“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Well,” I said, groping a bit, “what we’re seeing is the best the country can offer at this time. It’s always this way—you know, the collective expression of our national consciousness—uh, cooperating in whatever way with Iran’s, and with that of every other country on earth….”

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?”

On the screen we saw a parade of citizens expressing shock, sadness, and outrage, frustrated by the knowledge that it had all happened before—not only in our country but around the world—and that it would happen again many times more. It became almost a cliché for people to wonder what was wrong with people: Why do those who attain prominence often attract those who want to destroy them? I think the Seth material contains some penetrating insights into such questions, but those ideas aren’t nearly well-enough known to help on a national scale. Seth didn’t comment upon the shooting, It wasn’t that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t—but that Jane herself is basically so innocent, so repelled by the violence involved in such episodes, that she often chooses not to go into the subject. I thought she might later in connection with other material, however; this had been the case when Seth discussed the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978.¹¹

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

“I resent the designation unjustly given me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought—apparently too rigidly—to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence—yours, and mine as well.

8. Jane woke me up often while she was having this very revealing experience, and each time I tried to comfort her. Note how she expressed from another perspective the power of her early religious training, as well as religion’s fear of the power of the unknown—and how even now she still has to deal with those factors in her search for knowledge.

“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.

“Behind such ideas is the central point of Christianity, or one of them at least: that earthly man is a sinful creature. He is given to sin. In that regard his natural expression must be closely guarded. It must be directed toward officialdom, and outside of that boundary lay, particularly in the past, the very uncomfortable realm of the heretic.

“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.

“Outside of that context, none of those fears make any sense at all. In a large regard the church through the centuries ruled through the use of fear far more than the use of love. It was precisely in the area of artistic expression that the inspirations might quickest leap through the applied dogmatic framework. The political nature of inspirational material of any kind was well understood by the church. Ruburt well knew even as a child that such religious structures had served their time, and his poetry provided a channel through which he could express his own views as he matured.

“Ruburt had considerable difficulty with church doctrine even then, and the rules of the order as actually practiced were later considered to hold their own seeds of heresy. As an old woman, Ruburt was forced to leave the order that he had initiated. He left with a few female companions who were also ostracized, and died finally of starvation. It was a time when unconventional patterns of thought, of unconventional expression, could have (fateful) consequences.

“I have said that in almost every case of severe dissatisfaction or illness, the underlying reasons will not so much be found in the discovery or expression of buried hate or aggression—though these may be present—but in the search for expression of value fulfillment that is for one reason or another being denied.

“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.

I took those associations to mean that no matter what her evolving focuses in her present life, Jane should be as much aware of my reactions to her situation as she is of her own—that even though I’d worked out religious questions in a previous life, still this time around I had chosen to share with her a probable reality within which her physical symptoms, bound up as they are with the subject of religion, could occur. (But at the same time, I reminded myself, her great creativity had also found its modes of expression in spite of everything.) If, as Seth said on April 15, conflicts like Jane’s often stem from the gifted individual’s unrequited search for value fulfillment—even resulting in an early death—then that premise is at least consciously understandable. I’ve suspected for quite a while that something like this is operating in Jane’s case. It’s not that she perversely refuses to get well, even with all of the help Seth and I have tried to give her—and that she has even asked for—but that the deepest portions of her being in this physical life have other goals, toward which her nonphysical self and her physical symptoms are traveling together. Without such thinking, I was coming to feel, there could be little comprehension of my wife’s long-term challenges.

“Your love for each other is large enough to withstand any natural expression of aggression or resentment on either of your parts. As mentioned earlier, because of Ruburt’s background he feared abandonment often. It seemed to him that he did not offer what most men expected of women, so that if he wanted a good lifelong companion he had to tread lightly. He felt that many of his own characteristics were considered disadvantageous in a man-woman relationship.”

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:

That the Seth books outdo Jane’s other works has always puzzled us. Each one of her books, whether produced by herself or with Seth, is an equally valid and intimate expression of her basic creativity. Seth doesn’t come from some separate, more exalted portion of Jane’s psyche that’s off limits to her when she’s writing her own books. As he’s often said himself, he isn’t omnipotent: Like Jane, he shrinks from being a guru—and I stress that Seth doesn’t hold that attitude just because Jane does. Neither seeks to dominate the other; each tries to help the other.

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.

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.