“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane did feel considerably better by the time the page proofs for God of Jane reached us in mid-January. We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. We found the workings of our national consciousness to be both mightily creative and terribly frustrating in numerous ways. I thought the simple services in which our President and Vice-President were sworn into office were extremely moving: Unable to speak because of my emotion, I sat beside Jane on the couch while we watched the ceremonies on television, and had soup and crackers for lunch. At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

Amid her incessant questioning as to who or what Seth is—even if he is a master event!—and amid her concerns about leading others astray, Jane added to her journal four days later: “The worst explanation for Seth that I can imagine is that he is the part of me that I can’t express otherwise—making a psychological statement. Since his material is so terrific, why would this be bad? Because I’d be pretending to be better than I was—better than others? Or leading others to believe in life after death, because the material is so convincing?”

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.

And yet, Seth told us, in spite of everything Jane’s sinful self could begin to change once it was reached. We had reached it to some degree, and more than once, but the emotional upsets involved had left Jane feeling worse during this time. Her sinful self, according to Seth, no longer identifies with the Church. That self itself has become frightened, in conflict within itself over its early training and Jane’s great creativity, which it regards as wrong: The creative self is guilty. Jane had panic attacks while sleeping.

Through April and into May, I had problems controlling my own anger and hurt feelings toward Jane’s sinful self as I came to better understand its mechanisms of operation. Obviously. of course, my feelings reflected upon the workings of my sinful self, or upon some similar psychological quality—for how could I be so involved with my wife’s challenges, for almost 26 years, without complementing them within deep portions of my own personality? My anger, Seth told me, was just the way not to react, and even amid the welter of my emotions I had to agree. Jane had refused to listen to that self of hers in earlier years. “The idea is in no way to accuse the sinful self,” Seth said on April 28. “It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood—scared out of its wits, maligned…. Ruburt’s entire group of symptoms do not follow any established pattern. They are the result of applied stress, exaggerated finally by feelings of hopelessness, and by some relative feelings of isolation.” And I was so struck by his reference to Jane’s hopelessness that once more I returned to the private session for April 15. See Note 13, in which I quoted Seth’s material on her search for value fulfillment—how, without the psychic breakthrough of the sessions, “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence.”

In the session itself, Seth barely began an answer to my question. Instead he went into considerable detail as to how Jane could write a “psychic statement of intentions,” so that her sinful self would know exactly what she wanted out of life. She started work on it the next day. That same day, I congratulated her when our first published copy of God of Jane reached us; that excellent book had followed Mass Events all the way through the publishing process. I told Jane that God of Jane is her best book yet, and that I hope it does well in the marketplace.¹⁵ Yet I sadly noticed that the book’s appearance led to another intensification of her symptoms—the same reaction she’d had when we received our first copy of Mass Events 25 days ago. We were to discover very soon that her sinful self had put together the publication of the two books, my question of last night, and Seth’s own suggestion, to form an emotional trigger.

If we had been appalled when Seth began giving his version of the beliefs her sinful self held, we were even more so when that self began to express itself “personally.” And once more I had to guard my own expressions of frustration and anger; those emotions were so mixed up with my love for my wife that I even developed a perverse, almost black humor about the entire situation. Then Seth came through with another session on the same subject while Jane’s sinful self was in the midst of its own revelations! But she simply had to get that final, direct message from that portion of herself by herself; except for that one session, she even made Seth figuratively stand aside while she did so. But Seth himself was delighted with her breakthrough.¹⁶

Along with our shock came elation. Here, we congratulated ourselves, lay bared all of those beliefs and motivations that for years had been hidden and operative beneath Jane’s symptoms: Here were the real reasons—now we could eradicate her physical hassles! Jane’s own sinful-self revelations certainly complemented Seth’s, which in turn, we thought, were the other side of his material on the magical approach to reality.

In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or dead-ended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures (emphatically). Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support.

“Finish checking copy-edited manuscript of God of Jane this afternoon. Feel this important…. As I finish, I realize how much physical activity and energy is required for even that seemingly sedentary task, for I’ve been uncomfortable, sitting, switching my weight, body soreish, eyes not seeing properly and so forth…. But in some newish way I seemed to understand how much seemingly mental work is dependent upon physical vigor, flexibility and so forth; and then rather strongly—emotionally it came to me that I’d thought it my duty to clamp down physically, to cut down mobility in order to … have mobility as a writer; that is, to sit down, cut down on impulses, distractions, to make sure I’d ‘do my work,’ pursue my goal undeviatingly; that new [book] contracts instantly led me to that kind of behavior and that I really see that such behavior carried to its extremes would end up smothering my writing, defeating the purposes it (seemingly) meant to protect. But I did fear that impulses and body motion were … distractions to work…. Now I see how much impulses are conducive … to just typing, for God’s sake; imagine typing and seeing with ease, just thinking about what I’m thinking about, instead of trying to get my fingers on the proper keys. I feel as if I’m on to something here … feel some relaxation. If this is the case, the entire process could be changed around quite quickly, of course, toward mobility. I’m not writing here tonight about the reasons behind such behavior—many ideas—but did want to get something down now….”

“Lately I’ve been working with ideas of safety, saying and believing that I AM safe, secure and supported and that I DO trust my natural spontaneous motion. NOW as I write some old dumb stuff comes emotionally to mind—my mother saying that I’d destroy those I loved or some such nonsense. But it’s as if I always felt that spontaneously, left alone, I’d end up taking away people’s comfort blankets, and I felt bad about that, even while I knew that those philosophic blankets were wormy, had to go. And I do see that I’m offering something far better….

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

“Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all,” Jane wrote for her journal, “but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Very early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of a nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale and a toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child, named Susie, and thought the world of. Anyway, the point is that the story … and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time.

“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.

“Ruburt’s nightmare experience (three nights ago) is a beautiful example of the kind of explosive emotional content that many people carry, fairly hidden, representing certain taboos, translated of course in individualistic terms.

“The church was quite real to Ruburt as a child, through the priests who came (to the house) regularly, and through direct contact with the religious (grade) school, and the support offered to the (fatherless) family. Ruburt’s very early poetry offended Father (Boyle), who burned his books on the fall of Rome, so he had more than a hypothetical feeling about such issues. Many of his fears originated long before the sessions, of course, and before he realized that there was any alternative at all between, say, conventional religious beliefs and complete disbelief in any nature of divinity.

“The entire structure of fears, of course, is based upon a belief in the sinful self and the sinful nature of the self’s expression.

“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.

“Ruburt’s creative nature early began to perceive at least that man’s existence contained other realities that were deeper. Some of this is difficult to separate. To leave the church, say, meant to carry still some of the old beliefs, but without the bandaids that earlier offered some protection.

“He began to search actually from childhood in a natural fashion toward some larger framework that would offer an explanation for reality, that bore at least some resemblance to the natural vision of his best poetry. I have said before that many creative people, highly gifted, have died young in one way or the other because their great gifts of creativity could find no clear room in which to grow. They became strangled by the beliefs of the cultural times.

“His poetry acted in some regards as a stimulator. That breakthrough, you might say, with perhaps some exaggeration, was a lifesaver, for without some such expansion Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence. It is not possible to say in words what one person or another looks for in life, or what unique features best promote his or her growth and development. Even two plants of the same kind sometimes require completely different treatments. The sessions, then, opened the door to a particular kind of value fulfillment that was natural to Ruburt’s being. Now to some extent it was that poor, unhappy sinful self, a psychological structure formed by beliefs and feelings, that was also seeking its own redemption, since even it had outgrown the framework that so defined it.

“Ruburt broke through both psychically and creatively—that is, the sessions almost immediately provided him with new creative inspiration and expression, and with the expansions needed psychologically that would help fulfill his promise as a writer and as a mature personality. He was still left, however, with the beliefs in the sinful self, and carried within him many deep fears that told him that self-expression itself and spontaneity were highly dangerous.

As Jane finished delivering that passage for Seth I felt like interrupting the session to most strongly protest her poor assessment of herself, but I didn’t. Instead, later I added my rough statement to the session. Besides expressing my love for Jane, it reveals other churning emotions:

“It might be of value to have Ruburt mentally ask the sinful self for a few comments on how its beliefs about the female sex were connected with its concepts of sin, and if those attitudes are changing.”

“Now Ruburt had only one parent available most of the time, and he did not feel secure in that relationship—a situation chosen ahead of time, now. There is great leeway in the nature of such bondings…. With some people, they are so secure that they provide an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer framework. Ruburt’s relationship with his mother left much to be desired. The bonding did not secure him that vital sense of safety, and he felt threatened by abandonment. His bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for that initial lack. The sinful-self material represents those ideas that were a strong element in his original belief structures. The ‘troublesome’ material remained relatively inactive until his curiosity and ability led him to actively challenge those ideas while [he was] also in a situation where the natural fear of abandonment might be suggested. At certain points, the assimilation of new information is so qualifiedly different from the original belief structure that in order to assimilate it the personality is left for a time between belief systems.

“Now remember that Ruburt’s mother used phrases like: ‘I hereby disown you,’ and: ‘You are hereby disinherited,’ and: ‘I consider you no longer my daughter.’ Such situations increased Ruburt’s sense of not being safe, yet also reinforced feelings of independence, for he did not have to feel as dependent upon Marie as he might otherwise. The time would come, however, when the old bondings had to be encountered, for they simply could not hold the newer larger frameworks of understanding. The ideas of the so-called sinful self represent several layers of activity, then—troublesome aspects of belief structures that are shared by millions in your society, and by certain levels of Ruburt’s personality. He is now trying to assimilate a greater framework, to become bonded to a higher sequence of knowledge.

“Once those old beliefs are understood, they will no longer be considered shameful in themselves, nor humiliating, or as attitudes to be accused of….”

“Wednesday, July 15, 1981. Last night or rather this morning I had a strange strange dream experience, very vivid while happening, quite important I felt, and now I hardly remember it. The affair involved an excellent TV movie on reincarnation we saw last night. In the dream experience I think I was considering doing a book, a sequel, to the movie—but I was also seeing one or maybe two reincarnational lives of mine, seeing how a belief in reincarnation helped open a sense of the future in the present: I was learning how to visit those lives, which were still happening and for which I think I yearned—without dying in this life. There was a road and other scenes from my past I wanted to paint too; a significant green bottle; people I dearly loved, and Rob might have been involved too. Lots I’ve completely forgotten about people who loved you in particular lives always in some way being supportive; that we’re caught up in time-to-time overlays Seth has referred to in his late book dictation; that rhythmic time overlays happened as various anniversaries or significant events from various lives overlapped, bringing them momentarily closer (like comets) when entries back and forth, and interchanges, are particularly easier.

“How a belief in reincarnation and immortality added support to life, so that it didn’t seem dead-ended. That I could relax now, admitting and realizing that I did have certain fears per the sinful self’s document (instead of pretending that I didn’t). Because brought into the light I really could handle them and see how they originated. Stuff on how society operated, whether it knew it or not, on a reincarnational basis, and how association was many-lives-thick, so to speak. Only these are thoughts I’m left with, connected to the experience while I’ve forgotten the events themselves, and the scenes that were extremely colorful and emotionally charged.”

One can, of course, turn the whole thing around in various ways: The freshly dead person, still carrying his or her nonmaterial emotions, can feel a grief equal to that of the one left behind; their mutual sorrow can form a bond stronger, perhaps at least temporarily, than those created by either one in other lives with other people. Or the one still “alive” can turn away from the dead partner, relative, or friend in order to be psychically and physically free for new adventures. The variety of relationships between parents and children, no matter on which side the death occurs, must be vast. Jane said that perhaps we can get some answers from Seth.

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.

I’ve noted before that Seth himself has no reservations at all about expressing reincarnational material. Listening to some of the tapes students made in Jane’s ESP class—in the early ‘70s, say—I hear Seth being allowed to spontaneously give regular students and first-time visitors often quite detailed and penetrating insights into their other lives; explaining how events and emotions from other existences can intermix with their counterparts in present lives. Jane still picks up such information from others, but now she seldom expresses it through Seth. I think her deep concern about leading others astray, related as it is to her early religious training, is the inhibiting force here. Then see Notes 9 and 19 for this session; their contents show that she hasn’t closed a certain window into the dream state, either.