“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While Jane has been enjoying many periods of ease and relaxation, she’s also had bouts of blueness over her general stiffness and walking difficulties [her “symptoms”]. But she’s finally dispensed with the last stages of her cold, which had turned out to be much heavier than mine, and is feeling a resurgence of energy for the sessions. Her own work has been going well for the most part, however—she expects to finish Chapter 12 of God of Jane tomorrow. Because of her concentration on that hook she hasn’t done much on her book of poetry, If We Live Again, since late February; and as I mentioned in the Preface for Dreams, she laid aside her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, in May 1979 when she began God of Jane. As for myself, I’ve progressed to working with Session 860 [for June 13, 1979], which bridges chapters 8 and 9 in Mass Events.

Through the centuries philosophical and religious thinkers have created numerous complicated variations of ideas involving free will and determinism, so that neither thesis is as simple as it first appears to be. Man related the concept of free will long ago to the question of whether he could deliberately choose evil, for example. He still does. And he still struggles with questions about his freedom before God’s omnipotence and foreknowledge, and whether those qualities cause events, or can cause them, and whether they involve predestination. Opposing determinism is the idea that man has always fought for his personal responsibility—that instead of being controlled entirely by his heritage, he’s capable of forming new syntheses of thought and action based upon the complicated patterns of his own history.

I want to add that even with ideas of religious determinism—that man cannot know God’s will, for instance, or is quite dependent upon that divine grace—we’re still creating our conscious ideas of what God is, in those terms. So once again we have a determinism that operates within our sensual and intellectual boundaries: another framework within which we ceaselessly attempt to understand “the meaning of life.”