“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

See the opening notes for Session 918, which Jane held on June 2 for Chapter 8 of Dreams. I referred to the strong local opposition to venting radioactive krypton gas from the contaminated containment building at Three Mile Island. An estimated several thousand people, not trusting the credibility of statements about safety that had been made by federal and private officials, left the area before company technicians finally began the long-delayed venting on June 29. All went well: The radiation released into the atmosphere was far below permissible limits. Surprisingly, the procedure was completed in only 13 days—considerably less than the estimated three to four weeks required for the job. The still-wary populace returned. Twelve days after the venting was completed, two engineers from TMI entered the enormous containment building on the first brief inspection trip to gather photographic, radiation, and other data.

Jane doesn’t often refer to such world events in her notes and journals, but we often talk about them. In fact, she made no notes of any kind in her 1980 journal from the middle of June to July 20, for a span of five weeks, but those two months were busy times for us professionally. In June, I started experimenting with paintings of my dream images, for use in a possible book—and this endeavor, I discovered, presented me with a whole set of challenges all by itself. I mailed the finished manuscripts for Mass Events and God of Jane to our publisher on July 2 and 18 respectively. During those times, however, I was extremely sorry to note that Jane’s physical symptoms—her difficulties “walking” and performing other routine tasks—were obviously becoming much worse.

Jane’s worsening situation through June and July, then, prepared her to accept my suggestion that Seth could help her. She put aside the first session for Chapter 9 of Dreams, and began Seth’s sessions on the magical approach to reality. As Seth remarked on August 6, when he gave his first session on the subject: “When Ruburt finished his project [God of Jane], he found himself with all of that time that was supposed to be used. He also became aware of his limitations, physically speaking: There was not much, it seemed, he could do but work, so he took the rational approach—and it says that to solve the problem you worry about it.”

In the meantime, early in August Jane had laid Seven Three aside once more and returned to the book of poetry she’d had in progress for a year.⁶ And on August 15 she happily announced that she’d come up with the complete title she had been searching for all that time: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. Her editor, Tam Mossman, enthusiastically agreed with her choice. Two days later, Jane began writing the first of the three essays she had planned for the book: “Poetry and the Magical Approach to Life.” Her choice of subject matter there was quite natural: She’d given her third session in that series two days earlier.

Besides enabling Jane to help herself physically, Seth’s magical-approach material had other beneficial aspects for her. Some of those lay in her poetry, both for her book and outside of it. On August 25, for example, on the day she delivered the sixth session for Seth on his new theme, Jane wrote the following untitled poem. I urged her to give it a title and include it in If We Live Again. Within its deceptive simplicity her poem carries profound meaning; I haven’t seen that meaning expressed any better elsewhere. If she were to sum up the results of her life’s work so far in a few lines, this poem would do the job the best of all:

See Note 7, in which I used Jane’s poem as a focus around which to offer certain pieces. Indeed, more and more as I worked on these notes for Chapter 9 of Dreams, I saw how necessary it was that I write an Introduction for the book itself—to create a framework for the presentation of all of the material in it from our private and professional lives. Of course, I couldn’t yet know everything that such a project ought to contain. Jane had mentioned a number of times that she’d help me with it. And she was playing around with the idea of a Seth book on the magical approach.

First of all, the term “schizophrenia” is of basically little value. Many people tabbed with that label should not be. There are so-called classic cases of schizophrenia—and borderline ones, so-called—but in any case the label is highly misleading and negatively suggestive.

I am making generalizations here, but each individual case should be looked at in its own light. Such people as a rule, however, have an exaggerated version of the self (pause), so idealized (long pause) that its very existence intimidates practical action. They are afraid of making mistakes, terrified of betraying this sensed inner psychological superior. Usually, such an idealized inner self comes from the acceptance of highly distorted beliefs—again, concerning good and evil. You end up with what can amount to two main inner antagonists: a superior self and a debased self. The qualities considered good are attracted to the superior self as if it were a magnet. The qualities that seem bad (underlined) are in the same fashion attracted to the debased self. Both of them, relatively isolated psychological polarities, hold about equal sway. All other psychological evidences that are ambiguous, or not clearly understood by either side, group together under their own psychological banners. This is a kind of circular rather than linear arrangement, however, psychologically speaking.

There is always an overall order to the personality, even though it is in the background, so that in any given case all of the separate “selves,” or other sources with whom the individual feels in contact, would together point toward the totality, or unity, that lies beneath. The outstanding mental phenomena, therefore, show in isolated fashions those elements of the personality that are not to be assimilated in the usual smooth fashion.

The language is an excellent example of the coded messages I mentioned earlier (as I’d thought). It is supposed to remain secret, you see, yet becomes the symbol of the all-powerful knowledge of the exaggerated superior self, while making the knowledge impossible to act upon. To translate the information would mean a more serious commitment to physical communication than that young man was willing to make.

1. I don’t mean to imply that it was particularly easy to assemble these notes. It took me days. Sometimes over the years, in my frustration at being unable to find a certain line or passage in a session, or in something Jane or I have written, I’ve ended up thinking that I merely imagined its being: “It doesn’t really exist at all,” I’ve told myself, “so why am I wasting my time looking for it?” Yet once I start hunting, it’s difficult to stop until I’ve exhausted all reasonable chances of finding what I want. Even a thorough indexing of every paper we have in the house, including each page of the Seth material, often wouldn’t locate the kinds of references I need. To suit me, I’ve told Jane more than once, the index would have to be practically as long as our lifework itself. I’ve gone through those episodes a number of times. (So have others, according to their letters, even though the books are indexed.)

When they’re published the reader will be able to see that she touched upon her physical hassles in Chapter 17 of God of Jane, for example, and referred to them in her Introduction for Mass Events. She didn’t actively object when I began to mention them more extensively in the notes for Dreams. But as Seth said in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, while discussing her goals in life: “The power of his (Ruburt’s) will is indeed awesome, and he is just beginning to feel it.” In that volume, see Session 713 for October 21, 1974. And in larger terms, if Jane is at all correct in her expression of the Seth material, then each action we’ve taken in connection with her symptoms has been valid and creative, just as each action we have yet to take will be.

“Important misunderstandings involving time have been in a large measure responsible for many of Ruburt’s difficulties, and also of your own, though of a lesser nature. All of this involves relating to reality in a more natural, and therefore magical, fashion. There is certainly a kind of natural physical time in your experience, and in the experience of any creature. It involves the rhythm of the seasons—the days and nights and tides and so forth. In the light of that kind of physical time, there is no basic cultural time … which you have transposed upon nature’s rhythms.

“It certainly seems that the best way to get specific answers is to ask specific questions, and the rational mind thinks first of all of something like a list of questions. In that regard, Ruburt’s response before such a session is natural, and to an extent magical, because he knows that no matter what he has been taught, he must to some degree (underlined) forget the questions and the mood that accompanies them with one level of his consciousness, in order to create the proper kind of atmosphere at another level of consciousness—one that allows the answers to come even though they may be presented in a different way than that expected by the rational mind.

“Life as we know it is excitement; highly organized—excitement at all levels, microscopic, macroscopic, psychic. It is the result of the relationship between balance and imbalance, between organization and ‘chaos.’ It is excitement ever in a state of flux, forming psychic and material knots. It is explosive yet filled with order; it becomes so filled with itself that it explodes in the same way that a flower bursts; the same principle is acting in a hurricane or a flood or a murder or the creation of a poem, or the formation of a dream; in the birth and death of individuals and nations. We instinctively know that disasters mimic the birth and death of cells within our bodies—we instinctively know that all life survives death, that death is the bursting of life into new forms, hence our fascination with accidents and fires. The psyche itself leapfrogs our beliefs at usual conscious levels, and sees us as a part of all life, excitedly forming all kinds of complexes which then fill themselves to the brim, exploding, escaping the framework only to form another. The emotions themselves can sense this when we let them, and grasping that sense of excitement can show us a glimpse of the even greater freedom of our own psychic existence, which flows into us as individuals and then bursts apart that short-lived form into another, as the excitement of individuation leaps from life to life.”

“Now when you understand that intellectually, then the intellect can take it for granted that its own information is not all the information you possess. It can realize that its own knowledge represents the tip of the iceberg. As you apply that realization to your life, you begin to realize furthermore that in practical terms you are indeed supported by a greater body of knowledge than you realize, and by the magical, spontaneous fountain of action that forms your existence. The intellect can then realize that it does not have to go it all alone: Everything does not have to be reasoned out, even to be understood.”

“So after all these years I find that out,” I said. “What else haven’t you told me? How come the big secret?”

“I can envision Seth’s material expanding almost endlessly just on a day-to-day basis, as he deals with events in the lives of Jane and me—and this idea conveys nothing about news of his reactions to and interactions with events on various levels of his own reality, plus other realities he may be able to reach. In Chapter 8 of Dreams, when I asked Seth what he was going to do for the rest of the evening (in our terms), he replied: ‘I am going to refresh myself by diving into some new concepts, for there are new concepts for me also, of course, and I dive into them from many positions all the time as well.’ (See the conclusion of Session 916 for May 14, 1980.) Think of the questions one could ask him relative to just this one statement! Such provocative assertions leave behind them unsatisfied voids of curiosity. Actually, most of his information does, regardless of subject matter. But obviously, if Seth did take up every moment of our temporal lives with personal material, all else would be probable.”

“First of all, however, a note primarily to Ruburt: I often quite purposefully (with amusement) break off book dictation to discuss other matters that come into your experience. This allows me to cover material from several different viewpoints, and to organize it in different fashions. Actually, however, there are several self-formed books in your material already. Do you follow me?”

“He need not feel that all sessions must be book dictation, nor feel that he is in any way negatively responsible, as he sometimes does.”

9. I do not mean the word “disturbed” to be derogatory in any sense at all. Instead I refer only to a behavioral departure from the generally accepted “norm.” As Seth said in Session 917, which was held last May 21 for Chapter 8 of Dreams: