“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In their own ways, these are heroes representing the detective who is out to protect good against evil, to set things right. Now these characters exist more vividly in the minds of television viewers than the actors do who play those roles. The actors know themselves as apart from the roles. The viewers, however, identify with the characters. They may even dream about the characters. These have their own kind of superlife because they so clearly represent certain living aspects within each psyche.

For example: Say that you have a certain Wilford Jones, who is a character in one of the soap operas. This Wilford, while carrying on within his own drama as, say, a sickly grocer in Iowa, with a mistress he cannot support, and a wife that he must support (with amusement) — this poor, besieged man on station KYU is also aware of all the other programs going on at the other stations. All of the other characters in all of the other plays are also aware of our grocer. There is a constant, creative give-and-take between the day’s various programs. Period.

When our Wilford dramatically cries out to his mistress: “I am afraid my wife will learn of our affair,” then the symphony playing on another station becomes melodramatic, and the sports program shows that a hero fumbles the football. Yet each character has its own free will. The football player, unconsciously picking up the grocer’s problem, for example, may use it as a challenge and say: “No, I will not fumble the ball.” The crowds then cheer, and our grocer in his soap opera may smile and say: “But it will all work out after all.”

Clothing tells much about character, for a person chooses his clothing. Subconsciously he also chooses his environment, and throws his own character about it so the basic mood, the underlying mood of a personality beneath all the shifting moods, will also be expressed in color that is reflected in the entire painting, the environment as well.

[...] You have known a proportion of them from other existences, and have a knowledge, innate, of their characters and temperaments. [...]

[...] The fluidity of lines also tells much about the characterization; a rigidity of line showing a rigidity of character.

[...] My main character, a male who wore a tight-fitting Superman-type costume with a flowing cape, occupied a space several panels high right in the middle of the page — quite a daring concept for a comic layout. I knew the character type well because in the early 1940s, in ‘real’ life, I’d been one of the artists who had drawn the very popular comic-book hero, Captain Marvel. My dream character stood confidently facing the reader — except that I’d omitted drawing his head! [...] I thought the head was too small, but well done, quite youthful with curly black hair and handsome features, as one would expect such a magical character to have. I also saw that the head was almost too youthful for the strong physique of the character I’d drawn, although I wasn’t critical of this. [...]

[...] His closest connection to magic would be his comics experience when he drew Captain Marvel — a magical character. [...] In the dream he sees himself returning to the comics, only the Sunday edition (special), and the superhero character is much more prominent than the comics would ordinarily have it; the smaller head representing, I think, the idea that the intellect’s place is smaller or of a lesser nature than he earlier supposed. [...] I think that Rob is himself in the dream, represented by the super character as the magical self; and also that he is the assistant who had prepared the figure’s head.

[...] I’m not sure of the connection unless it means that at the time he knew Tom, as youthful artists both Rob and Tom believed in the magical aspects of life — which now come to Rob’s aid, assisting him by drawing the character’s head.”

[...] A novelist, being himself or herself writing a book, will nevertheless imaginatively live the actions of all of its characters—the villain, the hero, the madman, the saint or whatever—and a true creative gestalt is involved. Then in the author’s mind the characters will interact. The author may know the book’s end, or allow the characters themselves to work out their own solutions. Here we will call the author the whole self, and the characters are real. [...]

[...] Some such characters are brave and upright; some of your heroes are scoundrels. [...]

[...] Their beliefs appear so drastically that you can use them as blueprints for others in whose characters the beliefs will appear more modified, and perhaps nearly unnoticed. [...]

(Seth’s interesting remark that fictional characters may be manifested in some probabilities, may have been engendered by the In Search Of program we watched on TV from 2:30 to 3:00 this afternoon. It dealt with Sherlock Holmes, and how that character has assumed real, living qualities in the minds of some people. [...]

In some worlds, your fictional characters are physically manifested as probabilities. [...]

[...] When you realize that the personality can and does have access to other kinds of information than physical, then you must begin to wonder what effects those data have on the formation of character and individual growth. Children do already possess character at birth, and the entire probable intent of their lives exists then as surely as does the probable plan for the adult body they will later possess.

[...] Heredity plays far less a part in the so-called formation of character than is generally supposed.

[...] You read constantly of people who seem to have been most affected by fictional characters, for example, or by personalities from the past, or by complete strangers, more than they have been affected by their own families. [...]

[...] This sense gives rise to most experiences of a revelationary character.

[...] Otherwise, how would they ever get up the gumption to sit around and carve out all those damn little characters? [...]

[...] I see a large, sort of beefy man with a red face, sitting at a piece of furniture like a drafting table, carefully cutting out these characters. [...]

[...] Some of the characters might be familiar, and others, not. [...]

Each character, however, or portion of a scene, would represent in fragmented form another quite valid program [or reality, in brackets]. [...]

[...] The picture of a character from an old book long forgotten may appear and disappear. [...]

If you let yourself lie still longer with eyes closed, the symbolism would continue to change character, losing perhaps some of its visual characteristics and growing more intense in other directions. [...]

[...] Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters — and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. [...]

[...] There is a strength of character, and indeed a rather heartless determination. [...]

[...] (Pause.) You would do well with male characters and be fairly strong in plotting. [...]

[...] the characters in the stories did this for him in their own fashion.... [...]

In those terms, the great religions of your civilizations rise from myths that change their character through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. [...]

[...] It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality. [...]

[...] I only want to note that this would make the second instance recently in which I might have had the same character appear in separate dreams.

[...] Either a character on the screen said something, or someone in the room did — whatever, it triggered my memory of the Gus episode. [...]

“This is another terrific dream, continuing the one in the last session, in which Rob was constructing an image of the magical self — seeing it as a kind of Captain Marvel character. [...]

[...] There were many such villages in the mountains in the overall times of Nebene and your Roman soldier, and they were much in character like the villages recently destroyed in the earthquake. They dealt with a different framework of consciousness—one that is somewhat now out of character with your kind. [...]

[...] The written characters make sense because of their arrangement, and precisely because they are chosen over other characters that do not appear.

[...] Oversoul Seven, the main character, achieved his own kind of reality. [...]

[...] For example, the novel included many Sumari poems and portions of Speaker manuscripts; and when I sing Sumari I identify with Cyprus, who is supposed to be a fictional character. [...]

The analogy is perhaps an old one, but the fragment is like an actor playing a character role, partially lost within it, perhaps disliking the character he plays, and yet through the part learning lessons that he will use in his own private life with its greater dimensions. [...]

[...] They play at being historic known characters. [...]