“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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:

One of the tactics leaders in the West are still pursuing is to organize world opinion against the Soviet stay in Afghanistan and the war between Iraq and Iran. Jane and I think that both situations, furnishing as they do large-scale frameworks for the almost endless convolutions of consciousness, may persist for many years, with no formal resolutions materializing. Russia may simply annex Afghanistan as the years pass. Perhaps the Iraqi-Iranian war will subside because of the exhaustion of those countries. I speculated that the overall revolutionary and fundamentalistic consciousness of Iran is like a creative vortex, surrounded by other great national consciousnesses that are strongly resisting its policies for their own creative religious and political reasons. A look at a map will show what I mean: Iran has Iraq and Turkey on its western border, with Russia to its north and Afghanistan on its east; Pakistan lies on Iran’s eastern border also; south of Iran, across the narrow Persian Gulf, cluster the mix of large and small wealthy states on the Arabian peninsula. The Moslem Kurds of Iran and Iraq, minority peoples with strong roots in eastern Turkey, are rebelling against the military forces of their respective countries; and Pakistan has become a place of shelter for refugees from Afghanistan. That whole area in the Middle East, then, is a stew of emotions, actions, and consciousnesses.

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.

He requires undue amounts of praise and attention from others, since he obviously will get little from himself. In a fashion, to an extent he will refuse to be accountable for his actions—therefore taking them out of the frame of judgment within which other people must operate. He then can avoid putting his “talents and superior abilities” to the test, where he feels he would certainly fail. He half realizes that the superior self and the debased self are both of psychological manufacture. His abilities are not really that grand. His failures are not nearly that disastrous. The belief in these highly contrasting elements of personality keep him in a state of turmoil, however, so that he feels powerless to act in any concerted fashion.

“The natural person is indeed the magical person, and you have both to some extent had very recent (telepathic) examples of such activity…. Framework 2 has been a rather fascinating but mainly (underlined) hypothetical framework, in that neither of you have really been able to put it to any perceivable use in your terms. This is not to say that it has not been operating. You have not had the kind of feedback, however, that you want.

“When you were both intensely involved in your projects (Mass Events and God of Jane), just finished, you let much of your inner experience slide, relatively speaking. Since then, however, you have each been struck by the magical ease with which you seemed, certainly, to perceive and act upon information that you did not even realize you possessed.

“Being your own natural and magical self when you dream, you utilize information that is outside of the time context experienced by the so-called rational mind. The creative abilities operate in the same fashion, appearing within consecutive time, but with the main work done outside of it entirely…. When you were both working on your projects, your cultural time was taken up in a way you found acceptable. When the projects were done, particularly with Ruburt, there was still the cultural belief that time should be so used (underlined), that creativity must be directed and disciplined to fall into the proper assembly-line time slots.