“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As he progressed with the series, Seth delved into Jane’s sinful self from a number of viewpoints: its birth and growth during her intense relationship with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her early years; the development of her very stubborn core beliefs; her creative dilemmas after she left the church in her late teens; the conflicts she began to experience after our marriage, involving on the one hand her sinful self and the religion she thought she’d left behind, and on the other hand science, art, writing, and the unconventional direction she discovered her natural, mystical abilities were taking via the Seth material; her growing fears of leading others astray; and the very real necessity for her—and for each individual—to achieve value fulfillment.

We had a hard time believing him when Seth told us the very next evening, on April 23, that Jane’s sinful self thinks her physical symptoms are necessary “for the personality’s own good”; that that self has no conception that its policies have become self-defeating; that, following Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, it believes that suffering is good for the soul; that the idea of the flesh itself being graced is, to it, blasphemous.

“They were these: that the entire world with its organization was kept together by certain stories, like those of the Roman Catholic Church; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them for the truth, and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since … on the other side, so to speak, there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent; powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten not just personal survival but the fabric of reality as we know it. So excommunication was the punishment, or damnation … which meant more than mere ostracism, but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities … without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well-intentioned behavior, then … and retribution had to be swift and sure.

I could add much material from Jane’s personal past to supplement just the session excerpts given here; perhaps the two of us can explore those fascinating connections in a later work. Right now I’ll make just one point: The priest, burning Jane’s books in the backyard of the house she lived in, taught the growing girl in most specific terms that she had to protect her natural abilities and her inquiring mind even from the very institution—the Roman Catholic Church—that she had so strongly identified with.

22. Although Jane has had “particular difficulty” with the theory of reincarnation, both through Seth and in her poetry she’s always kept psychic windows open through which she can view and express reincarnational ideas and emotions. Poetically, this will be obvious when If We Live Again is published late this year. (Probably in December. We expect to receive from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for the book, for our review, any day now.) In her poetry the young Jane was using ideas akin to reincarnation before she even knew the word—subject matter that was strongly disapproved of by the Catholic priests who visited Jane and her bedridden mother at home.