“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.

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?

That basic impetus toward survival came to take precedence over everything else. Indeed, for several weeks following the initiation of the challenges I relate in the essays, supposedly creative activities like writing books and painting pictures often faded into insignificance by comparison. And for me, Jane’s condition came to stand for everything we don’t know in our particular joint, chosen, probable earthly reality.

[...] 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.

[...] Learning experiences can show themselves in a vast number of ways, then, and independently of sequential time, too; and if Jane and I don’t like certain aspects of the realities we’ve created, we can try to change them, together and separately.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] One of these states that matter cannot be created from nothing. [...]

There followed many sessions, both regular and private (or deleted, as we sometimes call them), in which Seth discussed Frameworks 1 and 2. As can happen when we’re consciously too close to a deep-seated situation, some little time passed before Jane and I realized the obvious: It wasn’t that we were unable to tune into Framework 2, say, for help in effecting a healing for her in the joint reality we’d created in Framework 1—but that in physical reality we were drawing from Framework 2 exactly what we wanted to, even if often on unconscious or unwitting levels. [...]

So if Jane undergoes illness in this reality, in another she does not—but in between those extremes she also explores all stages of her illness in a series of probable universes, flashing among them in “no time at all,” basically…. [...] But as Seth has said, since I live with her in this probable reality from which I write, then my existence is always at least probable within any of her realities. [...] And although Seth hasn’t said so yet (that I remember), I also think that within the spontaneous plan of probable realities each of us—anyone, that is—explores all aspects of sexuality and parenthood at the same time.

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. [...]

My main point is that I also feel, without having asked Seth, that the farther one travels ahead in time the greater the play of probable realities and probable lives he or she encounters. [...] In some cases there will be a great fear of becoming lost among all of those realities. (What if one doesn’t want a probable reality they choose? [...]

[...] 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.

[...] For now, though, I present what I have to work with from the saddest, most mournful Sumari song she’s ever created and sung. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] But I was horrified to think that my dear wife might become involved in a similar reality, with or without my unwitting compliance. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

(Long pause at 8:01.) In a manner of speaking, the sinful self created the superhuman self-image that demanded so much, and it encased Ruburt’s body as if in concrete. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Perhaps, I thought, that portion was creating a physical disability that allowed Jane to publish forbidden material while protectively isolating herself—and me—from rejection by the physical world. [...]