“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.

Then tonight she began writing “a fun thing” about our cats, Billy and Mitzi, who are brother and sister just 10 months old now: “In the beginning, Billy and Mitzi weren’t even kittens yet, but only bits of sky and cloud that wanted to be pussycats. Not that anyone knew what cats were, because God hadn’t created any yet. If it hadn’t been for Billy and Mitzi, cats might not exist at all….” The story sprang out of the hilarious way she’s taken to addressing Mitzi in regard to that cat’s gifts from heaven; I’ve been telling her that the affair would make a great children’s book.³ In the several pages she wrote this evening Jane presented her material quite humorously, in a manner reminiscent of, yet different from, her second Seven novel, The Further Education of Oversoul Seven, and her Emir.⁴

Jane surprised me at the last moment by asking if I wanted the session; I’d thought she was going to pass it up because of her general discontent with herself. Seth didn’t call this one book dictation, but it certainly applies to Dreams. And in his opening delivery he referred to the creative freedoms that—seemingly in spite of her conscious fussing—Jane had allowed herself today.)

In other words, subjective play is the basis for all creativity, of course—but far more, it is responsible for the great inner play of subjective and objective reality.

With all due respect, your friend [the psychologist] is, with the best of intentions, barking up the wrong psychological tree. He is very enthusiastic about his value tests, and his enthusiasm is what is important. The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of mechanical psychology, as if you could break down human values to a kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try (with humor), but representative of psychology’s best attempt to make sense of a poor hypothesis.

You may do what you wish yourselves (about taking the tests), of course, but our main purpose is to drive beyond psychology’s boundaries, and not play pussyfoot among the current psychological lilies of the field.

In effect, Ankh-Hermes has published not only a translation but a condensation. Considering the eagerness with which we’ve looked forward to having the Seth material published in other languages, and the long waiting periods involved, this situation is frustrating indeed. Many of my notes, some of which contain excerpts of Seth material, have been eliminated. So have large portions of a number of the sessions themselves. The Appendix in Seth Spreekt is only 11 pages long, chopped down from 67 pages.

“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….”

“Whenever a book is translated, it is almost impossible, of course, to say the same thing in the same way. Such a book will always be expressed through those invisible national characteristics that are so intimately involved with language—and obviously, were that not so, no book could be understood by someone of a foreign language. There are bound to be distortions, but the distortions themselves are meaningful.”

Jane and I have often been most intrigued by the obvious contradictions involved here, for what can the materialistic scientists use other than mind—or consciousness, that poor epiphenomenon—to study and dissect matter? (Not to mention that innumerable experiments have proven that “physical matter” isn’t solid or objective at all, but “only” energy!) We have, then, the paradox of mind denying its own reality, let alone its importance. As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures on earth who would seriously engage in such learned, futile behavior. It’s also very ironic, I think, that the materialists spend years acquiring their specialized educations, and prestige, both of which they then use to inform us of the ultimate futility of all of our endeavors (including their own, of course). But for the materialists, the mind-brain duality isn’t scientific in the orthodox sense. It isn’t falsifiable; that is, it cannot be stated under what precise conditions the mind-brain duality could be proven false. To which, understandably enough, those scientists who do accept the reality of mind reply that neither can the idea be falsified that only what is “physical” is real.

“Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness. But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily end up creating its own illusion. It ignores the reality of experience, the evidence of being, and in so doing it denies rather than reinforces life’s values.”

If toes had eyes,
then I could see
how my feet know where to go,
but toes are blind.
And how is it that my tongue
speaks words it cannot hear?
Because for all its eloquence,
the tongue itself is deaf,
and flaps in soundlessness.