“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.

My own belief, which I’ve held for some 15 years, is that in Jane’s case at least the young girl’s psychological conditioning was far more important—far more damaging, in those terms—than any physical tendency to inherit. I think that Marie’s domineering rage at the world (chosen by her, never forget) deeply penetrated Jane’s developing psyche, and—again in those terms—caused her to set up repressive, protective inner barriers that could be activated and transformed into physical signs at any time, under certain circumstances. Out of many possibilities, the daughter’s conditioning was psychically chosen and accepted, and through that focus she meant to interact with the mother’s behavior. This, to me, is an example of the way a course of probable activity can be agreed upon by all involved.

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.

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….

In these last few pages (since I began discussing my beliefs about Jane’s early psychological conditioning), I’ve indicated the only kind of thinking by which I can personally make sense out of our world these days. Particularly when I consider the “news” on the typical front page of the typical daily newspaper: All too accurately the “stories” of war, pollution, corruption, and poverty and crime show just how little we human beings know or understand ourselves at this time—and how far we have to go, individually and en masse. As the years have passed, I’ve come to trust more and more my own insights into our behavior as a species within the framework of a nature that I believe our kind has co-created with every other species on the planet (to confine my theme to just our immediate environment for the moment). It all seems very complicated, certainly, but as I manipulate in everyday life I don’t consciously dwell upon all of the ramifications I’ve mentioned in these essays. Instead I try to hold them in the back of my mind as parts of a greater whole. So, I believe, does Jane.

Granted that our species’ best human understanding of “the mystery of life” and of the universe is exceedingly inadequate, still Jane and I do not think that nature is totally objective, indifferently cruel, or simply uncaring, as science would have us believe. (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. We are not dwarfed. How could we be? For if, as I wrote earlier, Jane and I agree with the ancient idea that “all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole,” we also think that in some fashion the whole is enclosed within each of its parts. Science calls the idea holonomy, but Seth has been saying the same thing for years without ever mentioning the word. Jane didn’t even know 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.