“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.”

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.

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.

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.

What you are dealing with in many instances are exhibitions of various, sometimes quite diverse personality patterns of behavior—patterns that are, however, not as assimilated, or as smoothly operative as they are in the person you call normal. The patterns are seen in an exaggerated fashion, so that in some such cases at least you can gain glimpses of mental, emotional, and psychic processes that usually remain psychologically invisible beneath the more polished or “finished” social personality of the usual individual.

I am making generalizations here, but each individual case should be looked at in its own light. Such people as a rule, however, have an exaggerated version of the self (pause), so idealized (long pause) that its very existence intimidates practical action. They are afraid of making mistakes, terrified of betraying this sensed inner psychological superior. Usually, such an idealized inner self comes from the acceptance of highly distorted beliefs—again, concerning good and evil. You end up with what can amount to two main inner antagonists: a superior self and a debased self. The qualities considered good are attracted to the superior self as if it were a magnet. The qualities that seem bad (underlined) are in the same fashion attracted to the debased self. Both of them, relatively isolated psychological polarities, hold about equal sway. All other psychological evidences that are ambiguous, or not clearly understood by either side, group together under their own psychological banners. This is a kind of circular rather than linear arrangement, however, psychologically speaking.

The personality can indeed put itself together in multitudinous fashions. There is great leeway in the use of inner and outer perceptions, and the manners in which these are mixed and matched to form an acceptable picture of reality at any given time.

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.

“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.

“There is much material here that I will give you, because it is important that you understand the different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

“So after all these years I find that out,” I said. “What else haven’t you told me? How come the big secret?”

“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.”