“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.

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.

He tells us that our reincarnational selves explore the past, present, and future—but basically all at once, since time as he defines it is simultaneous. I’ve written before that as physical creatures we’re always going to find the contradictory notion of “simultaneous time” hard to comprehend, intellectually at least.

And how about reaching a future life through the dream state, perhaps abetted by hypnosis or self-suggestion before sleep? Our own results have been ambiguous at best, in contrast with the “ordinary” precognitive dreams Jane and I have had, which we can document through our written records. Future-life dream recall may be thoroughly disguised so as to not alarm the guardian, conscious present self. I’ve often speculated that clues to oncoming lives must exist within the hundreds of dreams I’ve recorded.

However, Jane and I don’t particularly think that in our present lives we’ve been that greatly influenced by any successes, failures, or illnesses chosen from other lives except in the broadest of terms: general bodily and personality characteristics and abilities, say. I freely note, and with some humor, that this can be somewhat of a jointly contradictory attitude for us. Perhaps we’re too stubborn about agreeing wholeheartedly that such possibilities exist, or perhaps we’re just too enamored of our “present” physical lives, even with all of our challenges, to want to fully concur with Seth.

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”:

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.

(Obviously, some counterpart selves can meet physically, as reincarnational selves cannot. Under circumstances and in ways explained in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, again, Jane and I think we’ve encountered a few of our counterpart selves. Just for fun, try to imagine the complicated relationships that can obtain within only a family of five, say, when each member exists within his or her much larger family of reincarnational and counterpart selves. Let the mathematicians among our readers calculate the number of possible psychic interchanges alone that can arise in the “past, present, and future” involving the reincarnational and counterpart selves of these five people!)

Within the idea of probable realities, then, there are innumerable opportunities for redemption to take place, between or among creatures—or even between or among ideas—and in all manner of ways. In how many ways? Seth remarked a long time ago that we humans can at least approach the notion of infinity by considering the ramifications inherent within probabilities. For my own amusement, in recent years I’ve often tried to objectify that statement by equating the possible number of probable realities with the current scientific estimate of the number of atoms in the universe: 10⁷⁹, or a 1 followed by 79 zeroes. But even if that rather simple number is inconceivable to us it still won’t do, of course, for it represents only a limit of measurement inside the “physical” universe we think we know. Within the limitless realms of consciousness, 10⁷⁹ is still but a doorway to vastly greater imaginative quantities and qualities of either numbers or probable realities. Fascinating! There are multitudinous possibilities for a redemption—or equalization or love or forgiveness, say—to take place amid such a dazzling array of probable realities. As far as our understanding can go, such a redemptive quality can be psychic, physical, both, or simply based on explorations of feeling and accomplishment we have yet to know.

We’ve presented lengthy quotations from Seth on his Framework 1 and Framework 2 material both in his Mass Events and in Jane’s God of Jane. His discussions on the subject are an excellent example of how a very creative idea, capable of helping many people, can arise from an attempt to deal with a personal situation—for on September 17, 1977, Seth introduced his Frameworks 1 and 2 concept in a private session designed to help Jane contend with her physical symptoms.

As Seth told us in that introductory session, over four and a half years ago, Jane’s “body itself has nothing wrong with it except the application of beliefs…. Even if you think the body does have something wrong with it, then the necessary adjustments would be made in another kind of time [in Framework 2] that in Framework 1 would take no time at all—or, the amount of time you thought required.” For emphasis I myself underlined that last phrase, because it’s easy to miss how very important it really is: Our individual concept of the amount of time necessary to accomplish an action like a healing will govern its progress. Then, a bit later, Seth made a statement that I’ve thought most ironic ever since: “In terms of creativity, however, Ruburt has long been operating in Framework 2, and this session should help him make certain correlations so that he can automatically begin to use such methods in regard to his physical conditon.”

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.

After nine weeks, however, Jane and I are more than ready for an increase in the strength of the pills, for she obviously needs the boost. I’ve mentioned several times her dozing or falling asleep outright in her chair. Dr. Mandali agrees that the low thyroid activity is directly related to these episodes. Yet there’s more involved with the dozing—effects I haven’t gone into yet, and can only briefly refer to here. We haven’t discussed these with her doctor, either—clear signs of the secretive aspects of our own natures—but Jane believes she’s had a number of part-hallucinatory, part-psychic experiences as a result of the thyroid-medication situation.

“I’ve had several new experiences with altered states of consciousness,” she wrote in labored script, “and these are quite different than anything I’ve done before. For this reason they are difficult to classify….” Also, she’s indulged in long conversations with me—and on occasion with certain friends—when we apparently were present in out-of-body states. Related here are actions she thought she was participating in with me, say, yet when she “woke up,” she discovered we hadn’t done any of those things. She’s referred often to “gaps in my consciousness” while dozing. “I don’t know what I was doing in my chair,” she said at 11:05 A.M. yesterday; she’d fallen asleep after telling me she had to use the commode. “I don’t like the way the thyroid business is making me feel…. I feel like I’m in your way, or in life’s way….” She had certainly been depressed on that occasion, and I’d tried to cheer her up.

At this time Jane doesn’t know just how, or to what extent, hallucination was involved in any of these episodes, if at all; sometimes the dream state definitely was. But the experiences I’ve mentioned here, plus others, have uncovered some surprising new dimensions of her abilities, and later she wants to thoroughly investigate and write about them.