“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Through such behavior the overall value fulfillment purposes and intents of the species are kept in focus, and those necessary requirements then planted in whatever space or time [is] required. Again, free will still operates in all such ventures.

“To confine such creativity to solve life’s problems primarily, or to direct it primarily in that fashion, limits it and holds it in an improper focus; shackles it.

“To [achieve] that, I have to drop those old feelings of responsibility as a primary focus, because they strain the Seth-book framework, particularly when I demand that in each book Seth answer all questions and so forth.

6. Seth went on to say in that session for February 17, 1980: “The only other times there are any such difficulties also involve responsibility, when he concentrates upon his responsibility to hold the sessions—that is, when he focuses upon need, function, or utility as separate from other issues involved. Such feelings can then for a while override his natural inclinations, his natural enjoyment and excitement with which he otherwise views our sessions.

“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….”

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.

“The main issues with which the sinful self was concerned were focused most clearly in Mass Events and God of Jane,” Seth told us, “since more than the other books they represent a direct confrontation, ‘attacking’ the very legitimacy of the entire concept of sin and evil, insisting more dramatically on the good intent of man’s basic impulses…. [Ruburt’s] sinful-self explanation represents a fascinating psychological document in that regard, and also shows the self’s mobility and willingness to learn and change—once the intent is made to take a stand.

“His idea of a project on the magical approach now is excellent, for it suggests a new concentration or focus.”