“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of “Sayre-environment dreams,” as Seth called them. I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. I’d recently asked Jane if Seth would comment.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s psychology—knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. They are often quite aware of “willing” themselves sick to get out of difficult situations—and of willing themselves well again (with humor).¹

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”