) Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. [...]

These institutions and disciplines are composed of individuals, each restrained by limiting ideas about their own private reality; and so it is with private reality that we will begin and always return, period. These ideas in this book are meant to expand the private reality of each reader. [...]

[...] She was led to develop her own, therefore, and this book is an extension of certain ideas already mentioned in Adventures in Consciousness.³ To write that book, Jane Roberts drew on deep resources of energy.

[...] Now he knows differently, but he still clings to the idea of one god, one self, and one body through which to express it.

Your gods, and your ideas of a God, have always followed the contours of your consciousness, your civilizations, your prerogatives, and your values. [...] Such ideas can and have been used most beneficially by simple men and women throughout the ages, and distorted as they are, they still served to remind man that his source is not the world.

[...] This is mainly Jane’s idea; I imagine that for the most part I’m willing to stick to our regular routine. [...]

[...] We had no idea what the session might be about, since we’d posed no questions for Seth. [...]

Since this “one God” of Carter’s, however, can obviously have such different ideas, saying one thing to one nation and the opposite to another, then men will begin to check their nationalistic lists of divine instructions, discovering that to one extent or another this God would seem to have told several different groups of people that they were chosen above others, that their enemies would be vanquished, and that they might indeed defend their divine rights through whatever unfortunate but necessary means.

[...] But to discuss Seth or Seth’s ideas primarily from the true-or-false framework is the same thing as considering the Mona Lisa only from the validity of the physical properties of paint and canvas; very, very limiting. To “just” say that Seth’s ideas are true is to limit him and us.... [...]

So after getting to the position that yes, these ideas are factual (or even, larger than facts) is okay, good—but only part of the picture, and the premise could actually be misleading and limiting.... [...]

To do that, I have to drop those old feelings of responsibility as a primary focus (to get the ideas out quickly so they can help people, etc.) because those feelings strain the Seth-book framework particularly when I demand that in each book Seth answers all questions and so forth. [...]

[...] The strong ideas of responsibility are limiting too; they put you in a less creative framework, stifle creativity. [...]

[...] Many such ideas have been held by those relatively innocent of any great creative ideas themselves, in order to rationalize their own deficiencies.

Their ideas ruled the world. Their ideas carry the weight of mass acceptance. [...]

Now, dear friend, you have also shared some of these ideas, and to some extent seen Ruburt’s physical condition as a symbolic statement of how the so-called authorities viewed our joint work. [...] It offends your idea of secrecy, privacy, and being anonymous. [...]

You will benefit by the economy’s misfortune—but because your ideas are what people need in order to change the conditions that caused the economy’s lack of comfort. [...] Your ideas offer hope and literal promise. [...]

(Pause.) People with like ideas reinforce each other’s beliefs. [...] The others may feel it necessary to defend ideas that all of you previously took for granted. [...] Each individual has his or her own ideas about reality for reasons that seem valid. [...]

(Interestingly enough, we’re already beginning to hear about such frictions developing, especially from members of ESP class as they work with the ideas in this book. [...]

[...] You must accept the idea completely, however, that your beliefs form your experience. [...]

[...] You must work with your own ideas. [...]

(10:27.) At what expense is “the good” to be achieved — and whose idea of the good is to be the criterion? [...] These are all value judgments involving your ideas of the good.

[...] Hitler’s idea of good was hardly inclusive, therefore, and any actions, however atrocious, were justified.

[...] He counted its humiliations over and over in his mind, until his mind became an almost completely closed environment, in which only certain ideas were allowed entry.

[...] The Jews’ idea was also a dark one, in which their own rules and regulations were set to preserve the soul’s purity against the forces of evil. [...]

[...] When you project your ideas outward, you often behave as if they were not yours but belonged to another. Therefore it behooves you to understand what your ideas and feelings are, and not to be frightened of them.

[...] You have an idea that good is gentle and bad is violent. [...] You become afraid of projecting ideas or desires outward, for in the back of your mind you think that what is powerful is evil.

As Ruburt would put it, your sidekick over here (Jim’s wife, Jean) did not go along with your ideas at all in that life. [...] As a male in that life she had an expanding effect upon your personality, but you were very given to ritual and a belief in magic acts, and to the idea that existence in itself was evil and wrong. [...]

[...] You cannot imagine it without perception in your terms; and yet consciousness can be vital and alive without your idea of perception. [...]

[...] The basic ideas and beliefs that have been personified into his being, that became his being, were formed to protect Augustus One from the destructive ideas given to him in his childhood, to combat the beliefs in powerlessness and futility. To that degree they were added onto the original ideas, but still at an early age; so it was from the child’s concept of a powerful being that Augustus Two sprang.

Augustus One’s moods of course were a direct result of the ideas he was entertaining. [...] For the greater periods of time Augustus One predominates, since his ideas of worthlessness, in your terms, were adopted earlier; and worse — are only reinforced by the contrast between him and Augustus Two. [...]

[...] It will usually organize ideas in as rational a way as possible, and dispense with those that seem to contradict the overall system of its beliefs.

[...] Beliefs or ideas that frightened him were not faced, therefore, but initially shoved into corners of the conscious mind, where they lay relatively harmlessly in the beginning.

Concentrating upon your own camouflage universe, you are able to distinguish only the distortive pattern, and from this pattern you deduce your ideas of cause and effect, past, present and future, and ideas of an expanding universe that floats …

(Seth began talking about the dilemma posed between the conventional theory of evolution and his ideas about the simultaneous nature of time and existence, soon after these sessions started late in 1963. [...]

[...] I like the ocean analogy because you get the idea of continuous flow and motion without apparent division.

You concentrate with great vigor upon one idea, usually to the exclusion of others. [...] As such it also portrays the importance of belief, for using hypnosis you “force-feed” a belief to yourself, or one given to you by another — a “hypnotist”; but you concentrate all of your attention upon the idea presented.

If you are focusing upon ideas of poverty, illness or lack, for example, your conscious mind also holds latently concepts of health, vigor and abundance. If you divert your thoughts from the negative ideas to the positive ones, then your concentration will begin to alter the balance. [...]

[...] It is somewhat fashionable to place feelings above conscious thoughts, the idea being that emotions are more basic and natural than conscious reasoning is. [...]

[...] There is much written about the nature of healing, and there will be material in this book dealing with it, but there is also healing-in-reverse, in which case an individual loses a belief in his or her health and accepts instead the idea of personal illness.

The “spirit guide” designation may be a handy symbolic representation of this idea, and I’m not saying that spirit guides do not exist. I am saying that the idea deserves greater examination, for the spirit guide may represent something far different than we think. The idea can also be limiting if it always places revelatory knowledge outside of us, and tries to make literal some extraordinary phenomena that may be beyond such interpretation.

The Nature of Personal Reality not only enriched my creative life but challenged my ideas and beliefs. [...] Certainly this book is an answer to all those who have written for help in applying Seth’s ideas to ordinary living, and I am certain that it will assist many people in dealing with the varied events and problems of daily life.

My idea briefly is this: Our usual orientation is focused pretty exclusively in what we think of as the “real” world, but there are many realities. [...]

[...] I couldn’t accept either idea, at least not in undiluted form.

To some extent the material on Frameworks 1 and 2 is of course an example of the entire idea, for you receive a good deal of information in sessions not given to book dictation — simply because, while our books are extremely free, still they must be colored by your ideas of what books are.

[...] When you are creating a product or a work of art, the results will have much to do with your ideas of what the product is, or what the work of art is — so your ideas about your life, or life itself, will also have much to do with your experience of it as a living art.

[...] In a way the suggestion was my idea of trying to do something about Seth producing books within books, as I discussed in my opening notes for the 814th session; but Seth is so prolific that it seems we’ll never get all of his material published at this time.

(Jane showed more interest in my idea than I’d thought she would, and spent the afternoon going over those private sessions. [...]

[...] My ideas had been triggered by an article I’d read yesterday in a recent Science Digest article, which I’ll file: At first glance, I’d told Jane later, the article seemed very good. It dealt with the idea that imperfections in the universe gave birth to life and all we know—that if the “big bang” had expanded perfectly uniformly there would be no life in the universe, merely a perfectly uniform cloud of lifeless hydrogen gas. It took me a while to realize that the author had said nothing at all about the idea of life as we know it being latently present all the while in the primordial cloud before it began to expand. [...]

(One of the letters, from a doctor in Canada, referred us to an article in Scientific American in which a discussion of the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics clearly vindicated a number of Seth’s ideas. [...] However, I doubt if the author, a professional philosopher, had any idea of backing up Seth; pardon my skepticism. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Therefore Ruburt’s idea of a new program is a quite natural therapeutic one. [...]

[...] In the overall, again, the reasons behind Ruburt’s difficulty should be encouraged to rise to the surface of the mind, where they can be encountered—but the idea is not to concentrate upon those reasons but to let them be one part of a larger therapeutic motion or movement in which they show themselves in order to be orchestrated away. [...]

[...] Naturally, I had no idea whether telepathy was involved, but had attempted during the first call to explain our ideas of such possibilities. [...]

(I wasn’t at all sure, but I wondered whether Seth’s second delivery might have been in response to the talk Jane and I had had recently, in which I’d tried to explain my own ideas about the extent to which one could go with personal challenges like illness, say, or work, or whatever. Some of it had been based upon bits of Seth material that had come through lately, along with my own long-standing ideas. [...]

(Such ideas refer back, of course, to the sinful-self ideas—material we still need. [...]

[...] I’d thought the letter idea might help him put the whole affair, which he says has gone on for three years, in better perspective. [...]

The ideas themselves are quite ancient, of course. [...] Their strength, vitality, and worth has been greatly undermined, however, by distortions, negative ideas, and some sheer nonsense.

[...] The ideas in the book proper will quite change their negative, charged ideas of psychic activity in general.

[...] I also felt that the idea of authority was somehow connected with my shaky right hand, and since this aspect of the dream wasn’t discussed today, I’d like Seth to comment on it tomorrow if he has a session. [...]

[...] In his own mind, Ruburt calls these ideas, taken together, “The New Way.”

I am hampered here by your ideas of ideas, to begin with. [...]

(I ended up this evening wondering why nature would provide within its limitless possibilities that of such nasty ideas or creations—which, I told Jane, only meant that we had the power or ability to create such ungainly hassles. [...]

Now: The Physical Universe As Idea Construction: Ruburt’s initial intuitive triumph.

All realities are the result of idea construction. [...]

(Long pause at 4:12.) Politically as well as medically, such distortions have led to unfortunate conditions: the Aryan-supremacy biological ideas fostered in the second world war, the concentration upon “the perfect body,” and other distortions. The idea of the ideal body has often been held up to the populace at large, and this often sets forth a stylized “perfect” physique that actually could be matched by few individuals. [...]

The whole idea was developed in the most mechanistic of terms, stressing competition among all aspects of life, pitting one life form against another, and using physical strength and dexterity, swiftness and efficiency, as the prime conditions for the survival of any individual or species.

[...] The whole idea of the esthetics of nature is forgotten — a subject that we will touch upon further as we continue our discussion.