“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.

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.

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. “]

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.

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.

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.

You have forgotten, conveniently, how much you learned from all of the animals, as I have mentioned in past sessions. You learned a good deal of medicine from watching animal behavior: You learned what plants to avoid, and which to cultivate. You learned how to rid yourself of lice by going into the water. You learned social behavior by watching the animals. At one time you could identify with animals, and they with you to a remarkable degree. They have been your teachers, though they did not choose your path. Obviously, you could not have gone your way [as a species] had it not been for the animals.

Domesticated animals have their own reasons for choosing such a state. It is, for example, usual enough to think that your cats (Billy and Mitzi) should ideally run outside in the open, because in the wild that is what cats would do.

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.

(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.])

To some extent you had your own niches, recognizable by society even if they were relatively (underlined) unusual. You did not know that there was a deeper, older, or richer tradition—a more ancient heritage—to which you belonged, because you found no hint of it in your society. It seemed at different times since our sessions began that there were disruptive conflicts. For example: Was Ruburt a writer or was he a psychic? Were you an artist, or weren’t you? What about the writing you did—both for our books, and the writing that you sometimes plan to do on your own?

1. Those who are familiar with the Seth material know this, so I ask their forbearance while I reproduce for “new” readers Note 3 for Session 679, in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality: