“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.]

Right now our friend Sue Watkins, who lives better than an hour’s drive upstate, is well past the 15th chapter of Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about the ESP classes Jane held from September 1967 to February 1975. Prentice-Hall will publish it. Jane hasn’t seen Conversations yet. Next month she’ll get together with Sue to go over it, then start writing the Introduction for the book soon afterward.

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.

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.

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. “]

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.]

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.

(10:01. Now Seth discussed a couple of other questions Jane and I had, then ended the session at 10:27 P.M.

(Actually, it’s taken me a long time—a little over three years—to round out these preliminary notes for the session that follows. When I finished them, then, it was nighttime again, September 23, 1982, late, and once again I stepped off the back porch of the hill house for some fresh air. [Mitzi didn’t watch me this time.] Much has taken place in Jane’s and my lives since 1979, as it has for everyone else, but here in the light of the corner streetlight the scene outside our place was just as magical and mysterious as ever. That’s what we love about it. In the warm evening the silent road still ran uphill past the house and into the woods. The cicadas and the katydids still sounded their hypnotic rhythms, I’ve heard geese often lately, moving south in noisy waves, and we’ve had deer in our driveway several times. I looked for rabbits or ‘coon or deer now, but didn’t see any of those creatures.

Once more, as I’ve done often in recent years, I expressed the hope to myself that in another probable reality very similar to this one I opted for the outdoor life in a much stronger way—even to living outside night and day for most of the year. I must be doing so right now! In that probable life I use a tent sometimes, but I cook and sleep outside as much as possible, except in the worst weather. What a different life! I’m still a painter, I often think, but perhaps not a writer. I might be a Milton Avery or a Paul Cézanne type of artist. More and more I’ve come to admire—revere, even—the single-minded, childlike devotion artists like Avery and Cézanne had for their art. Not that I want to copy Cézanne, for instance [I couldn’t even if I wanted to], but in that other reality I too chose to live the natural life in a more naive or clear-eyed manner—to sublimate myself before nature while at the same time trying to become master of whatever means of expression I can achieve.

How strange a desire to have in these days of scientific and religious turmoil, of computers and nuclear debate and space technology. It’s almost like trying to wish oneself back into an earlier, seemingly less complicated time. That, surely, would be an illusory goal! But no matter what we may accomplish as a species, or how far we may travel, in those terms we started out utterly dependent upon our earth, with its fantastic variety of resources and life forms. That sublime framework still exists for us in all of its great beauty, and I want to always return to it: We create our human version of it each day, and I think that even now we’ve hardly begun to understand what we are and have. I’ve come to believe that the predominantly outdoor life would give me a certain understanding of our temporal and spiritual worlds impossible to grasp otherwise, and that my painting would inevitably mirror that greater comprehension. Sometimes I simply yearn for that way of living. Of course, what I’m really stressing here is living the independent life as much as possible within our ever-more-complicated national and world cultures. But we all have our dreams.

Now here is the private session listed at the beginning of these advance notes—the one I chose to present just before Seth’s actual Preface for Dreams. The opening notes that follow are pretty much as I wrote them before Jane began delivering the session on Thursday evening at 8:40, September 13, 1979. [That night, however, I could do no more than barely indicate the “extra” material I’ve just finished giving, although even then I knew much of what I wanted to cover.])

You identified, primarily now, as a poet and an artist because those designations, up to that time, seemed most closely to fit your abilities and temperaments. Ruburt’s¹ writing set him apart. Your painting set you apart. These were recognizable, tangible proofs of creativity. You therefore identified with elements, characteristics, and traditions that seemed to suit you best.

Now: When Ruburt begins to trust himself, as he has, the physical (arthritic) armor loosens. The creative abilities become even more available, hence his new creativity, and the new physical steps he has taken. They all go together.

He believed in the specific nature of the creative self, so that it could only be trusted in certain areas. He believed he needed strong mental barriers as well as physical ones, set up against his own spontaneity. He is beginning to understand that the spontaneous and creative aspects of personality are the life-giving ones. They can and must be trusted. He knows now he does not have to slow down, and that relaxation leads to motion.