“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.

Seth, then, has finished his work on Dreams. I wrote the original version of the notes for each book session as he delivered it through Jane, and also began collecting other notes and reference material that might be used. Since I’ve completed the essays, all I have to do now is “refine” the session notes (and addenda) as I type the finished manuscript. Jane will help as much as she can. We expect to have the book ready for our editors, Tam Mossman and Lynne Lumsden, by the end of the year.

Jane appreciates that the dates I’m always giving merely furnish a convenient framework for our material, but she’s hardly enamored of such precise methodology; she understands that it’s my way of doing things, realizes it’s very useful, and goes on from there. I use a similar system in presenting all of the published Seth material. It has the great attribute of allowing for quick reference timewise (if not always by subject matter) to any of the more than 1,500 regular, private or deleted, and “ESP class” sessions Jane has given over the past 19 years—until July 1982, that is, when I began work on these passages.

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?

[...] “Interactions with others do occur, of course,” Seth told us long ago, “yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions.” [...]

Throughout these essays I’ve been unable to go very far into most of the subjects Jane and I wanted to discuss, to do much more than approximate in words a welter of feelings and actions. [...] Perhaps if Jane and I could do that, a great metamorphosis would take place: The closer we moved through probabilities toward All That Is, the more the tensions associated with the subject in question would transform themselves into profoundly joyous answers and challenges.

[...] She’s made no effort to learn to write with her better-functioning left hand, as I suggested she do a couple of months ago, so I’ve dropped that idea. “But I could start another book tomorrow,” she said, “only I don’t know what good it would do….”

[...] For if the information arouses such mixed emotions in Jane and me, surely it will do so in others too, serving as an impetus or goad to learn more even while it highlights one’s strengths and weaknesses. [...] 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.

[...] Certainly our comprehensions have deepened as a result—yet in the face of that great promise, what was I doing barely able to leave my chair? And if spontaneous order was such a vital ingredient in the workings of the universe, then what was I doing trying to shut it down in my own daily life?

[...] Jane said she’d like to do some more dictation of her own, so I agreed to take down that instead. [...]

[...] Jane was nodding in her chair as I finished, and I thought she wouldn’t be doing any work this evening after all. [...]

[...] You can do a prologue or whatever else you want, too….”

As the days passed Jane kept putting me off about doing the translation, until finally I grew resentful and despairing at her refusal to cooperate. [...] For by then I knew that she had no intention of producing an English version: Some childlike and naive, yet deeply stubborn portion of her psyche, some “perverse area,” as Seth, her trance personality, jokingly characterized it long ago, had simply taken over and decided not to do any more on that subject. [...]

[...] She’d very gradually started doing this before entering the hospital, but any physical causes behind her behavior had been unsuspected by us then. [...] Instead she napped or drifted—even as she does now—while intermittently reading and rereading our material for Dreams without ever doing anything with it.

We do not just receive the torch of life and pass it on as one Olympic runner does to another, but we each add to that living torch or flame a power, a meaning, a quality that is uniquely our own. We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. [...]

“Just do it your own way,” I said. [...] There’s nothing else you can do.”)

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. [...]

[...] I thought this might be relatively easy for her to do, since she’s often voiced her suspicion that she’s one of those born “lefties” who at a very early age were forced to begin writing with their right hand. She has yet to do anything about my suggestion. (I spoke from my own related experience, since as a native right-hander I taught myself to print with my left hand just to see if I could do it. Now I always do crossword puzzles that way.)

It’s impossible to present here all of Jane’s own material on her sinful self—much as I’d like to—but shortly I do want to give portions of the first few pages to show readers how experiences from one’s very early years can sometimes have the most profound effects in later life. As will be seen, that material obviously raises as many questions as it answers, but right now we can do little more than touch upon the whole affair. [...]

[...] Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus.

[...] I think that if parts of her psyche “fear those fears,” other parts do not—or that at least they chose to confront them, and actually began doing so many years ago. [...]

[...] Our independence relative to reincarnation may represent just conscious cussedness on our parts, but we believe that each of us (meaning anyone, that is) always has the freedom to accept or reject any such choice or causality —whatever we choose to do. No, instead we think of our current challenges as contributing to the knowledge of our whole selves in most specific ways, rather than our being swayed that much by our reincarnational and/or counterpart associations. [...] I do know that regardless of local variations an acceptance of reincarnation has encircled the earth for millennia, and that in our country recent polls show a quarter of the population believing in it.

[...] The genes in each cell have their individual jobs to do in furnishing the quivering templates for the manufacture (via the nucleic acids DNA and messenger RNA) of all of our bodily proteins. [...] What we choose to do with those possibilities that we present ourselves with at each temporal birth may be another matter entirely.

But if the interactions between or among frameworks exist for everybody, in our terms, then as far as I’m concerned they exist for each thing as well—and I do mean the so-called “inanimate.” [...] So, “probably,” do most of the far-out probable realities one can imagine—for I won’t go so far as to deny that some probable realities may exist without such framework structures. [...]

[...] More, it would have involved altering dates, and changing or eliminating some of the copy to make the rest of it fit—all things I dislike doing. After Jane came through with her dictation I told myself I’d know what to do with it, and awoke the next morning with the clear understanding that her session should be presented just as is, and when we received it. [...]

As I wrote in the first essay, “the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it.” [...] “Do you want to spend the rest of your life inside, in a wheelchair? [...]

[...] What does one do when the insert begins to wobble? [...]

[...] 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? [...] 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! [...]

[...] (Some physicists, however, have implied that subatomic particles—photons—communicate with each other as they take their separate but “sympathetic” paths.) Pardon my irony here, but Seth has always dealt with the ramifications of consciousness and maintained also that we do not inhabit just one probable world, but constantly move among them by choice—and by the microsecond, if one chooses.

[...] 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 didn’t urge her to do so, either. [...]

[...] I hadn’t asked her to do a song for this last essay; she told me afterward that she hadn’t realized I was that close to finishing it. [...]

[...] If the medical profession had had anything to do with casting that medical spell, then apparently it could be quite effective in removing it.

[...] We’d have respected his statements on that aspect of his abilities and intents as much as we did—and do—on any other. [...]

[...] With a more painful heart I yearned for my wife to walk to me, hips innocently and joyfully swaying, as she used to do years ago, when she’d meet me every day as I left the printing company where I worked as a commercial artist. [...]