“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

[...] I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I’d also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16: “Many of Ruburt’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”

[...] 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. [...]

The belief in sin and in the sinful self has been for uncounted centuries embedded in man’s concepts about himself and God. Around those beliefs civilizations evolved and religions orbited. [...]

[...] I think that in the following excerpts Seth rather neatly encapsulates her past beliefs, her present condition, and how far she has yet to go in meeting her challenges. [...]

[...] And even in the most private-type sessions Seth always wound his material into more public areas, so that we have reams of unpublished (and very controversial) material dealing with the connections between one’s illness and other members of the family, community relationships, and with the very belief systems that underlie all of human activity. The kinds of beliefs we have about people bring about the kinds of illnesses we encounter. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] The more middlemen that I entertained between my physical condition and my personal beliefs, the more confused I thought I’d be.

[...] After explaining how a couple of women (among others) had recently claimed that he had been in contact with them, Seth stated: “Now, I did not communicate with those women—but their belief in me helped each of them use certain abilities.”

[...] (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.

[...] 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. [...] Those ingrained beliefs are of course biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

[...] 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.

[...] She doesn’t want to use the concept as a crutch; her caution stems from other beliefs, on which I’ll quote her shortly. [...]

[...] I don’t think her “sinful self” could have risen to such prominence without feeding upon those repressions, clamping down more and more within the psyche as the years passed, continuing its misguided but “well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self … to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of men’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.” [...]

[...] And regardless of whether our space and time are limited here, still it seems impossible to really penetrate to the deeper core of any subject or belief. [...]

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.” [...]

[...] Jane is still very much against drugs and surgery, though—even while she’s well aware of the contradictions in her beliefs as she continues to take daily the synthetic thyroid hormone and the liquid salicylate medication prescribed by Dr. Mandali. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

This is a good place to explain that while Jane was in the hospital neither of us ever made any attempt to “convert” the people there—doctors, nurses, technicians, say—to a belief in the Seth material. [...] We weren’t there to impose our beliefs upon anyone else. We’d made the conscious, joint decision during a time of crisis to seek certain kinds of help from skilled practitioners in the medical field, and we were willing to learn from them, even if those people were pretty certain to have belief systems very different from ours. [...]

[...] Our beliefs said so. [...]