“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In this essay I’ll touch upon a number of subjects. Some of them have already been mentioned. During our work on these pieces Jane and I have automatically been led back to earlier material again and again, but each time we’ve tried to plunge deeper into the topic under discussion, to uncover new layers of meaning and insight. (Doing this always reminds us of additional points to cover, of course!) Putting it all together is an extremely challenging endeavor as I try to summarize our years of committment to the Seth material—for inevitably we end up dealing with ideas lying outside society’s generally accepted frameworks of belief. Forty-one days have now passed since Jane left the hospital, and this passage of “time” alone has given us more perspective on the whole affair of her illness, and on our beliefs, intents, and desires.

Among the subjects not discussed so far are Seth’s (and our own) ideas on reincarnation, counterparts, probable realities, and Frameworks 1 and 2. Jane briefly referred to Seth’s “magical approach” material in her dictation last month (see her own session of April 16, 1982, in Essay No. 3 on that date)—thus prefacing the long quotations from her “sinful self.” So as counterpoint to her writings on the sinful self, I’ll be presenting two excerpts to hint at what Seth does mean by his magical approach.

I’m certainly not writing here about the idea of redemption in the ordinary religious sense, although I think it’s perfectly possible that in some other frameworks, larger than our taken-for-granted physical and psychological one, the idea of redemption—of understanding and embracing—may be involved in a “religious” sense, as part of an intuitive grasp of All That Is.

Jane and I live our physical lives on mundane levels, though, as everyone else does, so it’s inevitable that we often find ourselves meeting our daily challenges within those frameworks. We practice one big difference, however—for we hold within ourselves Seth’s ideas on a host of subjects. It seems that we can feel his concepts—intermingled with our own questions, ideas, and accomplishments—constantly turning within a kind of special excitement and revelatory insight. This is true for us even when things aren’t going well, when we feel “dumb” or blocked about whatever we may be trying to do.

We’ve presented lengthy quotations from Seth on his Framework 1 and Framework 2 material both in his Mass Events and in Jane’s God of Jane. His discussions on the subject are an excellent example of how a very creative idea, capable of helping many people, can arise from an attempt to deal with a personal situation—for on September 17, 1977, Seth introduced his Frameworks 1 and 2 concept in a private session designed to help Jane contend with her physical symptoms.

For Seth, Framework 1 is simply a term representing the everyday, linear, conscious “working reality” we take for granted, the one in which “time” and events automatically unfold in moment after undeniable moment. It’s the milieu in which most of us unthinkingly live out our physical lives. Beyond Framework 1, however, exists Framework 2, and it represents the great timeless or simultaneous spacious present that’s so dearly a manifestation of All That Is. All of our dreams, plans, thoughts, actions, and choices live in Framework 2; all flow from Framework 2 into Framework 1 according to our beliefs.

As Seth told us in that introductory session, over four and a half years ago, Jane’s “body itself has nothing wrong with it except the application of beliefs…. Even if you think the body does have something wrong with it, then the necessary adjustments would be made in another kind of time [in Framework 2] that in Framework 1 would take no time at all—or, the amount of time you thought required.” For emphasis I myself underlined that last phrase, because it’s easy to miss how very important it really is: Our individual concept of the amount of time necessary to accomplish an action like a healing will govern its progress. Then, a bit later, Seth made a statement that I’ve thought most ironic ever since: “In terms of creativity, however, Ruburt has long been operating in Framework 2, and this session should help him make certain correlations so that he can automatically begin to use such methods in regard to his physical conditon.”

There followed many sessions, both regular and private (or deleted, as we sometimes call them), in which Seth discussed Frameworks 1 and 2. As can happen when we’re consciously too close to a deep-seated situation, some little time passed before Jane and I realized the obvious: It wasn’t that we were unable to tune into Framework 2, say, for help in effecting a healing for her in the joint reality we’d created in Framework 1—but that in physical reality we were drawing from Framework 2 exactly what we wanted to, even if often on unconscious or unwitting levels. Again, a matter of choices, and hard truths to face. As I’ve tried to show in these essays, we didn’t suspend our efforts to reach into that larger framework. In a variety of ways we kept trying to do just that through the screens of our emotions and intellects. In those terms, communication between frameworks is unstoppable, really: I think that if one could halt the interchanges, physical death would result. For us, the learning processes were there for the changing anytime we decided that a physical illness was “wrong.” But it would be wrong only when we decided that we didn’t need it anymore.

I should note that Seth has briefly—very briefly—referred to the existence of Frameworks 3 and 4. He says, I believe, that initially his encounters with Jane take place in a Framework 3 environment. It’s my own guess that Framework 4 might involve our communication—through the first three frameworks—with some of those nonhuman probable realities I mentioned not long ago.

But if the interactions between or among frameworks exist for everybody, in our terms, then as far as I’m concerned they exist for each thing as well—and I do mean the so-called “inanimate.” (This isn’t the place to go into it, but Seth maintains that for many reasons we arbitrarily decide what’s living and nonliving.) Each reincarnational self, each counterpart self and probable self has its complement of frameworks. So does the most minute living or nonliving entity and the most gigantic. So, “probably,” do most of the far-out probable realities one can imagine—for I won’t go so far as to deny that some probable realities may exist without such framework structures. Strange one-dimensional “flatlands” indeed! But in each case where those framework interactions operate, they help each creation, each presence, each essence or vital principle fulfill “a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.” In ways I can’t even begin to describe here, all frameworks must ultimately be joined within the ineffable context of All That Is.

Before presenting the promised excerpts on the magical approach, I want to note that Seth is simply saying that from Framework 2 (and possibly from other frameworks) we draw whatever information we want in whatever way we choose to focus upon it: positively, negatively, magically, literally, skeptically, and so forth. As he told us in a private session way back on February 26, 1972: “You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule.” Every reincarnational and counterpart and probable self, located in whatever neatly packaged compartment of time—past, present, or future—can utilize the magical approach as a matter of choice, then. That simple declaration of use involves a world of understanding and experience, however, and one that Jane and I have found extremely difficult to initiate in the way we consciously think we want to—although according to their letters, at least, many of our readers are able to work with various portions of the Seth material with little or no trouble at all.