“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

History is written according to the present beliefs of a historian in his time. As you know, your western world followed its own mixture of Christianity, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology. Because those ideas still are largely in the mainstream of your society, your television news, newspapers, and magazines are invisibly slanted. The news is invisibly organized to fit certain patterns, so that when you read or hear it, it carries the seemingly indelible mark, confirming the basic beliefs of the culture.

I am not speaking strictly of political parties or political newspapers, or of any specialized journals or magazines, but of the overall pattern displayed by all of your mass communications. You can see easily, however, the highly specialized, intensified view of the world that is apparent in scientific journals. These are in sharp conflict with, for example, religious journals. If you look you can easily become aware of these specialized worlds.

If you do not understand this, then you will take your newspapers and other news unthinkingly, thinking that a fairly adequate picture of world events is being portrayed—a picture that only deepens the negative feelings that are behind the invisible organization of such data. In such a way you miss any significant evidence to the contrary.

Privately, then, you will to some extent or another have to take up defenses against that reality. 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. You will think, for example, when a story about misuse of political power is concerned “That’s only one story. How many more politicians do the same thing?”

For the newspapers also act in a suggestive fashion, further programming your expectations. In a way you organize your physical experience as you do your inner life, through association, through emotional association. I am not simple speaking of sensationalism in newspapers or on TV. When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

People generally have been taught to play down their own heroism, and to concentrate upon man’s weaknesses, and so your newspapers contain categorized fact upon fact, emphasizing man’s errors and stupidities. It has become virtuous to keep track of these, as if concentrating upon errors will do anything but compound them.

To some extent, it is because you have accepted the newspapers’ view of reality as real, that you have allowed yourselves to dwell upon certain attitudes about your fellows—so that for example sometimes the world does not seem to deserve great art; or that you even feel you do not want to share your work with the stupid bastards (Seth said, staring at me. I laughed again).

Collecting such distorted data about inner or outer worlds can only make an individual build up defenses, or want to. The newspaper world is, then, highly distorted, organized in such a manner that its data reinforce negative beliefs, and constantly give evidence only of negative patterns. These then are taken as an objective picture of the fact world.

All of the heroism, the private and even mass triumph, and the good intent, have been left out. The world is seen as a patient, sick in body, insane of mind, a thing that needs treatment, a Freudian and Darwinian monster. Even with your own changed beliefs, the two of you still see that mirror when you read a newspaper, and do not realize the invisible organizations behind the news. It makes it seem foolhardy to relax, doesn’t it? (Ironically, leaning forward for emphasis.)

Use relaxation techniques, as in hypnotic techniques, if you want. I have mentioned this before. Often I do not state the reasons for such suggestions. To some extent —underlined and qualified —you hypnotized yourselves into your view of reality. You helped Ruburt form his. You have not taken my suggestion before for a very simple reason: part of you, Joseph, was not ready to reassure Ruburt in such a fashion, for you were not certain that it was safe to relax in such a world, and you did not want to lie to Ruburt because you believed the newspaper world so thoroughly—with all, now, of its implications, as Ruburt did.

(11:01.) The newspapers act as hypnotic suggestion of a potent kind. There is no one present who can confirm the newspaper’s evidence. You cannot ask questions of a newspaper, or of a news program. The entire pattern of these latest sessions deals with your inner reactions to your beliefs about yourselves and the world. Tonight I am dealing with a specific area. To some extent, however. These newspaper beliefs shut you off from full utilization from Framework 2’s potency.