“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This is Jane’s first “regular” session in four months. It’s a nonbook one, and I’ll comment later on why I’m presenting it in Dreams. Right now, I just want to note that since she gave the last session for this book, the 919th on June 9, Jane has come through with a series of 15 private, or deleted, sessions—13 of them on what Seth calls “the magical approach to reality.”

I plan to mention certain secular affairs that I’ve kept track of while Jane has been producing Dreams, but mainly these notes will deal with personal and professional events in our own lives. I’ve organized most of the material in a roughly chronological order. Some of it I took from Jane’s daily journal for 1980, some from my own notes and files, and some from private sessions. Portions of it came from Dreams itself. And we put some of it together simply through our conversations.¹ I also remind the reader that everything described took place within the overall context of an extended presidential campaign in this country.

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.”

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.

That first, July 23rd entry at Three Mile Island took place on day 263 of the seizing of the American hostages in Iran. See Note 1 for Session 919, in Chapter 7 of Dreams, wherein I reviewed not only Iran’s concern over the Russian invasion of its eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, in late December 1979, but also Iran’s border clashes with its western neighbor, Iraq, during the past year. Finally, on September 23 [day 325 of the hostage situation], the inevitable happened in the very unstable Middle East: Amid that explosive mixture of secular and religious national consciousnesses “at work” there, Iraq launched an outright invasion of Iran. Quickly Iraq began to gobble up large portions of Iranian territory. The whole Western world became alarmed, for economic reasons as well as others.

At the beginning of the notes for this 920th session I wrote that the session isn’t dictation for Dreams. Yet it is, of course, since in it Seth illuminates from still another perspective his concept of value fulfillment.⁸ The session grew out of the encounter we had yesterday afternoon with an unexpected visitor from out of state. Seth hardly mentions the individual involved, however, but instead goes into the subject of mental illness in more inclusive terms. I see many correlations between this evening’s material and that in Session 917 for Chapter 8; there, among other things, Seth had discussed the reasoning mind, the imaginative mind, and schizophrenia. That session had been triggered, at least in part, by a letter Jane had found to be quite upsetting.

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.

3. In Chapter 6 for Volume 1 of Dreams, see Session 907.

4. In Chapter 2 for Volume 1 of Dreams, see the opening notes for Session 885.

“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.

6. In Chapter 8 of Dreams, see the opening notes for Session 915.

“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.”

“I believe a great memory must be involved here, one that on deeper levels is coupled with a shortening of time as we think of it. Seth-Jane’s abilities remind me of material I wrote recently on how certain portions of the psyche must very shrewdly and carefully construct dreams in advance, so when the dreams are played back they render just the right messages to the other part or parts of the psyche that need them. I’m not being contradictory here when I write that dreams are also spontaneous productions.”

Our exchange had quickly reminded me of a note I’d written a couple of weeks ago, and hadn’t placed yet in Dreams:

“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.”

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: