“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’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.

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.

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.

Such people—in a fashion, now—play a game of quite serious hide-and-seek with themselves and with the world. They believe in the dictum: “Divide and conquer.” It is as if, for reasons I hope to discuss, they refuse to put themselves together properly, refuse to form one fairly united self. The idea behind this is: “If you cannot find me, then I cannot be held accountable for my actions—actions which are bound in one way or another to betray me.”

(Pause.) I will have more to say about such communications, and the ways in which they can point out the greater psychological mobility that is a more or less natural element in children. When you are a child, you are not held accountable for your actions in the same way that adults are, and schizophrenia often begins around puberty, or young adulthood, when people feel that their youthful promise is expected to bear fruit. If they have been considerably gifted, for example, they are now supposed to show the results of schooling through adult accomplishments. If they are nearly convinced, however, that the self is also dangerous or evil, then they become afraid of using their abilities, and indeed become more frightened of the self—which, again, they then try to conquer by dividing. They feel cut off from value fulfillment. In a fashion they begin to act opaquely in the world, showing a divided face.

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

And: “Today now I feel that acceleration that tells me that my intent is traveling out into the unknown, or out into the universe to bring in answers to my questions, even questions I’m not consciously aware of. And from experience I know that enough energy is generated to do this though the results will come to me in time. I know I get them from outside of time in some unknown way.”

“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.”

(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.”

“Now on the question of ‘mental disorders,’ it is highly important that individual integrity be stressed, rather than the blanket definitions that are usually accorded to any group of symptoms.”