“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The essay form gave us chances for at least a minimal study of the various forms our creative learning experiences have taken to date. We quickly agreed that we’d been setting up the illness syndrome for years, yet the deep emotional shocks accompanying its physical developments seemed to come at us like attacking dark birds zooming in from another probable reality. We learned. We adjusted in ways that a few weeks previously would have seemed unbelievable to us—and, ironically, as must often happen in such situations, once we’d moved into our new joint reality, it appeared that those particular challenges had always been incipient for us.

[...] This would have been a very mechanical approach. 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. [...]

[...] Medical science would be willing to try, however. Out of the goodness of its heart, all of its scientific procedures would be put at my disposal. [...]

Being a proper candidate meant that I would turn my life over to medical science in the hospital for at least a year: a year spent in therapy, surgical procedures, and more therapy, until I ended up having at least four separate operations. [...]

[...] I wanted to see how my body would react to the synthetic thyroid hormone and to therapy first. [...]

[...] Seth insisted that those powers, followed at least in principle, would raise man’s estate and fill it with a brilliance and joy in which the old problems of the species would largely disappear.

(Long pause at 7:40.) In the meantime, Rob and I often thought that this very book would never be completed. [...]

Value fulfillment is the largest issue here, both with Seth’s book and my own experience, and if I really understood what Seth was saying in this book, I would not have needed to undergo such an uncomfortable drama in my daily life.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] If I had broken a leg I would have gone to a doctor to get it set. [...]

[...] If I’d felt I was suffering a heart attack, for example, I knew I would rush to the hospital, but this was a chronic condition. [...]

But would our time traveler ever want to give up his or her present mental and physical focus to enter completely into an earlier personality? I think not, in the overwhelming majority of cases—and perhaps never—for in those terms it would mean surrendering a portion of the whole self or entity that had, through a projection into our scheme of “present” time, attained a certain consciousness and physical form of a unique degree. [...] If so, then, they would be strange only from our limited viewpoints.

Could one return to that 12th-century life, even as an observer, what would the traveler find? [...] 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?

[...] This approach would very nicely eliminate having to deal with one’s “karma” this time around—should there really be a system of consciousness embodying that ancient concept. [...] Buddhism and Hinduism would banish the very thought: How dare one even think of escaping, or just simply ignoring, his or her “fate or destiny” (to put it loosely)! [...]

[...] Even if you think the body does have something wrong with it, then the necessary adjustments would be made in another kind of time [in Framework 2] that in Framework 1 would take no time at all—or, the amount of time you thought required.” [...]

[...] Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. [...] (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. [...]

[...] Not only would the two women be emotionally tested and enriched across physical and psychological time, but so would their entities or whole selves.

[...] I can’t help wondering!) Portions of the latest scientific literature I have on hand, particularly that produced by physicists, contain references that not long ago would have been branded as metaphysical, or even worse.

I also think that if asked Seth would point out that since the concept of quantum mechanics is based upon the idea that everything we “know”—matter, energy, our sensual information—is made up of quanta, or the interactions of insubstantial fields that in turn, and quite paradoxically, produce very active subatomic packets or particles, then quantum mechanics is at least analogous with his statements that basically the universe is composed of consciousness itself. [...]

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. [...] Finally, we were left hoping that the sinful self’s very exposure through its own material would eventually bring about some physical improvement. [...]

[...] It was short but, as I expected it would be, excellent. [...]

[...] The arthritis diagnosis, Jane said, was the only one the medical profession could offer, given its insights and viewpoints—but after all those years would she be able “to set it aside”? [...]

Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception: It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds…. [...]

Jane’s book would be called The World View of Jane Roberts, of course. [...] The results would be even more intimate than those in James and Cézanne. A work like that would furnish invaluable clues concerning her redemption, on many levels, and mine as well.

[...] 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.

[...] Jane’s determination would see to her own protection in any case. [...] I deeply believe that her psyche would insist that she doesn’t need any sort of basic protection by me (or anyone else) to begin with—only understanding. [...]

When in the earlier days of our marriage I used to tell her that she had her “symptoms” regardless of what I thought or wanted, she would deny it. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] When she read it to me I knew at once that it would go here, for a few words she certainly sang of the basic theme of these essays—of the sublime, immortal consciounesses of the earth and All That Is, of that loving redemption that consciousness always makes possible somehow, somewhere, in the eternal private world of each of us, and that each of us always seeks:

[...] I asked that she be tested for food allergies, since I’d read that reactions to various foods and additives can trigger arthritis, but Dr. Mandali said that “if Jane is allergic she (Jane) would know it”—a position I came to most thoroughly disagree with. [...]

[...] That is, the individual is not just a side issue in what people usually call the evolutionary process—but he or she is the entire issue, without which there would be no species, no survival, no exquisite web of genetic cooperation to produce living creatures of any kind whatsoever.

[...] I envisioned some hilarious episodes during which Seth, speaking through Jane, would try to explain to gatherings of medical people just who he was and what he believed. [...]