8 results for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"introductori essay by robert f butt" AND stemmed:dream)
We could have presented Dreams as is, or at least have avoided mentioning certain less-than-advantageous circumstances surrounding its production by Jane and by Seth, the “energy personality essence” she speaks for while in a trance or dissociated state. The facts are, though, that Jane’s already impaired physical condition grew steadily worse while she was working on the book. Shortly after finishing it, she went into the hospital. Since we’ve always wanted to make sure that our “psychic work” is given within the context of our daily living, I’ve undertaken to present in these essays intensely personal material relevant to the creation of Dreams. (The mechanics of Jane’s still-fascinating trance phenomenon have been described in some detail in the six previous Seth books she’s produced—with my help—and they’ll also be referred to, if briefly, in Dreams.)
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.
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.
There must be a vast amount of pertinent dream information ready for the tapping, however, and maybe with Seth’s help Jane and I can eventually learn more about the undoubtedly therapeutic roles our joint and individual dreams have played as we contended with the challenges posed by her physical difficulties. Many questions arise: Even granting our personal reservations about influences being exerted within our current lives through past, future, as well as other present existences, what about exchanges on dream levels concerning Jane’s symptoms between or among any of our reincarnational selves, our counterpart selves, or various combinations of the two? [...] To what extent does Jane’s physical infirmity mushroom into other probable realities through the dream state? [...]
I’ve hardly mentioned our dreams. As related to Jane’s physical symptoms, they have remained largely unconscious phenomena: We knew all along that we were often having “symptom dreams,” but didn’t recall them consistently enough to be able to do much conscious work with them. [...] Obviously, we made our choices in that respect long ago: As far as the deeply charged subject of Jane’s illness was concerned, we decided to keep most of our dream work on intuitive and unconscious levels. [...]
[...] While at work in my own writing room I occasionally hear her talking to herself as she sits at her card table in the living room, just down the hall: I’ve learned that on such occasions, she’s asleep and often dreaming aloud, solving the psychological equations continually arising among the levels of her psyche as she pursues her chosen learning processes. [...] While I spend all of this time working on these essays for Dreams, I’m always afraid I’m leaving her alone too much. [...]
But that simple statement also means that our dream work relative to Jane’s challenges has often been powerfully abetted by Seth in many of the 347 completely private and 159 partially private sessions he’s given us since November 1965. [...]
[...] Our agreement was that in the meantime she was to start checking the sessions and my notes for Dreams; then I was to type the final manuscript. [...] 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.
[...] During other longer periods, say, those resources may direct themselves toward healing or dreaming—or possibly both.
After some hesitation following my question about having a session this evening, Jane decided she wanted to contribute introductory material for Dreams. This was to be a new experience for us: Because of the arthritis she was having trouble even holding a pen, so she intended to dictate her material as though she were writing it herself in longhand. [...]
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.
[...] In this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, for example, Seth portrays us as a vibrant, well-intended species—a physically attuned kind of consciousness beautifully tailored by our own cosmic ingredients to live lives of productivity, of spiritual and physical enjoyments, with each individual life in charge of its own fate and adding to the potentials of all other life as well.
[...] So again, how did that experience fit into Seth’s Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment?
And amid all of this frenetic activity our painting and writing—those activities we’d always regarded as the creative hearts of our lives, the very reasons we’d chosen to live on earth this time around—had receded into a far distance, so that they’d become like dimly remembered dreams, or perhaps actions practiced in probable lives by “more fortunate” versions of ourselves.
And how about reaching a future life through the dream state, perhaps abetted by hypnosis or self-suggestion before sleep? Our own results have been ambiguous at best, in contrast with the “ordinary” precognitive dreams Jane and I have had, which we can document through our written records. Future-life dream recall may be thoroughly disguised so as to not alarm the guardian, conscious present self. I’ve often speculated that clues to oncoming lives must exist within the hundreds of dreams I’ve recorded.
[...] We were becoming so harried by her worsening physical symptoms when that material started to come through that she gave up working on Dreams and concentrated on those private sessions instead. [...] Jane didn’t return to work on Dreams until July 1981, when the two blocks of sinful-self material had run their courses. By then, she’d held only one session for Dreams in the last 13 months.
I also know that in a couple of chapters for Dreams itself Seth referred to the genetic factors involving reincarnation. [...]
Few overt hints of this appear in Rob’s notes for Dreams. For one thing, the process of withdrawal was slow at the start. For another, when Seth was more than three-quarters of the way through Dreams he began devoting a series of private sessions to an in-depth discussion of “the magical approach”—material that was calculated to help me personally, and others like me, change our approach to experience and thus experience itself. [...]
Indeed, Seth’s material on the magical approach was so fascinating that by the time he finished Dreams I’d already put together large portions of it in a separate book, even if much of it was personal. [...] 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. [...]
All of that work—and more—accounts for the long delay in the completion of Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. Actually, with the exception of one session held in November 1980, I let my work on the book go for over 13 months, from early June 1980 to mid-July 1981.
We might have inserted some of this introductory material into that large gap in Dreams, since very important portions of it were acquired during that time, but we didn’t want to interrupt the sessions for the book with different subject matter. [...]
(9:03 A.M. Last night Jane had pronounced her work finished on the introductory material for Dreams. [...]