“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.”

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:

It’s not that my mind knows less
than it did before, but that
its reason finally deduced
the magic of its source, and
sensed beneath the logic of its
ways the deeper spontaneous order
that powers its own thought.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“You have not really, either of you, been ready to drastically alter your orientations, but you are approaching that threshold. As Ruburt’s notes also mention, the ‘magical approach’ means that you actually change your methods of dealing with problems, achieving goals, and satisfying means. You change over to the methods of the natural person. They are indeed, then, a part of your private experience. They are not esoteric methods, but you must be convinced that they are the natural methods by which man is meant to handle his problems and approach his challenges.

“I use the word ‘methods’ because you understand it, but actually we are speaking about an approach to life, a magical or natural approach that is man’s version of the animal’s natural instinctive behavior in the universe. That approach does indeed fly in direct contradiction to the learned methods you have been taught.

“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.

“What we will be discussing for several sessions, with your permission jointly—and, I hope, with your joint enthusiasm—will be the magical approach to reality, and to your private lives specifically, in order to create that kind of atmosphere in which the answers become experienced (underlined).”

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.

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

“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.”

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:

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: