“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Five scheduled session dates have passed since we held the 884th session three weeks ago; we missed four of those, but did hold a private, or deleted, session on October 10. We’ve been busy. Jane has been working hard on her God of Jane. He’s also written a number of poems. [Some of them are on reincarnation, and I plan to present them when Seth gets into that subject in Dreams.] On October 7, a Sunday, Jane saw for the first time the work Sue Watkins has done on Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about the ESP classes Jane used to hold. The project is turning out to be much longer than Sue had thought it would be, and she still has a few chapters to go. The two women spent the day going over the manuscript, and I had a chance to read some of it also. Later Sue laughingly admitted that she’d been nervous at first, imagining all kinds of adverse reactions either Jane or I might have—but she’s doing a fine job. She has complete freedom to do Conversations in her own way. The next day Jane began making notes for the introduction she’s to write for the book.

(9:33.) There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man’s consciousness by which he ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity within him is never fooled.

Our visiting psychologist left us a couple sets of the tests Seth referred to. Jane had resisted filling them out during our meeting with him, and has little intention of doing so now. Even our guest said the tests were very experimental; I believe that actually a colleague of his had devised them in large part. I thought they’d been [perhaps unwittingly] oriented in certain negative directions—that is, the one taking the test has to choose from a series of more or less negative possibilities, listing specific choices in an order that depends upon his or her personal belief systems—I think.

“My own position cannot be as immediate as your own,” Seth said on October 10. “I respect your emotional reactions, whatever they are, and your right to them. (Loudly and amused:) Seth, it seems, speaks a bit more briefly in Dutch than he does in English—but the material is there, and if the Dutch have cut it, or your notes, it is, in the most basic of terms, now, their loss. Agreements of a legal order should, however, always be honored, and each society has been built upon that precept….”

5. By now, a number of the world’s leading scientists in the physical disciplines have publicly stated their beliefs that basically consciousness plays the primary role in our world and/or universe. For reasons too complicated to go into here, this attitude prevails even with some mathematicians who seek to penetrate to the core of our reality as they understand it.

Aside from anything Seth has said or ever may say about other probable realities, or even about human origins here on earth, I think it most risky at this stage in history for anyone—scientist or not—to dogmatically state that life has no meaning, or is a farce, or that attributes of our reality of which we can only mentally conceive at this time do not really exist. Discoveries in the “future” are quite apt to prove such limited viewpoints wrong. The history of science itself contains many examples of theories and “facts” gone awry. Moreover, why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as epiphenomenalism through which to comprehend our reality? Or better yet, why does it in large part? Truly, our individual and collective ignorance of just our own probable reality is most profound at this time in our linear history (in those terms). Jane and I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately, as a result of mankind’s restless search for meaning, we didn’t end up returning in a new official way to our ancient concepts of spirit within everything, animate and inanimate. Such an updated animistic/vitalistic view would take into account discoveries ranging from subnuclear events to the largest imaginable astronomical processes in our observable universe. Human beings do know their own worth, as Seth stated in this session.

“There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning. That belief may well be a biological imperative. If we were as science maintains—only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos—then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?