“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(7:30 P.M. After supper I told Jane I was going to work on the essays for Dreams. Already this morning I’d typed from my notes last night’s very encouraging private Seth session: “—and know that you have taken, both of you, important new strides.” Jane said she’d like to do some more dictation of her own, so I agreed to take down that instead. Once again, however, she shied away from translating any more of that dirgelike Sumari song she’d sung to herself, and recorded, shortly before going into the hospital. I still had only that one great line she’s interpreted for me in English: “Let my soul find shelter elsewhere.”

I now read to her the last two pages of material Seth had given us last night. Jane was nodding in her chair as I finished, and I thought she wouldn’t be doing any work this evening after all. Yet she roused herself: “I’ve got the first sentence, I guess.” I lit her cigarette for her. Her voice was free of tremor and her rate of delivery was a little slow.)

There is no doubt that I was caught between life’s contrasts, and only too aware of the endless questions that came to mind. On the one hand there was the Seth material itself, and Seth’s performance in his books.

(Long pause at 7:34.) His ideas had somehow led me to the point where the very dimensions of experience should change. As he presented them, his concepts dealt with the spontaneous, rambunctious powers with which nature was endowed. Seth insisted that those powers, followed at least in principle, would raise man’s estate and fill it with a brilliance and joy in which the old problems of the species would largely disappear.

Certainly our lives and the lives of others have been strongly influenced by the Seth material, changed for the better. Certainly our comprehensions have deepened as a result—yet in the face of that great promise, what was I doing barely able to leave my chair? And if spontaneous order was such a vital ingredient in the workings of the universe, then what was I doing trying to shut it down in my own daily life?

Value fulfillment is the largest issue here, both with Seth’s book and my own experience, and if I really understood what Seth was saying in this book, I would not have needed to undergo such an uncomfortable drama in my daily life.