“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The day after that session for March 11 was held we received a jolt: Eleanor Friede, Jane’s editor at Delacorte Press, informed us that Jane’s book, Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers, was being remaindered—taken off the market because in the publisher’s view it wasn’t selling enough copies. Eleanor’s protests at the action had done no good. We were given the chance to buy as many copies as we wanted to, at a very low price per book. We’d known that Emir hadn’t been setting any records since its publication in September 1979, but we’d also thought the book’s sales were respectable enough that the people at Delacorte Press would keep it in print until it became better known. Perhaps our shock came about because we’d become spoiled without realizing it, but of Jane’s 14 books Emir¹⁰ is the first one to be withdrawn—and, ironically, the last one she’d had published. That status would soon change, however, when Mass Events and God of Jane reached the marketplace.

I do not want you to feel that you are fated to experience certain events, however, for that is not the case. There will be “offshoots” of the events of your own lives, however, that may appear as overlays in your other reincarnational existences. There are certain points where such events are closer to you than others, in which mental associations at any given time may put you in correspondence²⁰ with other events of a similar nature in some future or past incarnation, however. It is truer to say that those similar events are instead time versions of one larger event. As a rule you experience only one time version of any given action. Certainly it is easy to see how a birthday or anniversary, or particular symbol or object, might serve as an associative connection, rousing within you memories of issues or actions that might have happened under similar circumstances in other times.

As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threatened but retain its prominence—for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended.

Religion was hampered—and is—by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. (Long pause.) Reincarnation suggests, of course, the extension of personal existence beyond one time period, independently of one bodily form, the translation or transmission of intelligence through nonphysical frameworks, and implies psychological behavior, memory and desire as purposeful action without the substance of any physical mechanism—propositions that science at its present stage of development simply could not buy, and for which it could find no evidence, for its methods would automatically preclude the type of experience that such evidence would require.

“Seth as a ‘master event.’ As the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than, say, a normal object or the [materials] that compose it, so is all good or great art more than its own physical manifestation. Consider art as a natural phenomenon constructed by the psyche, a transspecies of perception and consciousness that changes, enlarges and expands life’s experiences and casts them in a different light, offering new opportunities for creating action and new solutions to problems by inserting new, original data.

“Again as with master events, we’re dealing with a different framework of action entirely, where the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than the physical properties that compose it. This is not to deny the validity of its [materials]. But to discuss Seth and his ideas primarily from the true-or-false framework is the same thing as considering the Mona Lisa only from the validity of the physical properties of its paint and panel: very very limiting…. I don’t have to ‘live up’ to anything. I don’t have to ‘make the material work,’ or prove through my actions that it does, because it proves itself in the way that creativity does, by being beyond levels of true-false references. Otherwise I’m at cross-purposes with myself.”

5. For that matter, I’ve often told my wife that it would be all right with me if she decided to give up the sessions entirely—for good—period. Anything to help, I always thought at such times. More than once I’ve asked her if she keeps the sessions going just for me. Jane comes first with me—not the sessions, or anything else she might do. Her being is what I want to spend the rest of my life with. Once again I recalled Seth’s statement in Chapter 5 of Dreams, in Volume 1. See Session 899 for February 6, 1980: “But the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being (intently). That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.”

“I do not want to go into a history of culture here, but your organizations historically have largely been built upon your religious concepts, which have indeed been extremely rigid. The repressive nature of Christian thought in the Middle Ages, for example, is well known. Artistic expression itself was considered highly suspect if it traveled outside of the accepted precepts, and particularly of course if it led others to take action against those precepts. To some extent the same type of policy is still reflected in your current societies, though science or the state itself may serve instead of the church as the voice of authority.