“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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!”

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.

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.

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.

(Long pause at 10:24.) Physical perception gives you a necessary kind of feedback, but it is also based upon learning processes, so that from a young age you learn to put the pieces of the world together in acceptable fashions. In a way, under certain conditions, some schizophrenic situations can give you righter glimpses of inner psychological mobility, a mobility that was focused and directed as you grew through childhood. Schizophrenia represents a kind of learning disability in that particular respect.

The language is an excellent example of the coded messages I mentioned earlier (as I’d thought). It is supposed to remain secret, you see, yet becomes the symbol of the all-powerful knowledge of the exaggerated superior self, while making the knowledge impossible to act upon. To translate the information would mean a more serious commitment to physical communication than that young man was willing to make.

(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.)

“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.

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

“In childhood we have little past time to remember. We seem to come from darkness, taking our parents’ memories on faith for proof that there was time before our birth. As we grow toward old age, we have past time to play with—we know where we came from in usual terms—and the darkness that once seemed to stretch behind our source or origin seems to be our destination. Certainly an examination of the mind and reality from the standpoint of old age will be invaluable.”

“Ruburt’s state of mind was in (telepathic) correspondence with your own state of mind, even as you are in some kind of correspondence with your old (childhood) environment, so in these cases you have a free flow of information at other levels.

(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.”

“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: