“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All of this reminds me that lately the media have carried a number of stories detailing how medical science is not only trying hard to approach cures for scourges like cancer (in cancer’s case, possibly through the exploration and understanding of the role played in the cell nucleus by altered normal cells called oncogenes), but is already claiming to have narrowed down its search to specific genes that affect imponderables like behavior—depression, for example. Not only that, sociobiologists are advancing their very controversial ideas that much of human behavior has an ultimate genetic basis, which in turn influences cultural change, and so on.

“I think that a too-specific ‘reading’ of reincarnational material leads us to forget time’s simultaneous nature and promotes a ‘nitty-gritty’ attitude,” Jane wrote for me as I was working on these passages. “We may want to know the place and the time of a past self, for example—and the very concentration upon the ‘past’ simply deepens our commitment to time. The search for detail leads us further away from the larger sensed dimensions in which those facts must lie.

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.