“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Yet, Jane and I were being creative with it all—the whole time—and moving several stages closer to understanding All That Is in the process. If we were often badly frightened, we also felt surges of grim elation (when we allowed them to surface) that we were survivors. We’d chosen the entire experience, which is still continuing, of course. “You make your own reality,” Seth has told us innumerable times. We agree—and that is where Jane and I diverge most sharply from the conventional establishment belief that events happen to people, instead of being created by them.

The essay form gave us chances for at least a minimal study of the various forms our creative learning experiences have taken to date. We quickly agreed that we’d been setting up the illness syndrome for years, yet the deep emotional shocks accompanying its physical developments seemed to come at us like attacking dark birds zooming in from another probable reality. We learned. We adjusted in ways that a few weeks previously would have seemed unbelievable to us—and, ironically, as must often happen in such situations, once we’d moved into our new joint reality, it appeared that those particular challenges had always been incipient for us.

I worked on the essays in succession, just as they’re given here, although I found myself adding to the earlier ones as I moved into the later ones. In terms of length alone, it soon became obviously impossible to write all of the material for any piece on the date given. Even by going back over them, however, I couldn’t discuss everything I wanted to: The essays could have easily grown into a book of their own. This weaving things together to make them “fit” is only natural for one of my temperament, but I didn’t alter any of my original copy—that I’d have refused to do—and I kept intact those first spontaneous descriptions of the events attendant to Jane’s physical difficulties, as well as our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them. I did not look at Seth-Jane’s Dreams itself while writing the essays, in order to avoid having them overly influenced by work in the book. Instead, we want all of this preliminary material to show how we live daily—regardless of how well we may or may not do—with a generalized knowledge of, and belief in, the Seth material.

Moreover, the choice of presenting the material in essay form proved to have one virtue that was more valuable than all the others combined: It allowed us to delve into the events I describe, and “our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them,” a little bit at a time. Those situations might have been too devastating for us otherwise, too emotionally threatening, too charged for us to present them with at least the minimum amount of objectivity required by the written word. Many of the events and feelings evoked such deep implications of trial and challenge for Jane and me that we were often left with strong feelings of unreality: This can’t be happening to us. At our ages (52 and 62, Jane and I, respectively), why have we created lives with such nightmarish connotations? Why do I have to leave my dear wife alone in the hospital each night, so that I feel like crying for her when I go to bed by myself in the hill house? Why can’t we be left alone to live lives of peace and creativity? And how many millions and millions of times through the ages have other human beings on this planet felt the same way—and will yet? Why are our lives ending like this, when we feel that simply getting through each day is an accomplishment?

[...] You create your own reality. [...] I won’t claim that residues of it may not be buried within my psyche (and within Jane’s), but it’s very difficult to stay mad when one agrees with the simple but most basic and profound idea that you do create your own reality.

[...] I believe implicitly now that each one of us does create our own reality. [...] (In Chapter 1 of The Nature of Personal Reality, see the 613th session, for September 11, 1972.) And Jane and I are still exploring, still searching—together—for the factors within those larger frameworks of existence which make qualities like illness possible and understandable.

[...] These sessions still live, and in them he reinforces the idea that each of us does create our own reality. Both can be found in Chapter 1 of Personal Reality.

As Jane wrote in Chapter 1 of The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation (1977): “Seth maintains that each of us forms a psychic world view, composed of our own ideas, feelings, and beliefs, as we encounter our private corner of reality.” [...] Yet none of this means that contact will be made directly with the creator of the world view in question—only the bank of experiences originated through that individual’s unique version of reality. [...]

[...] 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! [...]

[...] 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.)

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. [...] 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.

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. [...] (Including their own consciousnesses? [...]

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. [...] 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. [...] 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. [...] 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. [...]

Among the subjects not discussed so far are Seth’s (and our own) ideas on reincarnation, counterparts, probable realities, and Frameworks 1 and 2. Jane briefly referred to Seth’s “magical approach” material in her dictation last month (see her own session of April 16, 1982, in Essay No. [...]

Since I’m so closely related to Jane in this life, through marriage, as well as through at least several reincarnational and counterpart roles (according to Seth and our own feelings), I’m as deeply involved in this search for redemption as she is. [...] To me, redemption means a continuous search or journey, then, involving whatever events and interchanges we choose to create, for whatever purposes, along the way—and truly, I think, some of those purposes will involve things “the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.” That we believe such things speaks for our own brands of faith, then, and also signifies that Jane and I think we have much to learn. [...]

[...] This means that each reincarnational self has its own cluster of counterpart selves within its own time period, and that all are interconnected on nonphysical levels, joining together like magical gears meshing in constantly changing patterns across time and reality. [...]

(7:20.) It is impossible in our time scheme to intellectually know our own potentials without trying them out, without testing them against the world’s edges. [...] In the development of each individual we act and reenact the startling events that brought our own universe into existence. The universe was not created in some dim past, but is newly recreated by our own thoughts, dreams, and desires—so that reality happens at all possible levels at once. [...]

In Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment Seth outlines the great cosmic and private energies that in our terms once brought into existence the reality of the universe and the birth of those private, cohesive realities in which our own individual daily lives are couched.

Lest I give an inaccurate picture of my wife, however, let me add that she combines instances of that seeming intransigence with a profound intuitive innocence before nature (and thus All That Is), and with a great literal acceptance of nature’s manifestations and of her own being and creations within that framework. [...] For now, though, I present what I have to work with from the saddest, most mournful Sumari song she’s ever created and sung. [...]

[...] For its own reasons it didn’t want to, and that was it. [...]

Since the later 1960s, when my own troubles began, I stubbornly resisted medical assistance. [...] I could keep track easily enough, I thought, of my own progress as I worked directly with my body, without drugs to confuse the issue, and with no one else between me and the reality I had so cunningly created. [...]

“Actually,” she continued much more emphatically now, as we discussed her rather mild comments about the other Seths, “I’m deeply outraged that some people who considered themselves ‘followers’ of mine or Seth can so easily fool themselves when they claim to be speaking for Seth—be so blind to their own motives, or not recognize the fact that they’re taking advantage of people. They’re also using my work to validate their own….”)

Seth gave so many sessions that were devoted to my own physical condition that I finally became embarrassed and confused: The sessions were obviously terrific—why couldn’t I put them to more practical use?

[...] Their needs—and my own—seemed to blot out the great hope that Seth could and did offer: the infusion of understanding and comprehension that could clear away the old belief patterns that held the individual in bounds.

[...] Only when she was home did she begin to fathom the possible depths of the physical reality she’d created for herself, with my help. [...] “Sure, for one joint, or two, maybe,” I said, then shut up, not wanting to add my own fears to her fears. [...]

[...] I answered my own question by remembering accounts I had on file, explaining how people of various ages had withstood numerous, incredible operations, sometimes over a period of years. But I was horrified to think that my dear wife might become involved in a similar reality, with or without my unwitting compliance. [...]

So last night, less than two days after she’d held her last session, I asked Jane for some material about the central theme of her days in the hospital, both from her own viewpoint and that of the doctors who probed, examined, and discussed her and her problems. [...]

For the third time in five days she began dictating her own material right after breakfast. [...]

I could write many windy pages about the mysteries of life, I suppose, and how each of us does the best we can, although often we may not understand what we’re doing; but what I really want to do is simply note that in her case, fortunately, and even if she may think she’s failed in certain major areas of life, Jane has achieved some remarkable insights into her own situation (as I have into mine, being her marriage partner). She’s managed to do this with the help of various portions of her own personality, the Seth material, and me. [...] You are learning how to form reality from your own beliefs, while having at the same time the freedom to choose those beliefs—to chose your mental state in a way that the animals, for example, do not. [...]

[...] Not only that, but those “magical” sessions had naturally developed into another series, this time on a portion of the personality Seth called “the sinful self”—mine as well as that of others—and those sessions had in turn led me to produce many pages of material directly from my own sinful self. [...] Ironically, then, in the midst of my own half-conscious withdrawal I’d been giving birth to not only Seth’s Dreams, but several other intriguing long-range concepts. And even if all of those sessions had been born out of my own psychic and psychological challenges and dilemmas, I knew they were excellent and deserved publication.

[...] The entire issue had been going on for some time, and the argument—the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. [...]

Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception: It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds…. I was frightened by her resolve, and by my own acquiescent participation in such a plan. [...]