“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Two weeks later, on March 3, Jane and I really received a surprise through a friend who lives on the California coast: news of a Spanish-language translation of Jane’s first book, How to Develop Your ESP Power. The edition was printed in Mexico and is on sale in that country and on our West Coast. Our friend has a Mexican friend who showed him a copy of the book. Jane and I didn’t know what to think, since the American publisher of ESP Power, Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc., hadn’t advised us that a translation into Spanish had been authorized. The almost wordless quality of our surprise reminded me of our feelings of a year and a half ago, when we’d learned that the Dutch firm, Ankh-Hermes, had published an abridged edition of Seth Speaks in that language, without our permission.⁷

Jane’s connections and challenges with religion across lifetimes are obvious among her dream of being a nun, the “nightmarish experience”⁸ she had two nights later, and the subject matter of the private session she gave on the evening of March 11. In that session Seth used her nightmare as the basis for a discussion of her life as a nun, mentioned her grandfather, and began the “sinful-self” material I referred to at the beginning of the notes for this 931st session. His information on the sinful self opened up a very important development in Jane’s [and my own] search for an understanding of her symptoms, and I’m presenting excerpts from that session in Note 9. [Before long, I realized that I could use notes to carry portions of several more sessions on the sinful self.]

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.

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

It developed, however, that Jane’s reincarnational adventure might end up doing double duty: Not only had it given her insights concerning her sinful self, but now she picked up from Seth that his remarks about it could result in dictation for Dreams. She’d been looking over sessions for the book at various times lately, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. She asked if I’d mind work on Dreams this evening, and I said of course not—that she and Seth have the absolute freedom to talk about anything at all. If Seth did discuss her experience, Jane replied, it would be in connection with “time overlays.” She wasn’t nervous about going back to Dreams. She said that dictation for it wouldn’t mean she was giving up on private material, or on her projected book on the magical approach, either.

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.

7. In Chapter 2 of Dreams, in Volume 1, see my account of the Ankh-Hermes affair, as given in Note 1 for Session 885. We didn’t know whether ESP Power had been published without our American publisher’s consent—but there we were, confronted by another puzzling development involving a foreign-language edition of one of Jane’s books. At once I wrote to our California friend, asking him to obtain from his friend photocopies of three pages in the frontmatter of ESP Power: the title page, the table of contents, and the page that nobody reads, containing the information on copyright, permission for translation, and the name of the Mexican publishing firm.

“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.

“Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose ‘defective’ bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus…. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well….”

15. I tell Jane that each book she does is her best—and I mean it each time, for each one is. The Seth books sell better, however, than do her “own” books: How to Develop Your ESP Power, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, Cézanne and James, her Oversoul Seven novels, Dialogues and Emir. (See the opening notes for this 931st session, as well as Note 10, for my description of the demise of Emir.) Now Jane adds God of Jane to her list, with If We Live Again to follow in a few months.

One can also say that the Seth books are a step farther removed than Jane’s are from the immediacy of life as we conceive of it. Even with the elimination of the Seth element from them, Jane’s own books would still represent a remarkable overall achievement, and had she never given expression to the Seth material I’m sure she would have developed her abilities in ways quite unknown to us now. Within her basic creativity lies the source of Seth as we are to understand him in our temporal reality. Her expression of Seth is an adjunct to that creativity, as he is the first to acknowledge.

“You are social creatures. You fear abandonment for that reason, since you are meant to develop individually while also interacting with others, that interaction giving you the peculiar quality of established civilizations.