“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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”:

We’re not against reincarnation, then, only careful about our beliefs concerning it. Within the context of my discussion, reincarnation is Seth’s historical version of his counterpart concept, which is that each of us is physically connected with certain other males and females who are living at the same time we are, and who are exploring physical life from a variety of viewpoints in ways that no one physical self could possibly match. This means that each reincarnational self has its own cluster of counterpart selves within its own time period, and that all are interconnected on nonphysical levels, joining together like magical gears meshing in constantly changing patterns across time and reality. And once one understands ideas of reincarnation and counterparts in these terms, it becomes difficult to think of one without the other, so inevitable do they appear to be.

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.

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.

Seth, from the private session for August 17, 1980—the third one in his series on the magical approach:

“The magical approach takes it for granted, in the simplest terms, that the life of any individual will fulfill itself, will develop and mature, that the environment and the individual are uniquely suited and work together. This sounds very simple. In verbal terms, however, those are the beliefs (if you will) of each c-e-l-l (spelled). They are imprinted in each chromosome, in each atom. They provide a built-in faith that pervades each living creature, each snail, each hair on your head. Those ingrained beliefs are of course biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

And: “The magical approach takes it for granted that the human being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the animals do, whether or not those purposes are understood. The magical approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow. The magical approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally. Overall, that approach operates in your world. If it did not, there would be no world. If the worst was bound to happen, as the scientists certainly think, even evolution in their terms would have been impossible, of course—a nice point to put in somewhere (all intently, but also with considerable humor).

“You needed this background, for I want to build up the atmosphere in which this magical approach can be comprehended.”