“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

“The dream representing his grandfather symbolically allowed him to go back to the past in this life, to a time of severe shock—his grandfather’s death—which occurred when (Ruburt, at age 19) was beginning to substitute scientific belief for religious belief, wondering if his grandfather’s consciousness then fell back into a mindless state of being, into chaos, as science would certainly seem to suggest. In the dream his grandfather survives. His grandfather survived in a suit that was too large, which means that there was still room for him to grow. Ruburt had a small experience of hearing a voice speak in his mind (yesterday)—a voice of comfort, all he remembered of quite legitimate assistance he received from other personalities connected with the French life, that came as a result of the French dream.

10. Like each of Jane’s books, Emir has its own life, its own place upon our planet, and resists categorization. It falls somewhere between being a book for children and one for adults. That made it difficult for its publisher to market. Tam Mossman said it best in September 1977, when Jane was writing the book and Prentice-Hall was considering its publication: Emir is really a book for “readers of all ages.” Jane has received many favorable comments upon it from readers, and we’re sorry to see it go out of print. Being remaindered usually means the end of a book, unless it can be placed with another publisher. That’s difficult to do.

For the first time ever since Jane began the sessions over 17 years ago, in December 1963, I got the chills when Seth delivered a passage—for when he remarked that without some such creative psychic expansion as the sessions “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence,” I surely thought he meant that Jane could have chosen to die. I didn’t mention this to her after the session, and she seemed to have no such reaction when she read the typed session the next day. We did talk about a number of highly gifted people who had died at young ages; indeed, we’d often speculated about what further contributions such individuals could have made had they chosen to continue living physically. In ordinary terms, it’s easy to say that those early deaths were wasteful—but not, I said now, from the standpoints of those involved. Great variations in motivation, intent, and purpose must have been operating, but each person had done what he or she could do in this probable reality—then left it. Jane agreed that Seth had come through with excellent material. I told her I didn’t see how it could be any better.