“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’ll skip ahead a bit here by noting that on August 15 four nuclear technicians made the second entry into the containment building—again, to acquire more information for future entries. [Two of the men were so strongly affected by the heat inside their heavy protective clothing that they decided to cut short their trip.] The reactor reclamation task is now projected to cost more than $760 million, and to take at least five years.

The head of the Subsidiary Rights department at Prentice-Hall had informed Jane that four copies of the film option contract were in the mail.⁴ By the first of August we’d had our attorney check, sign, and notarize the contracts, Jane and I had signed them, and I’d returned them to our publisher. It has been an extremely slow-moving project, but The Education of Oversoul Seven may yet be a movie.

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.”

I was delighted when Jane began to show physical improvements almost at once during those early August days, and so was she. It’s not contradictory to note that during August and September, following his regular schedule of twice-weekly sessions, Seth methodically presented some very exciting concepts. So closely do those 13 sessions fit together that it’s most difficult to give excerpts.⁵ Seth’s magical-approach material represents one of his best efforts to help us, as well as others. Jane’s difficulties certainly inspired them, but their creativity also goes beyond our own needs. And as soon as I realized she was going to continue the series for a while, I jokingly asked her what was going on: “What do you think you’re up to, hon? Are you doing a book within a book, or what?” My wife didn’t answer yes or no, but I could see that she was pleased, and that she was thinking about it. The title of the new book would be automatic: The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book.

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:

Now from the private session for Wednesday evening, August 6, 1980 (and with some occasional paraphrasing):

C. From the second session on the magical approach; Jane held it on Monday evening, August 11, 1980:

D. From the third session on the magical approach, Wednesday evening, August 13, 1980. Seth made certain comments that led to my writing this note: