“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.

At such times I’m apt to think about ideas of reincarnation and counterparts. Right here I’m dealing with just two of Seth’s larger concepts. But without dwelling upon them too heavily, I may consider the notion of my larger, nonphysical “whole self” or “entity” being made up of a number of other psychically related physical selves projected into time. For Seth, basically there is no time, only a great “spacious present” that’s a manifestation of a sublime, indescribable All That Is. Our gross physical senses, and indeed our very bodies, insist upon interpreting the spacious present in linear terms, however—through the inevitable processes of birth, aging, and death—so to help us get his point here Seth advances his ideas of reincarnational selves and counterpart selves in ways we can understand sensually.

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.”)

My main point is that I also feel, without having asked Seth, that the farther one travels ahead in time the greater the play of probable realities and probable lives he or she encounters. To venture into such a skein requires that one constantly picks and chooses among them—for each move, each thought, even, can launch the traveler into a different probability. In some cases there will be a great fear of becoming lost among all of those realities. (What if one doesn’t want a probable reality they choose? But that must happen all of the time!) The uncertainty perceived here by the conscious self, however, can act as a great restraint toward knowing a future life or lives—just as much as might the fear of tuning into one’s physical death ahead of time in this life. Hook up those two factors with the quite natural concern that at least some events in any life to come will inevitably be unpleasant, or worse, and we have at least three powerful restraints, or psychic blocks, inhibiting awareness of future lives. There would be others. Everything considered, we may just not want to know about future lives most of the time.

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”:

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).