“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

As I moved down the driveway I was thinking of what I wanted to cover next in these notes. The night was warm, heavily overcast, and mysterious: The streetlight down at the corner of our lot cast long shadows up the road running past the house and into the woods. The rhythmic, almost harsh sounds of the insects were strongly reminiscent of the long camping seasons my father had treated his family to many years ago. [I remembered holding an amazingly delicate, green-colored katydid in my hand as a child. My father had taken my brother and me into the woods one night, at first tracking one of the insects by its sound, until finally he’d been able to illuminate with his flashlight the katydid as it perched on a branch at just the right height for us.]

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.

In our terms, then, it’s certainly foolish for scientists to expect that the peoples of the world are simply going to dispense with religion just because scientists want them to, calling them “deluded” or worse. It’s just as foolish for those who are religious, even though they outnumber the scientists by far, to expect most scientists to embrace religion, to surrender their agnosticism or atheism, to give up their mechanistic, reductionist views of life—their attempts to use a series of “logical” steps to reduce the human being, say, to his or her ever-lower components, right down to the atomic level. [God is, therefore, unnecessary.] And this, of course, even though the scientists cannot explain where the universe we know came from, or where “it” may be going. They can only speculate about such massive concepts via theories like the currently popular “big bang” origin of the universe, with all of its implied consequences, or through the much lesser-known “inflationary model.” Nor can scientists tell us, any better than the religious-minded can, what life itself is, or where “it” came from, or where “it” may be going.

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.

I want you both, then, to understand that in the greater light of creativity, understanding its true meaning, you have taken the right course, and therefore drop from your minds any lingering ideas of conflict and doubt. Such a stand will automatically clear up all problems involving things like taxes, sex roles, or whatever—on both of your parts.

(9:16 P.M. And right at the end of the session, Jane’s head flopped down loosely as she quickly returned to the very relaxed state she’d been in before speaking for Seth.)