“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.

I’ll digress a moment to note that it’s quite obvious that when conducted by skilled therapists past-life regression has proven to be of great benefit to certain individuals. Whether or not reincarnation has been proven objectively, the belief structures surrounding that concept, or even the idea of it, have served very well as a forum within which certain present-life challenges have been worked out, through the therapists’ use of hypnosis, allegory, association, symbolism, and other very respectable methods.

I keep wondering about the results of an individual’s choosing not to call upon any of his or her bank of reincarnational lives, though, whether from the past or the future. This approach would very nicely eliminate having to deal with one’s “karma” this time around—should there really be a system of consciousness embodying that ancient concept. Think of the fun a person could have who decided at an early age—or even before physical birth—to experience a life unencumbered by other psychic relationships; wherein it had little or nothing to “work out.” What freedoms might lie ahead—and yes, what challenges, too! Buddhism and Hinduism would banish the very thought: How dare one even think of escaping, or just simply ignoring, his or her “fate or destiny” (to put it loosely)! Yet our mass reality obviously is large enough to allow me room to generate such fanatical thoughts….

“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.

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.)

For Seth, Framework 1 is simply a term representing the everyday, linear, conscious “working reality” we take for granted, the one in which “time” and events automatically unfold in moment after undeniable moment. It’s the milieu in which most of us unthinkingly live out our physical lives. Beyond Framework 1, however, exists Framework 2, and it represents the great timeless or simultaneous spacious present that’s so dearly a manifestation of All That Is. All of our dreams, plans, thoughts, actions, and choices live in Framework 2; all flow from Framework 2 into Framework 1 according to our beliefs.

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.

“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.