I equate this with three events: a movie I saw on TV the night before last where Sean Connery sees through the god of his people after reading The Wizard of Oz; a Raggedy Ann doll Rob found in the yard and brought in that reminded me of my old Suzie; and a part of a review I read yesterday on a book about death. The book was based on the idea that nature was against man; and that religion was man’s attempt to operate within that unsafe context. The feelings I was getting went even further, that religion or science or whatever weren’t attempts to discover truth—but to escape from doing so, to substitute some satisfying tale or story instead. And I suppose that if someone persisted long enough, he or she would find the holes in the stories.... and undo the whole works. The idea of the stories was to save each man from having to encounter reality in such a frightening fashion.... the characters in the stories did this for him in their own fashion.... and if you kept it up.... you threatened the fine framework of organization that alone made life possible....

They were these; that the entire world and its organization was kept together by certain stories or one in particular—like the Catholic Church’s; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them or to look for the truth and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since.... since on the other side so to speak there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent, powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten survival not just personally but to threaten the fabric and organization of reality as we knew it. So excommunication was the punishment or damnation.... which meant more than mere ostracism but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities.... without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well intentioned behavior then.... and retribution had to be swift and sure.

Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Anyway early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of an odd nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally, yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale or/and a childhood toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child named Suzie that I thought the world of. Anyway, the point was that the story.... and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time:

Ruburt will have some additional short-story sales in the near future, partly as a result of this story. At least one before the publication of the other story that has already been sold.

(In the 104th session, Seth said that Jane would sell some of the short stories from the group she was working on at the time of the session. [...] Jane has now begun work on another group of short stories. Enough time lapses between her short-story work so that it is easy to keep the groups separate. [...]

You were given the precise title of the dream content; that is, you knew the particular story was called The Big Freeze. It is true that you forgot that the title itself was a part of the dream,yet you did remember enough so that you were sure of the particular story. [...]

(Jane and I were most pleased to be included in Timothy Foote’s story about Dick Bach in the issue of November 13, 1972. [...]

(Timothy is Timothy Foote, book editor of Time Magazine, who interviewed Jane last Friday, October 13, concerning a cover story on Richard Bach, etc.)

(Story appeared actually on November 6, 1972—Monday. [...]

(Added Note: Timothy Foote also told Jane and me that he’d like to do a feature story on Jane, Seth and me for Time Magazine, but that it probably wouldn’t ever be done—the magazine being “too secular”—Timothy Foote’s words. I don’t know whether he meant cover story, a la Dick Bach.

(Timothy Foote, senior editor in charge of the book review department for Time Magazine, interviewed Jane and me today in connection with a cover story he is to write about Richard Bach and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

[...] And of course it is no coincidence that Timothy Foote, being the kind of man he is, came here, and is doing the Seagull’s story.

(As stated on page 21, Barbara did take her own daughter, Lisa, to visit Story Book Land, the subject of the postcard sent to us by Barbara, and used as the object in the 69th experiment. [...]

[...] On the visit to Story Book Land with the two children, Barbara also visited the display for Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. [...]

[...] We did not know about the Ali Baba display at Story Book Land, and had no thought of linking up the “Vases” data with this. [...]

[...] Then again I went into a nightmarish quality dream, with no story line. [...] I imagined the different ways magazines like The National Enquirer could trick someone into giving an interview to start with, and turn people against each other, (Carol Burnett is suing that paper—the story was in the news lately.) From there some wild stuff that doesn’t make sense now, with strange things happening to my chair pillow as I sat on it.... [...]

[...] The experience seemed to last all night gradually deepening in intensity, without overt dramatic story line — there was material on the Mafia in its relationship to family and particularly in connection with women—this seemed to be the focus point. [...]

[...] Looking backward in time, Plato heard the story of Atlantis from his maternal uncle, Critias the Younger, who was told about it by his father, Critias the Elder, who heard about it through the works of the Athenian statesman and lawgiver, Solon, who had lived two centuries earlier [c. 640–559 B.C.]; and Solon got the story of Atlantis from Egyptian priests, who got it from ———? [...]

[...] Then from Seth, mentally, I thought, I got the information that Atlantis, as it’s come down to us in myth and story, was actually a composite of three civilizations. [...]

And so, if you are very innocent and a child, and you read our story, you have a pageant of characters. But if you look beneath you see that there is much more and that the story is merely the coating. It gives you suspense and Ruburt would say it gives you a great story line and while you are reading the story, however, you are automatically taking in the inner truths that are within it whether or not you are consciously aware of what you are doing. [...]

[...] Words used told a story, yet certain words had a different meaning than the literal interpretation of the word. Certain key words in other words, if you will forgive me, were highly symbolic, and if you read the Bible along one surface line then you read a story highly ambiguous, called by many, but if you understood the meaning of the Word, as divorced from the literal interpretation of the Word, then you read an allegory and the allegory was highly important. [...]

[...] Now, you are familiar with morality plays so in our story we take the term deceit and we give it a name and we make a person out of deceit and we call it, for example, Judas. [...]

A gray-haired man telling a story. [...]

[...] A room four stories high where they stay.

On the front page of the paper was a rather long story, with photographs, telling how triplets were united by “chance” last weekend in New York City — a case we hadn’t heard of in the media before now. [...] There were similarities in the story that reminded me of my own experience. [...]

[...] You reacted creatively, using the precognitive story as a basis for a fictional endeavor. [...]

(9:31.) Give us a moment … As you lay there you were aware of the fact just beneath consciousness — usual consciousness — that you had not brought in the paper before your nap, as is your habit, and almost at a dream level you idly wondered what stories it might contain. [...]

STORIES OF THE BEGINNING, AND THE
MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOD

[...] It will be called: “Stories of the Beginning, and the Multidimensional God.” [...]

[...] It does not represent the entire lifetime of your species or the catalogue of physical activities, or begin to tell the story of physical creatures, their civilizations, wars, joys, technologies, or triumphs. [...]

(The typing below the photo and on the back sums up the content of the news stories on the object. [...]

[...] The pertinent lines in the story being: “This law in no way violates the constitutional rights of freedom of speech, press or assembly. [...]

[...] The whole of the news story indicated on the back of the object, as shown on page 169 concerns law, statues, the Constitution, overthrow, rights, government, etc., plus the mention of two names: Feinberg, and Aronowitz. [...]

[...] Christ clothed those realities in colorful stories geared to people’s understanding. [...]

[...] Literal minds, looking for evidential proof, would insist that the physical body itself must rise, ascending, hence the related stories, the misinterpretation of data. [...]

[...] The God, the source, was put outside of nature, however, finally becoming at last too remote, and the story itself became frayed at the edges as man tried to tie intuitive truths to objective fact.

[...] The short story referred to above was reported on a TV program about Three Mile Island: Jane and I caught a glimpse of, I believe, a local newspaper or magazine in the Harrisburg area that had printed a short story about a nuclear accident at that plant, on the same day that the troubles began at Three Mile Island. We hadn’t heard of the story. If I’m in error and the story was printed in a national magazine, for instance, we still haven’t heard of it. [...]

[...] Or you will see an item of that nature in the newspaper, or you will hear a story, told directly or indirectly about the same kind of dilemma. [...]

[...] The probabilities are still surging, of course, and in private and mass dreams people try out all kinds of endings for that particular story.

[...] Possibly another reference to Tom’s story about his car. [...] Since his first tale to Jane we have heard subsequent stories about his car, the most recent being how he stripped several gears.

[...] The river can be seen from the back door of the Art Shop, and from the second-story workroom above where Tom makes his frames, etc. [...]

[...] This is excellent data, and refers again to the second-story workroom above the Art Shop. [...]

[...] It is of a display called Story Book Land at Woodbridge, VA, and shows Mother Goose. [...]

[...] The place referred to as Story Land.

[...] We believe the formal arrangement here refers to the layout of the display of Story Book Land at Woodbridge, VA. [...]

[...] It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. [...]

[...] Instead, they are considered as myths, pagan stories. [...]

[...] In a manner of speaking, again, there was no one Christ, historically speaking, but the personage of Christ, or the entity, was the reality from which the entire dramatic story emerged.

[...] We’ve been quite discouraged at times lately, yet Seth has had a different story to tell. [...]

[...] The story of the Creation, as Biblically stated, is the symbolic representation of a master event—a legend that became its own event, of course, forming about it whole arts and cultures, religions and disciplines. [...]

(Long pause at 9:55.) The Christ story in the beginning was not nearly as singular and neat as it might now seem, for the finally established official Christ figure was one settled upon from endless versions of a god-man, with which man’s psyche has long been involved: He was the psychic composite, the official Christ, carrying within his psychological personage echoes of old and new gods alike—a figure barely begun, comma, to be filled out in time, although originating outside of it (again, all very intently).

You were quite correct: it was not coincidence, for example, that you heard from Bill Macdonnel just after the Burt Ryerson story. [...]

[...] We don’t know whether Carroll’s story is distorted, whether Ryerson may have things confused, or what. [...]

[...] I told him the Ryerson story. [...]

[...] Another approach would be half and half: First the family story in usual terms; then that same family story studied with Seth’s ideas in mind. [...]

[...] It’s attached to this session as page 302 and describes what seems to be in ordinary terms a senseless and horrendous story: A 20-year-old drunken driver crashed head-on into another auto, killing two people, the father and an aunt, and putting the other five passengers, all members of the same family, into the hospital. [...]

You form your own reality or you do not, so let us look at your newspaper story.