“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?

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.)

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.

The essays contain many insights into the meanings the whole experience with illness has had for us, and will continue to have for many years. Our lives have been irrevocably changed—by choice—and not for the worse, either. Jane and I used our wills to intensify our focuses in certain areas. And I’m sure that as the reader works his or her way through the essays, it will become quite apparent that I wrote them just as much for Jane and me as I did for others—all in our ceaseless attempts to better understand, to grasp a bit more firmly, those mental and physical adventures that we’re trying to delve into “this time around.”

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.

[...] 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.

As far as I can see, I’ve been living with two sets of “facts” for some years. [...] The same processes appeared in my husband Rob’s life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man’s greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears.

[...] This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. [...] Neither of us wanted live-in help on the premises 24 hours a day. [...]

[...] I think that when they blithely talk about having lived other lives people forget that those living before were—are—fully independent creatures, even if they are psychically related to others. [...] Interesting question: How would our 20th-century individual react when told by a visitor from the year 2355 (for example) that he or she represented one of our futurian’s “past” lives?

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. [...] But that must happen all of the time!) The uncertainty perceived here by the conscious self, however, can act as a great restraint toward knowing a future life or lives—just as much as might the fear of tuning into one’s physical death ahead of time in this life. Hook up those two factors with the quite natural concern that at least some events in any life to come will inevitably be unpleasant, or worse, and we have at least three powerful restraints, or psychic blocks, inhibiting awareness of future lives. [...] Everything considered, we may just not want to know about future lives most of the time.

[...] The books and magazines dealing with reincarnation—and the tapes, too, these days—swarm with tales of journeys to past lives, and some of those accounts are most spectacular. [...] As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can’t people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they’re regressed to their past lives? [...]

However, Jane and I don’t particularly think that in our present lives we’ve been that greatly influenced by any successes, failures, or illnesses chosen from other lives except in the broadest of terms: general bodily and personality characteristics and abilities, say. [...] Perhaps we’re too stubborn about agreeing wholeheartedly that such possibilities exist, or perhaps we’re just too enamored of our “present” physical lives, even with all of our challenges, to want to fully concur with Seth.

[...] The world view of every creature that has ever lived continues to exist, and can be tuned into under certain conditions. So can the psychic patterns of those now living, and even of those not yet born. [...]

At my age (63), then, I’m learning once again that I can’t live Jane’s life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to. [...] I live daily with the proposition that my wife is in the process of making profound decisions, and that once she’s made them she’ll respond accordingly both physically and mentally.

[...] 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? [...]

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. [...]

Certainly our lives and the lives of others have been strongly influenced by the Seth material, changed for the better. [...]

[...] We live in a world slung between our dearest hopes and greatest fears, while seldom encountering either in their pure form.

[...] As if on cue, through an open front window a quickening breeze stirred the long glass wind chimes hanging just inside; their pealing harmony filled the living room. [...]

When we hesitate, hold back, falter, when we hold back energy in the hopes of saving it, when we allow fear rather than trust to guide our activities, when the quality of our lives becomes less than we know it should be—then warnings flash. [...] This has happened in many people’s lives—and so recently the same kind of warning recently appeared in my own life.

[...] Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the events in our lives that preceded—and then followed—the hospital experience that affected us so much.

[...] She sat bundled up in her chair in the living room, her head down as she listened. [...]

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. [...]

For all of your complaining (Seth told us with some humor at 8:56), you understand in rather good measure the decisions and actions that motivate your lives, so that Ruburt is more than usually aware of the manipulations that psychologically and physically lie just beneath the material usually carried by what is ordinarily called the conscious mind. 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.

[...] Ruburt is now far more willing to make certain changes in his life than he was earlier, and he sees himself more as one of a living congregation of creatures—less isolated than before, stripped down from the superperfect (subconscious) model, and therefore no more under the compulsion to live up to such a psychological bondage. [...]

And as for books, early in August I returned to our publisher, Prentice-Hall, the page proofs Jane had corrected for her book of poetry: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. Ordinarily that event would have delighted us, since it meant that before the year was out she’d have another work published. [...] At this time, Prentice-Hall sent us the first published copies of If We Live Again, but as proud as Jane and I are of that book, its appearance didn’t help her. [...]

[...] We were pleased to get it for, as I told Jane, if ever we’re to understand all of the events in our lives that led to the hospital experience, we must call upon every ability at our service. [...]

[...] In Framework 2, for example, Marie, pregnant with Jane, could have decided with her daughter-to-be upon certain sequences of action to be pursued during their lives. [...] And Jane’s resolve, her will that, according to Seth, “is amazingly strong” (in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 713th session for October 21, 1974), may buttress the understanding and determination of one or more of her counterparts in this life; she may meet (or have met) such an individual; another may live across an ocean, say, with no meeting ever to take place in physical terms.

[...] (Yet, “Our lives and deaths are now,” Jane wrote in Chapter 10 of God of Jane, quoting herself from her own “psychic library.”)

[...] Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. [...]

[...] (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. [...]

[...] He couldn’t lead other people’s lives for them (underlined), either—yet through the years I began to feel a greater and greater sense of responsibility for people with physical problems who wrote requiring Seth’s aid, or mine. [...]

[...] Other annoying events were occurring in our private lives. [...]

[...] Once again from the card table in the living room:)