“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.

By then, my wife was almost always uncomfortable to some degree, and sometimes in outright pain. She had to sit on a high stool to do the dishes. She still walked by leaning on her typing table and pushing it forward step by step—but she did this much less frequently, perhaps only once or twice a day. Instead, it became routine for her to get around the house by using her feet to draw herself along as she sat in her wheeled office chair. She seldom left the house; she could barely maneuver down the two steps into the garage off her writing room, and into our car. Jane had a lot of trouble getting into the shower. She had much difficulty sitting for the long hours she spent at her desk. Her fingers didn’t work easily when she typed, or wrote with pen and pencil, or held a paintbrush.

Jane resisted lying down a couple of times a day to get some relief, although usually I was able to talk her into doing so. For many complex reasons she refused to go the conventional medical route, as she always had—and I felt [and still do] that my own hang-ups in that area prevented me from helping her as much as I should have. Instead, Jane insisted upon trying to use her abilities to help herself. I grieved to see my wife in such distress, but ultimately could do little beyond helping her get as comfortable as possible. Among other things, I bought her a water-filled cushion for her chair. It gave her some relief, but she needed much more help than that.²

By the fourth week in July, a few days after finishing God of Jane, Jane was reading over the 17 chapters she’d done on her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time.³ She made notes for Seven Three, as she called it. Then she wrote in her journal on the 24th: “I was looking over Seven Three for the first time in 14 months when sub rights called about the movie contract for the first Seven—so that’s no coincidence! May finish the third Seven next. Pleased with what I’ve read so far!”

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:

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.

Early in September Tam mailed back to us, for our approval, the copy-edited 484-page manuscript for Mass Events. An independent reader had gone over our labors line by line, checking for everything from grammar and contradictions to philosophy, “flagging” questions for us by noting them on slips of pink paper taped to the appropriate manuscript pages. Along with our other projects—including answering a steady flow of letters—Jane and I spent the month going over Mass Events, accepting some suggestions but rejecting many others. On the 13th we received from Sue Watkins our first copy of Volume 1 of Conversations With Seth, Sue’s excellent account of the ESP classes Jane used to hold in one of the two apartments we rented in downtown Elmira, before we moved to the hill house outside of town in 1975. Sue was now working on the last two chapters of the second and last volume of Conversations. Early in October I returned Mass Events to our publisher once more; it was ready to be set in type. Jane kept at her poetry and essays right into that first week in October, while her physical improvements continued to show in a modest way. Her walking especially was better, and I was able to take her on an occasional drive in the beautiful country.

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.

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.

I admit that for some mysterious reason of my own I let Bill Baker, as I’ll call that youngish individual, fool me when he knocked on our back-porch door yesterday afternoon. He was very well dressed and very well spoken, and I didn’t pay enough attention to the doubts I sensed when he told me about hearing voices in his head, and asked if Jane did the same thing with Seth. I said no. After introducing him to my wife, I went back to my writing room. I could understand what they were saying by concentrating upon the murmur of their voices from the living room, but I seldom did so. She almost called me, Jane said later, when she realized that Bill Baker is a disturbed⁹ person. He told her he’d been hospitalized several times for mental problems, and demonstrated his ability to speak very fluently a “nonsense” language he cannot decipher. [Later I remembered hearing a bit of that.] Our caller had received a number of pages of information from Jesus Christ. He described how he’s relating the Seth material to his sexual fantasies involving young girls, and detailed other instances in which he’d been strongly rebuffed when trying to physically actualize some of Seth’s ideas. There was more. Jane caught him in a number of contradictory statements.

Bill Baker left soon after learning that Jane no longer holds her ESP classes. The episode reminded us once again that many of our visitors are seeking help of one kind or another, and that we hadn’t had the remotest idea that this would be the case when Jane began her psychic development late in 1963. Sometimes we’re not sure whether the people are simply rebelling against the help offered by establishment disciplines [especially when that “help” is partially or wholly ineffective], or are more aware than most that some individuals, like Jane, have other “psychic” dimensions of personality that can be asked for information. Yet, I told Jane, look at the excellent letters we’ve recently received from psychiatrists, mathematicians, and “ordinary” folk engaged in a variety of endeavors.

And Bill Baker has benefited from reading the Seth material, I said, since now he reasons that some of his ideas are “core beliefs” that he’s created—and so can change. “Where would I be without the Seth material?” he’d asked Jane.

As we sat for the session, Jane said that Seth would discuss schizophrenia in general—so certainly our visitor’s appearance led to information on a subject we wouldn’t have asked about otherwise. Jane’s delivery as Seth varied from being fast to one with many pauses.)

(Seth added a few sentences of personal material for Jane, then ended the session at 10:40 P.M. Jane’s delivery had often been very animated and forceful, and I told her she’d done well. I was going to joke with her by asking if this was a “fill-in” session, but decided not to. I felt that except for our own time limitations, Seth could have given much more material on the whole subject of mental illness.)

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.)

2. When Jane and I married on December 27, 1954, we promised each other that neither one of us would interfere with the other’s creative approach to life, no matter what resulted from the actions we individually chose. We have kept those promises for the 26 years we’ve been together. Of course, we couldn’t possibly have foreseen the great variety of challenges that lay before us. Nine years were to pass before Jane began coming through with the Seth material. She’s certainly given me the complete freedom to be myself, and I’ve floundered often. So has she. Yet as the years passed I still had to learn the obvious—that Jane’s creative powers are inextricably a part of her whole approach to life, including her symptoms. How could it be otherwise? That doesn’t stop me from desperately wanting to help her. I’ve tried, in many ways. She’s helped me often. Jane even agrees with me that she’s a very stubborn lady—albeit an extremely creative one—who’s determined to go her own way.

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.

5. Seth hardly flattered us in this first session. He also gave us a clue as to how Jane delivers certain sessions for him. To begin with, however, his magical-approach information reminded me at once of the two thoughts Jane had picked up from him back on May 12, the day she held the 915th session for Chapter 8. I’m stressing these points because I think they’re important: “Alone, reason finally becomes unreasonable. Alone, imagination finally becomes less imaginative over time.” Nine days later, Seth finally gave a little information relevant to Jane’s insights; see the 917th session after 9:23.

“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.

7. At first some of these excerpts might seem quite diverse in content from one another, but with Jane’s poem in mind I intuitively chose each one for inclusion here. I’d wanted to show the first two items for several years, and surely the reader can divine how they’re related to the poem and to Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality. The next three excerpts are either from, or are directly related to, later sessions in the “magical” series.

A. From Jane’s journal for 1975. She doesn’t recall the month in which she wrote this—only that she did so at high speed:

B. From Jane’s journal for 1976. She wrote these notes on March 6, when she was 47 years old:

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

“Seth, of course, not only dictates his material—the session—but must keep the whole session in mind while doing so, so that each sentence as he delivers it makes sense compared to its predecessors and those to follow. Quite a feat on his part, and Jane’s, when one stops to think about it. How is this possible? Seth has no script to go by, nor can he refer during the session to my own notes to check up on what he’s already said.

“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.”

E. From my opening notes for the 13th and last session in the private series on the magical approach to reality. Jane gave the session on Wednesday evening, October 1, 1980—just five days ago:

(I was curious as to why Seth had devoted two other private sessions in late September to different subjects. When I asked Jane about this tonight, at first she rather matter-of-factly said that she didn’t know. Then: “Well, I don’t tell you everything, but for some time now I’ve known that Seth gives what I call fill-in sessions. I’ve labeled them that way in my mind. They cover floating material—stuff he could give any time. They aren’t book sessions or really personal ones. They keep the sessions going over periods of time—usually by discussing past material—connecting it to the present, while not necessarily adding new stuff. And not specifically given on one subject. Originally I think the Christ sessions got started that way.”

“You never asked me.” Jane’s reply had a familiar sound. Checking later, I learned that she’d given me the same answer about Seth’s material on Jonestown. We used that information in Mass Events. [When that book is published, see Note 3 for Session 835, dated February 7, 1979.]

“I think the fill-in sessions happen between book sessions, for a change of pace—where the material doesn’t have to fit a more concentrated overall book focus,” Jane added. She agreed to write a short account of what she’d just told me, for the record.)

“Of course, I thought, in ordinary terms the vast potential of the Seth material is fated never to be developed. No matter what Jane and I do in our joint reality, this is so. She could hold sessions 24 hours a day for the rest of her life, and still not exhaust Seth’s potential store of information. We’ve had many indications that his material is multichanneled, as when Jane has felt him ready to discuss any one of a number of subjects on any given occasion. I call that feeling, that awareness, a pale indication of what Seth means with his theory of probable realities—for like probable personalities, the unspoken channels he has available are certainly real whether or not they’re actualized in our physical reality.

“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.”