“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Late last week Tam Mossman called Jane to tell her that he’s begun work on her contract for the publication of If We Live Again. I wrote Tam this morning, asking questions about what long-range plans Prentice-Hall may have for the 15 books Jane and I have sold to the company. [That total includes Mass Events, God of Jane, and the poetry book, all of which are yet to be issued.] In the private session for September 22—one of his series on the magical approach to life—Seth had told us that our work is “protected.” I’ve been curious about that statement ever since, and mentioned it to Jane today in connection with my letter to Tam.

Ruburt knew that Helper could be sent out to others, to their advantage, and in that regard the form stood for the great power of natural, positive desire and thought patterns. (To me:) You have the same kind of “form.” These represent the greater source-selves out of which your present persons spring. I told you that you possessed far more knowledge about your own lives, and the lives of others, than you were intellectually aware of.² You act on that knowledge, for one thing, when you are born physically, when you grow. The squirrel acts on that kind of knowledge when it buries nuts—as you saw, again, on a recent TV program—and the squirrel’s greater knowledge includes the knowledge of its species as well.

Your work is protected, not only because it is one of your projects, but also because in a fashion it becomes its own kind of entity—a well-intended one that exists in a rather concentrated form, distilled from your own best aspirations. Hence it is also filled with energy, and also becomes a collector of it.

(Long pause, one of many in a much slower delivery.) I do not want to become involved in a confusion of terms. The mind’s powers are far greater than those generally assigned to rational thought alone, as per our last (private) sessions. Rational reasoning, overdone, can for example actually limit practical use of the intellect’s faculties, and therefore serve to dim some of the mind’s scope. In a fashion, again, Helper represents the true capacity of the mind’s functioning, the kind of instant comprehension that is behind both the intuitions and the intellect’s activities. You are dealing, then, with the spacious intellect, the knower.

In the most basic of terms, no one’s fulfillment can (underlined) be achieved at the expense of another’s. Fulfillment does not happen that way. Your very lives seek the best directions for fulfillment. Our work seeks its own best directions for fulfillment.

Jane was interested in our talk—mine, mostly—but finally she revealed that it was better for her when Seth didn’t take a break: “I like it when he zooms right through to the end.” I replied that my questions carried no hints for material from Seth. “Yes,” she said, “I guess if no one had anything to say, we’d sit here like dummies.”

Apropos of one of your brief discussions.

(Long pause at 10:18.) In a fashion—and forgive me for using one of my favorite qualifications again—but in a fashion, cultures do not evolve in the kind of straightforward manner that is usually supposed. Of course, cultures change, but man instantly began to fashion culture, as for example beavers instantly began to form dams. They did not learn how to form dams through trial and error (humorously). They did not for untold centuries build faulty dams, for example. They were born, or created, dam makers.

Memory was so perfected that men at one time were indeed living histories, and carried within their minds their genealogies and backgrounds and the knowledge of their peoples, which were then passed on to their children. It is true that reading and writing have certain advantages over such procedures, but it is also true that knowledge possessed in that old fashion became a part of a man, and a society, in a much more personal, meaningful manner. It was, of course, a different kind of knowing. At its best it did not lead to rote renditions of remembered material, but to dramatic renderings of it through music, poetry, dancing. In other words, its rendition was accompanied by creative physical expression. It is true that, practically speaking, a man’s mind, or a woman’s, could not hold all of the information available now in your world—but much of that information does not deal with basic knowledge about the universe or man’s place within it. It is a kind of secondary information—interesting, but not life-giving.