“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

ESSAY 7
FRIDAY, MAY 7, 1982

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.

But would our time traveler ever want to give up his or her present mental and physical focus to enter completely into an earlier personality? I think not, in the overwhelming majority of cases—and perhaps never—for in those terms it would mean surrendering a portion of the whole self or entity that had, through a projection into our scheme of “present” time, attained a certain consciousness and physical form of a unique degree. Yet, on second thought I wouldn’t dare rule out completely such bizarre developments. Perhaps transfers like that can and do take place within the vast arena of probable realities (which I’ll also be discussing in this essay). If so, then, they would be strange only from our limited viewpoints.

It can be seen from even this tiny quotation that Jane’s poetry reflects that same mystical, intuitive innocence before nature (and thus, ultimately, All That Is) that I tried to describe in the first essay. It could well be that her psyche has derived from her whole self, or entity, the “facts” of reality a lot better than either of us consciously knows them. Both of us have had our psychic expressions (really isolated episodes) involving what can be called simultaneously existing reincarnational selves, and we’ve published accounts of a few of these. Some of our experiences have come in dream states. Our independence relative to reincarnation may represent just conscious cussedness on our parts, but we believe that each of us (meaning anyone, that is) always has the freedom to accept or reject any such choice or causality —whatever we choose to do. No, instead we think of our current challenges as contributing to the knowledge of our whole selves in most specific ways, rather than our being swayed that much by our reincarnational and/or counterpart associations. However, I’m not at all sure how many others feel that way. I do know that regardless of local variations an acceptance of reincarnation has encircled the earth for millennia, and that in our country recent polls show a quarter of the population believing in it.

And nowhere in this part of my discussion, in order to keep it within manageable bounds in this essay, have I mentioned the inherent ramifications involving genetics and reincarnation and probable realities.

Now what kinds of “redemption” can be found amid the interchanges among any combination of reincarnational and/or counterpart lives, for instance? Some, certainly, and no doubt the reader can think of at least a few creative interpretations of redemptive qualities, but I’d rather let the question search for its own approximate answers as I continue work upon this essay. Jane and I do feel sure, however, that the experiences of our current lifetimes have so many psychic and physical ramifications that their numbers are literally beyond our grasp—and that many of those developments are certain to be quite “alien” to us here in our own everday realities. (All of this applies to everyone, of course.)

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.

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.

In the first essay I described how Dr. Mandali had told Jane that her thyroid gland had “simply ceased functioning,” and how the doctor had started to cautiously rejuvenate my wife’s endocrine system with 50 micrograms daily of a synthetic thyroid hormone. Jane is supposed to take these pills in some still-to-be-determined strength for the rest of her life (although in his session for April 16 Seth had explained that her thyroid gland “has repaired itself” on several occasions; see the essay for the same date.)