“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of our readers, sending us recent books and copies of articles written by scientists working on these subjects, have noted that it must be nice for Jane and me to have concepts that Seth has been discussing for years “corroborated” by the establishment (often we already had the material on file, by the way). But once again irony enters in on my part, for I’m afraid our answer is that in general science isn’t even aware of the existence of the Seth material, notwithstanding the letters of approval and/or encouragement we receive from individual scientists, representing a variety of disciplines. We feel no sense of corroboration. As I wrote to a fan just last week: “No matter what he or she may think of it personally, no reputable scientist is going to publicly espouse a belief in the Seth material. Certainly not career-wise. Not for a long time yet, in our opinion, and for many reasons.”

Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn’t urge her to do so, either. For my part, I’d always felt distinctly uneasy in Marie’s presence on the few occasions we met.

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….

“Oh, why did you have to put that in!” Jane cried in anguish as she read that last sentence. It happened to mark the end of my day’s work, which I’d showed to her after supper. “It’s a fantastic idea, but—”

Because of its very nature, however, and even though it comprises enough “evidence” in favor of a generalized principle that explains the workings of certain phenomena, a theory inevitably contains errors, since it’s based upon incomplete data to begin with. It’s therefore vulnerable to later theories through which investigators attempt to reduce or eliminate those errors. A continuous refining of detail takes place in the search for a final truth that can become “fact.” (I also note that that truth being sought may end up as so abstract a quality that it loses its emotional and intellectual meanings for us, and moves out of our generalized perception. I’m noting, then, that we can analyze something right out of our own reality by ultimately declaring it to be impossible—when actually it, and other versions of it, continue to exist in related probable realities.)