“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

Those first days in March were mentally crowded ones for Jane. During the early morning hours of the 6th she had a very vivid and joyful reincarnational dream involving herself, and a dream in which she returned to her own past in this life. “I rarely have reincarnation-type dreams, but awakened around 2:00 A.M. with this and the following dream,” she wrote the next day. The first one gave her information about a life she’d lived as a nun in the former province of Normandy, France, in the 16th century. The second dream concerned her strong reaction to the death of her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo: “Little Daddy,” as Jane had affectionately called him, died in 1948 in the family’s hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York.

On April 12 the space shuttle Columbia was launched into orbit around the earth, and I thought that Jane was complementing that obvious exploration of outside space by exploring inner space with the only vehicle she had available—her own mind. That same day, Seth agreed that her new book idea was a good one. Somewhere in here we received from our friend in California the photocopies I’d asked him to obtain, of the frontmatter for the Spanish-language edition of ESP Power. So the book was out in Spanish, we saw—but we were so preoccupied with Jane’s symptoms and related matters that we let the photocopies lie on a shelf. During this time, we had been often rereading Seth’s information on the sinful self as he’d given it on March 11. [See Note 9 for this session.] That material had deeply touched us. The result was that on April 14, the day Columbia landed, Seth initiated a long series of sessions on both Jane’s own sinful self, and that quality in general. The very next evening Jane allowed him to come through with some extremely important material.¹³

We had a hard time believing him when Seth told us the very next evening, on April 23, that Jane’s sinful self thinks her physical symptoms are necessary “for the personality’s own good”; that that self has no conception that its policies have become self-defeating; that, following Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, it believes that suffering is good for the soul; that the idea of the flesh itself being graced is, to it, blasphemous.

“Now Ruburt is undergoing some profound therapeutic changes. Probabilities at each point intersect with your time, and those probabilities are psychologically directed so that, in your terms once again, he is at an excellent intersection point, where the prognosis is excellent. Tell him I said this. And you are both responsible, for both of your lives merge in their fashions.”

Jane doesn’t agree with my doubts. As always, she’s been letting me put this book together the way I think best—and inevitably that way has followed how we’ve been trying to understand our joint long-term situation. She innocently accepts my labors as they come out. And that trust always reflects, I’m sure, Seth’s own larger view of reality, as I just quoted him from Session 915. Our challenges echo throughout all of our probable realities simultaneously, and through all of them together the largest picture of Jane and myself is presented. In this probable reality we work with what we can pick up from that great whole. We keep trying to learn to ask better questions.

(Intently:) “To begin with, he would not have had the sessions over this period of time (more than 17 years) for your sake alone, or even for your sake primarily: They simply would have petered out. You do have a large role to play, however, and I will go into that more clearly, along with the way that you might have sometimes misread some of your own attitudes. Nothing, however, would have kept him at the sessions for this amount of time unless he wanted them.”

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.

“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.

“The book was based on the idea that nature was against man; and that religion was man’s attempt to operate within that unsafe context. The feelings I was getting went even further, that religion or science or whatever weren’t attempts to discover truth—but to escape from doing so, to substitute some satisfying tale or story instead. And I suppose that if someone persisted long enough, he or she would find the holes in the stories … and undo the whole works. The idea of the stories was to save each man from having to encounter reality in such a frightening fashion…. The characters in the stories did this for him in their own fashion, and if you kept [searching] … you threatened the fine framework of organization that alone made life possible….”

“The name Normandy comes to mind, and the name Abelard. The dream came to remind Ruburt of those connections, but also to remind him that his life even then was enriched by a long-held love relationship. The two corresponded frequently, met often, and in their ways conspired to alter many of the practices that were abhorrent yet held as proper church policy.

“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.

“In that regard, Ruburt’s creativity kept struggling for its own growth and value fulfillment. His psychic recognition or initiation represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him that additional psychic room that would insure the continued expansion of the abilities of the natural self. The sinful-self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward into the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.

“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.

“It is one thing to say that the dilemma is unfortunate, but it is also true to say that the dilemma existed because of a breakthrough that gave him what amounted to a new life at the time….”

“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.”

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.

“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.