“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth actually began his Preface for this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, with the next, 881st session, which Jane delivered for him 12 days later [on September 25]. I chose to present this private session first because in it Seth offers certain information about Jane and me that I think applies to all of our work with him, through the session and books, and to our own separate creative lives as well. Especially do I like to interpret his material tonight as meaning that Jane is “a psychic or a mystic,” for to me, at least, this means that in this physical life she’s chosen to penetrate as deeply as she can the depths of reality, or consciousness.

Later in these notes I also plan to include, as a partial answer to many who have written us on the subject, material Seth gave on animal consciousness; this information came through just three days ago, in the 878th session for September 10. In the meantime I want to tie together Dreams and the last Seth-Jane book, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Seth completed his work on Mass Events about a month ago [on August 15], and a week later I began finishing my notes for it. This will require at least several months. At the same time I’ll be taking Jane’s dictation for Dreams. Along with my painting and dream recording, both of which I do in the mornings, all of these activities come together in just the kind of busy, creative life I greatly enjoy. As for Jane, she couldn’t be more pleased to be so involved with all she’s doing.

I wrote quite a bit in Mass Events about our publishing activities, just to show for the record how complicated certain aspects of the creative life can be as we juggled sessions, manuscripts, proofreading, and deadlines [to list a few of our endeavors]; we “worked” at any time of the day or night—which didn’t bother us at all. Since a lot of that kind of information was presented in Mass Events, Jane and I don’t intend for much of it in Dreams. Rather, after indicating in this Preface the continuity between the two books, I’ll discuss briefly a few other subjects we feel deeply about. All of them are related to our work with the Seth material and Mass Events, however, and will, I’m sure, be reflected in Dreams. Beyond that, I have little idea of how many notes of Jane’s and mine, or quotations from nonbook sessions, for example, we’ll be adding to this book.

Our lives do indeed seem to revolve around book projects and events! First, let me update the creative activities Jane was involved in while Seth and she were finishing Mass Events.

As of last May, when she laid it aside to begin work on her own The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, Jane had some 17 chapters in fairly good shape for her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time. By now she’s written 15 chapters, rough first draft, for God of Jane, and done notes for a number of others, out of a total of perhaps 25; she knows she’ll return to Seven when she’s through with the much more personal God of Jane. Since she’s finished her Seth part of the work for Mass Events, three days ago she began writing the Introduction to that book. She’s been painting, answering mail, and writing poetry. Jane would especially like to do another book of poetry, since she published Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time way back in 1975. She talks about doing this rather often, then reads through the collections of poems she’s built up over the years. She’s even made a few notes about such a venture. [Personally, I just wish I had more time to sit quietly and reread some of her poetry.]

(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We’re having the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the hill in back of the house echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so that Mitzi couldn’t get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We’d had Mitzi spayed three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.

I’d looked for the shape of a rabbit last night, hopping across the silent road like an upright shadow casting a shadow, as I’d seen one do the other evening. I didn’t see a rabbit, but I did hear a flight of geese approaching from the north above the cloud cover. And that growing cacophony, perhaps my favorite sound in all of nature, reminded me that I’d closed out Mass Events by writing about geese. I’d also mentioned the status of Three Mile Island, however, the nuclear energy generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us, in Pennsylvania. Because of a combination of mechanical failure and human error, one of the two reactors at TMI had come very close to a meltdown of the uranium fuel in its core. A potentially disastrous situation had developed, one that could have involved many thousands of people and several thousand square miles of land. It seemed incredible now that that accident had taken place only six months ago.

Enjoying the sounds of life in the mysterious nighttime, I intuitively understood that not only did I want to mention in this Preface the feelings Jane and I have about Three Mile Island as a technological and scientific entity, embodying man’s attempts to extract new forms of energy [and yes, consciousness, in our joint opinion] from the far more basic and profound quality Seth calls All That Is; I also knew that I wanted to indicate how the very idea of nuclear energy, as an attribute of a national focus, compared with the situation in the Middle Eastern country of Iran. Iran is undergoing a revolution of a strongly religious, fundamentalist-Islamic character. [Islam means “peace,” by the way.] The force of Iran’s upheaval makes the growing Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States seem tame indeed by comparison; therefore I want to concentrate upon the Iranian dilemma rather than the religious conflicts in our own country.

In Mass Events, along with TMI Seth had discussed the tragedy of Jonestown—where in November 1978 over 900 Americans had died [by murder or suicide] for a religious cause in faraway Guyana, South America. Last night I realized that in these notes for Dreams I also wanted to refer to the religious revolution in Iran while reminding the reader of the events in Jonestown. For to me, and to Jane also, I’m sure, Three Mile Island and Jonestown-Iran represent powerful extremes or directions in large-scale human behavior: certain aspects of religion and science seemingly at opposite poles of the human psyche, as it were.

Just as though it had been waiting for the right moment last night, a screech owl began to sound its sorrowful descending cry in the black woods on the hill behind our house. The barking of the geese started to fade. At least from my viewpoint, each of nature’s rhythmic signs implied a continuity, an inevitability and security, that I’ve often felt is lacking in our all-too-human affairs—this, even though I wrote in Mass Events that Jane and I are aware, of course, of all the “good things” we humans have constructed in our mass reality. Actually, I thought, our concepts of religion and science aren’t as contradictory as at first they may seem to be. In Mass Events Seth spent considerable time discussing the deeper and very similar meanings behind both of those belief systems—or cults, as he called them—and Jane and I hope he continues to do so in Dreams. Now it even seems to us that in Mass Events Seth began preparing us for Dreams long before Jane and he ever mentioned that work by name.

Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic orientation is directly opposed to the secular or worldly view of government espoused in Western lands. Horrendous as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. Iran is an entire country, whereas Jonestown was one fragile settlement confined within the jungles of an alien land. Iran can “infect” other nations or peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do so. Nuclear power can do the same thing with a new scientific force that can be even more devastating if not carefully “controlled” [in our terms]. To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and literally take on lives of their own. And really, I thought, it could have hardly been an accident on consciousness’s part that as the events at tiny Jonestown receded from world attention, the revolution in Iran began to dramatically increase. To me the religious correlations are obvious.

After six months, then, Three Mile Island is still “a closed enigma,” as I wrote in finishing Mass Events—only now the costs for the repair and cleanup of its damaged reactor have been projected as being well over $1 billion instead of the $40 million to $400 million of just a month ago, and into many years of “time” instead of just four. TMI has become the unfortunate symbol of our unprepared experimentation with a nature that contains all sorts of surprises for us; especially when, as Seth maintains, each of those “surprises,” once created, becomes conscious in its own way. [I do believe that this kind of thinking is totally unacceptable to most businessmen, as well as generally to the public they serve, the irony here being that neither businessman or scientist can explain what that fantastic nuclear energy—or any energy, for that matter—really is. In the frontmatter, see the first of the four quotations from Seth; the one taken from a private session given just two months ago: “All energy contains consciousness (underlined). … A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world. “]

I’d rather write about the nature that Jane and I live amid here at the hill house, I suppose, but it seems that in the beginning each great secret we uncover in our world is a “natural” one. Nuclear energy was supposed to transform life on our planet—until we began to encounter unexpected challenges with safety, the disposal of radioactive wastes, corrosion, cost, poor workmanship, aging equipment, and many other obstacles. Nuclear energy’s science and technology had always been isolated from most of us. Very gradually its ambience actually became threatening and psychologically “unnatural.” In the case of Three Mile Island, that energy, that consciousness, balanced on the edge of running out of our mundane control.

If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious expression long before it began recording history. This year [1979], Iran has turned into a land in which all Western nations—but particularly the United States—have become anathema. Iran’s religious leaders actually run the country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he fled his country last January. [Now, looking tired and ill, he travels the world with his expensive entourage, looking for a safe place to live after leading 25 years of savage oppression in his homeland.]

The religious and scientific mass consciousnesses released in Iran and the United States respectively reach far beyond their countries of origin, obviously. Indeed, I think those attributes of All That Is must have long ago formed strong portions of the psychic atmosphere that, one might say, encircles the earth and affects all below. Those forces or consciousnesses must also constantly replenish themselves: Iran’s religious leaders devoutly nourish their country’s hatred for the United States, while here at home no less than six separate teams or commissions have begun investigations—on private, state, and federal levels—of what went wrong at Three Mile Island. Many younger people [and not only in the United States] have become very fatalistic over the possibility of nuclear accident, or worse, war. Some even refuse to bring children into a world they believe their elders have created for them [in those terms]. And most older people avoid seriously considering what nuclear war would really mean for them, out of fear closing their minds to certain aspects of that psychic atmosphere.

Jane and I try to keep in mind Seth’s ideas, as well as our own, concerning the great challenges our species has chosen to deal with these days, but I must admit that we often have trouble doing so. It seems to us that even if they privately agreed with us, our world leaders would have even more trouble implementing such thinking, for in their positions of “power” they’re quite locked into their national statuses by centuries of custom and history. To initiate truly original and/or revolutionary forms of beneficial governmental and mass behavior would be extraordinarily difficult.

In my opinion these are hardly predictions, but instead very conservative projections of already well-established phenomena: I don’t for a minute think that any country, let alone our species as a whole, will give up on nuclear power. Nor will Iran, or the United States, or a number of other nations, dispense with fundamentalist religion of whatever kind. I believe that those particular aspects of scientific consciousness and religious consciousness will be with us for a very long time, for in our chosen earthly reality a larger consciousness—and, ultimately, All That Is—has opted for much long-range exploration of those two closely related portions of itself. In our probability we can create both very transcendent and very painful portions of that dual exploration. I think those particular aspects of mankind’s search for answers will grow ever more powerful for a number of years, until their very excesses finally lead to their “evolution” into forces that are much more controlled and compassionate and understanding.

I vividly remember that in the last chapter [7] of Mass Events Seth remarked: “The universe is—and you can pick your own terms—a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation, and not, in your usual vocabulary, an objective manifestation.” [See the 855th session for May 21, 1979. I find it amazing that Jane came through with that session only four months ago.]

The feelings Jane and I have for animals almost automatically lead us to associate at least some of the implications of Seth’s statement with another one he’d given earlier in Mass Events. I remember it equally well, and find it fascinating. In Chapter 5, see the 832nd session for January 29, 1979: “Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their ‘civilizations’ are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.”

I often consider those insights when observing both the wild and domesticated animal life, as well as the bird life, around the hill house. Much earlier in these preliminary notes I wrote that we’d had our cat Mitzi spayed almost three weeks ago [on August 27, to be exact], and that her littermate, Billy, is to be neutered early next year. I mentioned the guilt Jane and I feel because we’re depriving the cats of their reproductive roles in life, and because we don’t let them run free in the environment. I also noted that in a session on animal consciousness Jane held just three days ago, Seth had to some extent assuaged our feelings on such questions, and that his information will be of value to others. The session, the 878th, was held on September 10, 1979, and it began at 9:07 P.M. Monday—just five regular sessions after Seth had completed his work on Mass Events, and three before he began Dreams. Earlier that day I’d made a wadded-up paper ball for Mitzi to play with. Using her lightning-quick reflexes, she kept knocking it around the living room and beneath Jane’s rocker as my wife went into trance, then began to speak. Here are session excerpts:)

Observing the antics of your Mitzi gives me an excuse to begin the topic of the evening: animal consciousness.

It is somewhat fashionable to see man as … the creature who dirties his own nest, and I am not condoning much of man’s behavior in that regard. However, there are other issues, and questions seldom asked. You ignore the fact that [overall] the consciousness of animals has its own purposes and intents. It is true that animals are slaughtered under the most cruel of circumstances for human consumption—for then (underlined) they are treated simply as foodstuff.

(Pause.) Buffaloes do not roam as they did before. There are thousands of farm-bred animals, however [and have been], all throughout civilization, alive for a time, well-cared-for for a time—animals who in usual terms would not exist except for man’s “gluttonous” appetite for meat. That is the way the issue is often considered. It seldom occurs to anyone that certain forms of animal consciousness came in physical form [by choice], that certain species are prized by man and protected, or that the consciousnesses of such animals had anything at all to do with such an [overall] arrangement.

Remember here other material given about cellular communication, for example, and the vast web of intercommunication that unites all species. Of course animals can communicate with man, and of course man can communicate with other species—with all species. Such communication has always gone on. Man cannot afford to become aware of such communication at this point, simply because your entire culture is based upon the idea of the animals’ “natural” subordinate position. The men who slaughter animals cannot afford to treat those animals as possessors of living consciousnesses.

(Long pause at 9:26.) There is, beneath it all, an important unity, a sense of communion, as one portion of earth’s living consciousness dies to insure the continued life of all nature. That natural sacrament, however, turns into something else entirely when the gift is so misunderstood, and when the donor is treated so poorly….

Consciousness is filled with content—any kind of consciousness. [The farmer’s] animals understand that in a certain fashion he is a midwife, responsible for some of their births. Food comes from his hands. The animals understand, on their own, that life on any terms that are physical ends with death—that the physical properties must be returned to the earth from which they came….

(Pause at 9:45.) [Animals] do not blame [human beings] for anything. If as a species you really found yourselves communicating with the animals, you would have an entirely different culture, a culture that would indeed bring about an alteration of consciousness of the most profound nature.

Cats in the wild were, in those terms of time, exploring one kind of nature. In that kind of nature, with a natural population taken care of in the environment, there would be far fewer cats than there are now. Your cats would not exist. Why does it seem antinatural, even slightly perverse, for a household cat to, say, prefer fine cat food from a can, when it seems that he should be eating mice, perhaps, or dining upon grasshoppers? The household cat is exploring a different kind of nature, in which he has a certain relationship to human consciousness, a relationship that changes the reality of his particular kind of consciousness.

Your cats are as alive in all ways inside of the house as out. They understand their relationship with your human reality. They enjoy contributing in your life as much as any wild animal enjoys being a part of its group. Their consciousnesses lean in a new direction, feel about the edges of concepts, sense openings of awareness of a different kind, and form alliances of consciousness quite as natural as any other.

Inevitably, Seth’s specific references to cats had reminded me of certain other intriguing passages of his in Mass Events. I found I’d presented them therein as excerpts from nonbook sessions in Chapter 6: See Note 2 for the 840th session. Both of the following quotations from that material contain vast implications—and should these ideas ever become well known, Jane and I feel, they’ll be sure to arouse the deep opposition of a number of vested interests.

From Session 837 for February 28, 1979: “There is no such things as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses.”

From Session 838 for March 5, 1979: “If there is no consciousness ‘tailored’ to be a cat’s or a dog’s, then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either….”)

(Jane had been so relaxed, so physically at ease yesterday—as she has been often lately—that we’d passed up our regularly scheduled Wednesday night session. At the same time she’s been extremely inspired and creative recently, working on her own God of Jane and the Introduction for Seth’s Mass Events, turning out many pages of excellent material for those works. Even though she was again very relaxed today, she was also active writing. In fact, after supper she produced two more pages of notes that she “picked up” from Seth on his new book Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment.

We held the session in the living room, as usual. Jane yawned, then laughed as we waited for Seth to come through. “I keep trying to change that title, though….” After a prolonged juggling of titles and themes on her own, she’d finally acquired the book’s title directly from Seth some seven weeks ago, or shortly before July 30, 1979; see the closing note for Session 869 in Chapter 10 of Mass Events. “I just think that ‘value fulfillment’ is a strange phrase to use in a book title,” Jane said. “It’s too unfamiliar—I’m afraid it’ll confuse the reader. I keep thinking of something simpler, like Dreams and Evolution: A Seth Book. And without ‘Evolution’ being in quotes, too. Or how about Dreams, Evolution, and Creativity …?”

Jane had suggested an earlier session, although I hadn’t really thought she’d hold one at all. My only recent concern has been that she not let the sessions go on a regular basis just because I’m working on the notes for Mass Events.

“I think I’m about ready….” After she went so easily into trance, Jane’s delivery was very active and energetic—in most definite contrast to the near-bleary-eyed state she’d been in before Seth began speaking. This is a transformation that I’ve seen happen often: that familiar but always exciting and mysterious influx of energy and/or consciousness.)

Ruburt was correct in his introductory notes (for Mass Events) today—about the poet’s long-forgotten abilities, and his role. Ruburt has been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term. For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain as methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.