“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Aside from any books that he may produce himself (and on whatever subjects), I’ve already made plans to put together a short volume featuring Seth’s discussions on the magical approach to reality. A year earlier Jane had begun a much more ambitious project involving this material, as she mentioned on April 16, but she laid it aside for reasons already covered. My version will mainly feature the dozen or so sessions Seth gave in August—September 1980, and the poetry Jane was inspired to write because of them. She may also contribute an introduction to the book, showing how Seth’s and her own sinful-self information are related to the magical approach.

There’s so much I could discuss here that the lack of time and space is very frustrating. I can only hint at what I consider to be important points. The books and magazines dealing with reincarnation—and the tapes, too, these days—swarm with tales of journeys to past lives, and some of those accounts are most spectacular. Yet, even given ancient concepts like that of Seth’s spacious present, the participants in such adventures usually quite happily ignore the conclusion that reincarnation should also operate from the opposite direction—the future—just as well! As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can’t people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they’re regressed to their past lives? Indeed. Our rather copious mail brings us questions like that very rarely. (The key word there, I think, is “successfully.”)

Our attitudes, then, may point up our unconscious strengths and weaknesses when it comes to our acceptance and use, or nonuse, of at least portions of the Seth material. We may be more “prisoners,” or more deeply rooted in our times and concepts, than we like to admit. Consciously, however, Jane has never been overly enthusiastic about the idea of reincarnation to begin with. I’ve noted in other books that she seldom talks about it. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and more than passionately embraced that faith. Yet she was early subjected to the church’s rigid opposition to the whole idea of reincarnation because, strangely enough, even in her very youthful poetry she dealt with the forbidden subject (although not by name). Jane does believe that long ago she left behind the church’s dogmas on reincarnation. She doesn’t want to use the concept as a crutch; her caution stems from other beliefs, on which I’ll quote her shortly. (As for myself, while growing up I knew nothing of reincarnation beyond its name.) But we’ll be the first ones to agree that in certain Seth sessions, and in her very evocative poetry, Jane has encouraged her intuitive and creative selves to seriously discuss reincarnation. This is very evident in her second and latest book of poetry, If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love, which was published in December of last year (1981). From the beginning of Section 3 of “I Am Alive Again”:

Early in this essay (which I began on May 7, 1982), I mentioned the series of sessions Seth gave in 1980 on his magical approach to reality, and the different approaches Jane and I took toward doing books on the subject. We were becoming so harried by her worsening physical symptoms when that material started to come through that she gave up working on Dreams and concentrated on those private sessions instead. For many months she considered doing a book on the magical approach (with my encouragement), and collected much information of her own for it. In other words, she viewed the book as helping herself as much as anyone else. Then when Seth and Jane both came through with material on her sinful self (see Essay No. 3 for April 16, 1982), those data took precedence over everything else. That was to be expected, of course, for by then our concentration was directed almost wholly into the area of symptoms. Jane didn’t return to work on Dreams until July 1981, when the two blocks of sinful-self material had run their courses. By then, she’d held only one session for Dreams in the last 13 months.

Her focus on her book about the magical approach never jelled enough for her to carry it through, even though she continued experimenting with it. Our own general psychological unease certainly contributed to that failure, but Jane’s writing became bogged down in details about dates, quotations from old sessions, and elaborate studies built upon our dream accounts and other psychic and daily records, for example. Not her way of working, really, even though all of those ingredients were—and are—excellent.