“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Television interacts with your lives, but it does not cause your lives. It does not cause the events that it depicts. With your great belief in technology, it often seems to many people that television causes violence, for example, or that it causes a love of overmaterialism, or that it causes “loose morals.” Television reflects. In a manner of speaking it does not even distort, though it may reflect distortions. The writers and actors of television dramas are attuned to the “mass mind.” They are not leaders or followers. They are creative reflectors, acutely aware of the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the age.

(With some humor:) Ruburt and Joseph have recently purchased a color television set, so now their television world is no longer in black and white. I have used television as an analogy at various times, and I would like to do so again, to show the ways in which physical events are formed, and to try to describe the many methods used by individuals in choosing those particular events that will be personally encountered.

We will call the world as you physically experience it, Framework 1. In Framework 1, you watch television programs, for example. You have your choice of many channels. You have favorite programs. You follow certain scenes or actors. You watch all of these dramas, hardly understanding how it is that they appear on your screen to begin with. You are certain, however, that if you do buy a television set it will perform in an adequate fashion, whether or not you are familiar with electronics. Period.

In this book I will try to tell you what goes on behind the scenes — to show you the ways in which you choose your daily physical programs, and to describe how those personal choices mix and merge to form a mass reality. For now, we will go back to television again. You can turn off a program that offends you. You can choose to buy or not buy a product whose virtues are being praised. Television presents you with a mirror of your society. It reflects and rereflects through millions of homes the giant dreams and fears, the hopes and terrors of events in the most private individual.

[...] You bring it into clear focus in almost the same way that you adjust your television picture, only in this case not only sound and images are synchronized, but phenomena of far greater complexity. [...]

[...] When you watch your ordinary television program, perhaps on a Saturday afternoon, you view the program as an observer. [...]

Now: Your normal waking reality can be compared to a kind of television drama in which you participate directly in all of the dramas presented. [...]

In the dream state, it is as if you have a still-different television set that is, however, connected with your own. [...]

[...] That day we watched the events on television. [...]

(After watching the televised events from all over the world, Tuesday night I dreamed that in the future all households would be connected to interconnecting computers, keeping track of all inhabitants, actions, goods, and so forth. [...]

[...] When you watch, say, the news on television, you must keep in mind several important issues. Despite the perhaps deplorable conditions being televised—whether of wars, massacres, graft, or whatever—the great inventiveness of man’s mind is responsible for that technological achievement. [...]

(Part of the session grew out of our recent reactions to the televised newscasts, as well as what we’ve been reading lately, concerning the mass suicide in Guyana, the shooting of the mayor of San Francisco, problems with inflation, the Middle East —any of what seemed to be an infinite number of ills the species has created for itself. [...]

[...] There will be a television camera somewhere, and the most secret atrocities will find their way into the public eye. [...]

Now to some extent, because of beliefs, because of the public’s new knowledge through television of new nefarious acts, some governments do refrain from the more spectacular crimes. [...]

[...] The same child might see the image of a merry-go-round on the television screen, or be told about another youngster’s visit to a playground, and a subsequent ride on a merry-go-round.

[...] There will be some involvement, of course, as the child watches the images of the merry-go-round horses on the television station, while the story about another child’s visit to the playground will not take nearly as much of his interest.

The television camera lights were warm on my face. My husband, Rob, and I sat with Sonja Carlson and Jack Cole, who were interviewing us on the Boston “Today’s Woman Show” on television station WBZ. It was 10 A.M. on the last day of our first tour to promote my book, The Seth Material. This was our fifth television show. [...]

[...] Going into trance on television was something else again. [...]

[...] It was over, then; Seth had come through on television. [...]

[...] She also told us that she had used both color and fabric to communicate with children on an educational television program — a fact unknown to us.

Television, oddly enough, provides for many people an opportunity to leap over restrictive categories, and to identify in other ways, perhaps, than they would otherwise. The people who read will read, television or not. There are millions, however, who are not readers, and through television they do indeed enlarge upon their viewpoints.

In this life Ruburt knew his neighborhood as a child, and his feelings about people were not tempered by television programs showing normal families, or other ways of life. [...]

[...] You can turn on television and see a drama, but the inward mobility and experience of your psyche is mysteriously enfolded within all of those exterior gestures that allow you to turn on the television switch to begin with, and to make sense of the images presented. [...]

[...] Others have traveled where you have not, and television provides you with images. [...]

Where is the television drama before it appears on your channel — and where does it go afterwards? [...]

[...] A man who looks somewhat Lou Grant (television star Ed Asner) writes me a note saying that I’ve touched him as no other woman ever has. [...]

[...] No television picture is showing you the silent afternoons spent by an artist who will be called great tomorrow, or stresses the vitality of life that is responsible for the existence of the television sets to begin with. [...]

[...] You watched the events on television. [...]

[...] They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells.² Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers (even more emphatically).

[...] Nowhere in your television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy. [...]

[...] Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations. [...]

[...] On the other hand your common, unlettered, violent television dramas do indeed provide a service, for they imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is then resolved through drama. [...]

[...] So does her active dream-experience nightlife, still based upon, often, television programs. [...]

[...] Ruburt has been using television programs and such cultural data as a basis for some of his own dreams. [...]

In a manner of speaking you have your dream newscasters, of course, only these are both more extensive and more personal than your television equivalents. [...]

(The session began later than usual because we watched a television movie on the idea of cloning. [...]

Your conversations, your drives, your mail, the television programs you watch—all of these are involved—involved in that you will be led to watch programs, for example, that in one way or another help the entire picture. [...]

[...] A good drama on television helps. [...]

[...] In your physical constructions of the television set then, you are aided generally by the current idea of television set, as it exists in mass knowledge.

[...] In our last session, during a break, Philip mentioned the television set as being one physical object, about which he believed you could all agree in any discussion of size, material, color and dimension.

[...] First, you and Philip and Ruburt, when you are all present in the room, each construct from energy your own physical materialization of the idea, television set.

[...] Your constructions of the television set are further aided by other hidden unconscious data, such as the material best suited for the constructions, the general size, shape and color with which you have previously been familiar. [...]

(Tonight at session time the small television set on its swivel arm was on, opposite Jane’s left knee. [...] The television picture was on but the sound was off. [...]

Now: watch television and have a snack. [...]

[...] Ruburt felt for years that he should (underlined) become a more public person, do workshops, television shows, radio tours or whatever—that he should (underlined) nearly perform miracles in the psychic arena, that he should have a large class, that he should hold as many sessions for others as possible. [...]

Why didn’t he go on television like other psychics, or have an organization, or at least have workshops, or seek out learned men and women “in the field,” when it seemed that the dictates of normal behavior would suggest such activity? [...]

[...] He would naturally want to be at least on the most intelligent of television shows, for example, or speak to those groups for which he had some respect. [...]

[...] We are not speaking to the mass world, and television is set up for the mass audience, for the other-directed part of people. [...]

Ruburt might go on television for example 50 times—to be met by applause, acclaim and understanding, but in his reality, imaginatively, he would be met by scorn and derision. He need never go on television, but he must understand that the safety factor is built-in, and is dependable

Yet, I read all of those dire newspaper stories predicting disaster, and (oh yes, dear readers) I watched the daily tragic news events dramatized in living color on our television screen. [...]

[...] We even had a small remote-controlled television set installed in our bedroom so that she could watch it, say, when she was restless during the night. [...]

[...] Often it seems that you have no more control over the drama of your own life than you have over the outcome of a television program. [...]

(9:57.) Suppose that you turned on your television set to watch a program, for example, and found that through some malfunction a massive bleed-through had occurred so that several programs were scrambled, and yet appeared at once, seemingly without rhyme or reason. [...]