“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It should be obvious by now that in a large measure all of the selves and approaches I’ve delineated in these essays simply represent Seth playing around semantically, as he tries to get various portions of his ideas through our heads at certain times. All is one, basically, as he knows—and can feel—far better from his vantage point than we can from ours. (Yet, “Our lives and deaths are now,” Jane wrote in Chapter 10 of God of Jane, quoting herself from her own “psychic library.”)

That all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole is surely one of our oldest concepts, growing, in those terms, with us out of our prehistory as we struggled to grasp the “true” nature of reality. Traditionally we’ve cast that feeling or knowledge in religious terms, for want of a better framework, but I think that more and more now the search is also on within science for a theory—even a hypothesis—that will lock up our often subjective variables into what might be called a more human equivalent of the still-sought-for unified theory in physics. What are human beings, anyhow? From what Jane and I can gather (through our reading especially), at least some of the world’s leading scientists are becoming willing to contend with consciousness itself. (Including their own consciousnesses? I can’t help wondering!) Portions of the latest scientific literature I have on hand, particularly that produced by physicists, contain references that not long ago would have been branded as metaphysical, or even worse.

But I note with some amusement that science absorbs such heresies by weaving them into and developing them out of current establishment thinking—concepts, say, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Put very simplistically, this “quantum approach” allows for the theme that each of us inhabits but one of innumerable probable or parallel worlds. Even the theory of evolution is invoked, for those other worlds are said to evolve in parallel with the one we inhabit. Yet there is no answer within quantum mechanics as to how or why one’s personal identity chooses to follow a certain probable pathway, and consciousness per se is not considered. (Some physicists, however, have implied that subatomic particles—photons—communicate with each other as they take their separate but “sympathetic” paths.) Pardon my irony here, but Seth has always dealt with the ramifications of consciousness and maintained also that we do not inhabit just one probable world, but constantly move among them by choice—and by the microsecond, if one chooses.

(I’ll add that both Seth and quantum theory predict the spontaneous creation of particles of matter out of or in “empty” space—events that, it seems to me, go against some of the laws of conservation. One of these states that matter cannot be created from nothing. Seth says this spontaneous creation happens all of the time through the actions of consciousness. In the theoretical quantum world, however, certain conditions are needed: superheavy nuclei amid strong electrical fields, and so forth.)

To me, consciousness or All That Is is an omnipresent, really indescribable awareness that to us human beings has no limits, “one” containing not only the attributes of time and space and of all feeling, thought, and objectivity, but numberless other properties, manifestations, and probabilities that lie outside our very limited interior and exterior perceptions. In terms of physics, then, reality is still unknowable.

In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer, were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper New York State, in 1928. They were divorced in 1931, when Jane was two years old. (Jane didn’t see her father again—he came from a broken home himself—until she was 21.) By the time Jane was three years old, her mother was having serious problems with rheumatoid arthritis. Indeed, the daughter has only one conscious memory of seeing her mother on her feet. All we have are a few photographs Del took of Marie not long after their marriage. They show a beautiful woman wearing a bathing suit, standing on a beach in Florida.

I even think there’s good medical evidence these days for my view of Jane’s “symptoms,” as we’ve called them for many years. In recent years rheumatoid arthritis has been found to be an amazingly complicated disease involving a great number of the body’s immune factors. In the progression of rheumatoid arthritis one’s own immunologic system turns on the body and damages it. A very simplified explanation is that in a process repeated over and over, a variety of defender cells called phagocytic monocytes turn into macrophages, or scavenger cells that, in turn, release enzymes which consume healthy joint tissue. The resulting debris attracts more monocytes, and so on. An inflammatory accumulation of cellular detritus finally destroys the joint’s cartilage and eats away bone.

A moment ago, I referred to the way all involved with my wife could agree upon a course of probable activity. There are as many possibilities—and probabilities—as one can think of. I can hardly begin to list them all here. In Framework 2, for example, Marie, pregnant with Jane, could have decided with her daughter-to-be upon certain sequences of action to be pursued during their lives. Or in Framework 2 the two of them could have cooperated upon such a decision before Marie’s birth, even. If reincarnation is to be considered, their disturbed relationship this time might reflect past connections of a different yet analogous nature, and may also have important effects upon any future ones. Additionally, Jane could have chosen the present relationship to eventually help her temper her reception of and reaction to the Seth material, making her extra-cautious; this, even though she’d seen to it ahead of time that she would be born with that certain combination of fortitude and innocence necessary for her to press on with her chosen abilities. She could have made a pact ahead of time to “borrow” certain strong mystical qualities from her maternal grandfather, who was part French Canadian and part Canadian Indian (specific tribe unknown by us), and with whom she strongly identified as a child. And Jane’s resolve, her will that, according to Seth, “is amazingly strong” (in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 713th session for October 21, 1974), may buttress the understanding and determination of one or more of her counterparts in this life; she may meet (or have met) such an individual; another may live across an ocean, say, with no meeting ever to take place in physical terms.

In all of this I’ve barely hinted at the complicated relationships involving other family members from the past, present, and future. The mathematical combinations possible are vast. And what’s my role in all of this, for heaven’s sake (to make a pun)? Or that of members of my own family? What part do I play, and have yet to play, in Jane’s redemption—as well as my own—and on what level or levels? When did the two of us make our own pacts in Framework 2 (or other frameworks), and how will they work out in Framework 1? But it’s even possible that all together Marie, Jane, her grandfather, and I set up the original situation before the physical births of any of us—and in some probable reality (if not in this one) we did do just that! Words become terribly inadequate tools to express what I feel and am trying to write here, for I want to record at once every combination of relationships I can conceive of….

One of their common creations within the same time scheme was rheumatoid arthritis, of course, for Jane began to show her version of it some eight years before Marie died. That mutual illness obviously became a deeply charged subject for both of them. However, with that fine stubbornness I mentioned in the first essay, Jane never told Marie of her own affliction; since the two no longer saw each other, consciously Marie never knew. Both of us think she did know psychically, though. I even think that mother and daughter shared the same case of arthritis—there weren’t two separate instances of it.

I’ve written these passages knowing, of course, that many of Seth’s points and our own are at best theories, if very intriguing ones. Some may contend that they’re not even theories, but only hypotheses—tentatively inferred explanations requiring much further experimentation and examination. Worse still (I write with some humor), they may “only” be ideas. Whatever their status, Jane and I take heart from the letters sent us by many thousands of readers, who have time and again explained how they put the Seth material to use in very positive physical and mental ways. (Except for a few early instances when we inadvertently lost some of our correspondence, we’ve saved all of it. The cartons are piling up in a cellar storeroom. We hope that eventually our “fan mail” will serve as the foundation for a study concerning the ways in which society reacts to new ideas, through the viewpoints, say, of science, philosophy and psychology, religion, the “occult,” skepticism, generalized deep curiosity, and mental illness. Very abusive responses are also involved, as well as surprising near-illiterate ones.)

I think the beliefs the three of us hold are very creative ones; we accept them on that basis; they are as good “proofs” as we can currently get, and offer their own answers by sparking us into new ways of trying to make sense out of our reality. Science and philosophy will not agree with any of this, I know—at least for the most part, for I’ve read that there’s never an idea so wild that it can’t find a home in the mind of some scientist or philosopher. Jane and I aren’t so naive as to think that we can offer any hard proofs for what we believe, and certainly Seth doesn’t worry about it. Not even when I play around with his ideas relative to quantum theory can such proof be found—yet I let Jane’s “amazingly strong” will be the measuring and observing device that automatically causes “waves” of knowing or consciousness—in Framework 2, for example—to coalesce into the “particles” that make up the physical forms she perceives as her reality in Framework 1, either psychically from a distance or right here.