“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

August 12, 1982. Originally I’d planned to write the standard kind of introduction for Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. However, as I became involved in describing the complicated, emotionally charged series of events surrounding the hospitalization earlier this year of my wife, Jane Roberts, the material automatically began organizing itself into a series of dated essays. I was more than happy to follow this intuition from my creative self, for it answered many questions I’d started to consciously worry about.

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.

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.

If life has such great potentials, as Seth maintains, if it began—and begins (and continues to begin) at such rich creative and productive levels—then why did our experience so often make it seem that we struggled against unknowing or uncaring cosmic forces, or that we were at the most so ignorant of our own source and creativity that our hands were tied, or that we were forever shut off from our natural heritage?

(Long pause at 7:51.) It began to strike me that even my own physical incapacities were indeed creative ventures that appeared in my experience as bad, or limiting, or even tragic. [...]

[...] For now I understood that freedom of motion was at least one true reflection of an individual’s creative potential.

[...] I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.

[...] Okay: I hope sometime to tell the entire story of my physical and creative challenges, which as of now of course is unfinished. [...] (Long pause.) In man’s desire to make creative adjustments, it often seems that instead he adds unfortunate blemishes to life’s vitality. [...]

[...] Such a procedure could have turned into a creative tragedy for us and for our readers.

[...] He is returning to activity at his creative, naturally therapeutic pace, no longer afraid that he is going too fast—or will—but shown only too clearly that activity and motion represent the only safe, sane, and creative response [to life’s challenges].

[...] He found a mixed world, one hardly black or white, one with some considerable give-and-take, in which under even the most regrettable of circumstances there was room for some action, some improvement, for some … creative response. [...]

[...] There are reasons—creative reasons—why she can’t walk now, or write in longhand. [...]

[...] Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence—yours, and mine as well.

[...] 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.” [...]

[...] I was pleasantly surprised by her reaction, for her reluctance to talk about a certain subject often was a sign that she’d end up doing something creative with it.

Actually, of course, each second of any creature’s life represents a creative act of the keenest sort, for it signals that physical entity’s decision to continue living in physical terms. [...]

[...] I work around these creative outpourings by ministering to my wife, running our house and the many errands connected with our daily living, handling our publishing affairs, seeing visitors—expected and unexpected—and trying to answer at least some of the mail, which is threatening to accumulate beyond control. [...]

[...] I only saw that she could use the rest, since she obviously didn’t feel well generally—but I also thought she was waiting for one of her characteristic surges of creative energy before digging into her next book (of which she always has several going). [...]

[...] The whole creative intimacy of our hill house was one that we’d enjoyed many times; we desperately wanted to return to that same ambience many more times.

[...] Just the same, her creative abilities had immediately come to her aid.)

How richly creative we are: Each of our presents is part of the future from the standpoint of the past; each of our presents is also part of the past from the standpoint of the future.

[...] (As for myself, while growing up I knew nothing of reincarnation beyond its name.) But we’ll be the first ones to agree that in certain Seth sessions, and in her very evocative poetry, Jane has encouraged her intuitive and creative selves to seriously discuss reincarnation. [...]

[...] Some, certainly, and no doubt the reader can think of at least a few creative interpretations of redemptive qualities, but I’d rather let the question search for its own approximate answers as I continue work upon this essay. [...]

We’ve presented lengthy quotations from Seth on his Framework 1 and Framework 2 material both in his Mass Events and in Jane’s God of Jane. His discussions on the subject are an excellent example of how a very creative idea, capable of helping many people, can arise from an attempt to deal with a personal situation—for on September 17, 1977, Seth introduced his Frameworks 1 and 2 concept in a private session designed to help Jane contend with her physical symptoms.

[...] Any discussion of this in our books is strictly my own doing, my own speculation: I think it fun to play creatively with a theory that is, after all, there for anyone to consider, from whatever standpoint. [...]

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. [...]

[...] But it could well be argued that Jane needed to be able to write with a pen or pencil, to express her basic creativity in that particular elementary fashion, even more than she needed to walk. [...]