“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Further, Jane and I believe that what really happens during a “past-life regression” under hypnosis is that the subject (aside from any responses given to the hypnotist’s own witting or unwitting suggestions) very cosily views his or her previous lives from the comfort and safety of a present existence. This would be the case even when the subject is very unhappy with present challenges, and is trying to assign their origin to events in one or more former existences. [...]

[...] Yet she was early subjected to the church’s rigid opposition to the whole idea of reincarnation because, strangely enough, even in her very youthful poetry she dealt with the forbidden subject (although not by name). [...]

In this essay I’ll touch upon a number of subjects. [...]

Among the subjects not discussed so far are Seth’s (and our own) ideas on reincarnation, counterparts, probable realities, and Frameworks 1 and 2. Jane briefly referred to Seth’s “magical approach” material in her dictation last month (see her own session of April 16, 1982, in Essay No. [...]

[...] Traditionally we’ve cast that feeling or knowledge in religious terms, for want of a better framework, but I think that more and more now the search is also on within science for a theory—even a hypothesis—that will lock up our often subjective variables into what might be called a more human equivalent of the still-sought-for unified theory in physics. [...]

Some of our readers, sending us recent books and copies of articles written by scientists working on these subjects, have noted that it must be nice for Jane and me to have concepts that Seth has been discussing for years “corroborated” by the establishment (often we already had the material on file, by the way). [...]

Whatever the initial course of action agreed to in just this probable reality by everyone involved, from whatever point in the “past,” in Framework 1 the participants have subjected it to an almost infinite variety of choices and modifications through the years: but always—always—within nature’s great structure, and accompanied by the utter freedom of each person concerned to accept, reject, abort, or change the whole affair from their individual perspective at any moment….

[...] That mutual illness obviously became a deeply charged subject for both of them. [...]

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. [...] And regardless of whether our space and time are limited here, still it seems impossible to really penetrate to the deeper core of any subject or belief. 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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] Then as we went to bed she brought up two additional subjects to discuss, for those who would wonder: why we hadn’t more actively sought medical help in the past for her physical condition; and the many private, or deleted, sessions Seth himself has given for her over the years.

[...] To have attempted to censor Seth since 1963, say, to “keep him to ourselves” on that particular subject, would have long ago turned into an impossibly complicated and dishonest task: Jane and I would have become involved in a constant distortion of his material as we rewrote the sessions. [...]

[...] The subjects discussed are deeply charged for us, and the physical and psychological aspects of some of them could be devastating if we allowed them to be. [...]

[...] And Jane, trying to protect herself from the negative suggestions that had been administered to her like psychic hammerblows, ever since she’d entered the hospital, could only weakly demur on the subject of operations.

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. [...]

[...] Those sessions represented largely futile activity, I thought, yet I gladly admitted that each one of them was as unique and creative as ever, no matter what its subject. [...]

[...] 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. [...]