“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A close friend, one who used to attend Jane’s ESP class, had called our unlisted number to ask one of us some psychic questions. Jane had been jolted out of trance, of course. After I hung up we wondered why our friend, who knows our usual routine so well, hadn’t realized that we’d probably be having a session at this time on a Monday evening.

(Long pause.) The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative (underlined) psychological face that you use for the purposes of your life’s drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that you mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play’s formal structure. You cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past.

1. These excerpts from the session for April 9 (which we hadn’t requested, by the way) indicate Seth’s response to discussions Jane and I had been having about our personal functions as artists, as well as the use of art generally in our chosen probable reality. As usual, Seth had added his own wider, penetrating views:

In a strange way, determinism has always seemed lacking as a concept to Jane and me—for if it means what it’s supposed to mean, then surely human beings set up the parameters within which determinism is said to operate. I see this as a contradiction of the notion that the individual is entirely at the mercy of his or her history and of nature. How can we be, if through the ages we’ve created that history and nature against which we react? In other words, on joint and individual scales, vast though they may be, we do create our joint and individual realities.

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.”

Even in modern terms, our psychological and medical knowledge of mind and brain have added more complications to the doctrine of free will, yet it survives and grows. And all the while I worked on this note, I felt strong connections involving free will, determinism, and probable realities—connections largely unexpressed and unexplored in our world’s societies.