“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane and I haven’t had any sessions for the last 12 days, while we worked on God of Jane and Mass Events respectively. “I feel like having a short session tonight,” she said, “but it won’t be for Dreams. I have a few ideas he’ll discuss….” Yet when Seth came through his material certainly sounded like book work to me.)

10:10 P.M. “He slips it in on me, that’s what he does,” Jane remarked, when I kidded her about saying the session couldn’t be for Dreams. I also told her that it’s one of her best. She recalled that back in her 20s—some 15 years before she initiated the Seth material—she’d written a series of poems about our species returning to the earth from space. “And here’s Seth saying that it’s actually happened that way—at least in some probable realities,” she said. “It’s an old science-fiction idea.”

The session had been one of those in which Jane thought a great deal of time was passing. She was surprised to learn that it had lasted only 55 minutes, yet she felt that she’d come through with a good amount of interesting information.²)

However, let us remember that when creating and experiencing a challenge, on any scale, consciousness may choose a predominantly positive or negative focus, or it may seek to achieve a balance. While some utility companies in the United States are in trouble with their nuclear plants, then, other companies do own plants that perform very well and very economically. They have excellent safety records. Those companies are to be congratulated. There’s talk that the nuclear power industry will fail in our country, but Jane and I don’t think it will. What haunts many people, especially those living downwind from nuclear facilities, are the horrifying consequences that could result from an accident that released unchecked radioactivity into the environment. This chance, no matter how remote it may be, exists in every country in the world that has even one nuclear establishment. It’s just as real for those nations that are even thinking of going the nuclear way. So consciousness is really exploring the nuclear question in global terms, even though here in Dreams I usually deal with its “local” aspects.

2 After the session I wanted to tie in Seth’s material on infinity with mathematical ideas of that concept, but my reading soon convinced me that such an idea was too involved a task for a simple note like this. However, I told Jane, in his own way Seth had incorporated mathematical ideas in his material: I saw correlations between his probable realities, his intervals, and the concept of an infinite number of points on a line—and that some mathematical definitions of infinity are considered to be more basic, or of a greater order, than others. Actually, in various branches of mathematics, from the works of Euclid (the Greek mathematician who flourished around 300 B.C.) to modern information theory, I found many relationships with Seth’s ideas. I do think that Seth’s material on the “origin” of our universe can be termed an “ideal point,” embracing our mathematical systems, and that his concept of All That Is has no “limits” in mathematical terms. I do not know whether my comments here will make sense to mathematicians.

My tentative inquiries led me to ask Jane if she thought the axioms of Euclidean geometry, say, are innately valid in describing the mind’s inner reaches, or whether, in ordinary terms, those propositions represent conscious acquired interpretations of our visual experience. She hadn’t thought about it. When I asked her where she might have obtained her intuitive mathematical knowledge, she just laughed.

Jane was born in a hospital in Albany, New York, on May 8, 1929, but grew up in nearby Saratoga Springs. She began working at the variety store in the summer of 1945, when she was 16 years old. It was her first job; she had to get working papers and a Social Security number. She was always nervous in the store. “I remember when the war ended that summer,” she said, meaning Japan’s surrender to end World War II on August 14. “They closed the store to celebrate.” That fall she continued on the job after school hours, and on an occasional Saturday.