“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.]

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

“After supper I discussed with Jane the question I’ve been keeping in mind for Seth, concerning what her sinful self may have learned since we began this series of sessions. I said it was essential to communicate to her sinful self [so named by Seth for convenience’s sake only] that its performance has been very destructive to Jane, and that it must release its hold. I want to know that self’s attitude toward the fact that Jane is now helpless as far as her physical survival is concerned—she can no longer take care of herself without my help, and this obviously implies that if her condition continues to worsen to the point of death, her sinful self will die also. I want to know what it ‘thinks’ about such a contradictory situation. No matter how it must reason or react, that self has to be concerned about its own survival—but in what ways, and based upon what knowledge and reasons? Of course we have some answers now, but I want more.”

2. At times after Jane began to really show her physical symptoms, my awareness of the fact that basically she’s a mystic became submerged beneath many other more “practical” matters. Perhaps I should have stressed her nature more throughout Dreams. I never took that essential quality of hers for granted during those times, but instead accepted it so easily that I lost conscious stress upon it. She doesn’t use the word in connection with herself, yet I think that Jane’s mystical nature, which is so at odds with the realities most people create for themselves, actually offers the only real framework for understanding her physical condition, her choices, in our probable reality.

“I accept everything in the book, but I think I felt that if I was going to tell it like it was—and I was, was determined to—then I also needed more protection from the world, and began cutting down mobility again. My idea is that the eyes get bad after the muscular strain reaches a certain point. The idea [of protection] also came back after reading a book on William James that a friend gave us for Christmas. [James’s] attitudes and mine so often seem similar—that he was determined to be daring, press ahead no matter what, explore consciousness—while at the same time being attracted to safety, disliking controversy, wanting peace, etc. I think I am that way. The long breaks when Seth didn’t dictate [book work] may have come when I got particularly concerned about the material, the wisdom of presenting it to the world.

5. For that matter, I’ve often told my wife that it would be all right with me if she decided to give up the sessions entirely—for good—period. Anything to help, I always thought at such times. More than once I’ve asked her if she keeps the sessions going just for me. Jane comes first with me—not the sessions, or anything else she might do. Her being is what I want to spend the rest of my life with. Once again I recalled Seth’s statement in Chapter 5 of Dreams, in Volume 1. See Session 899 for February 6, 1980: “But the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being (intently). That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.”

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 point at which such a situation happens is of course internal, and it may or may not have anything to do with the quality of material, but with its nature. Each society—or each system of knowledge, for that matter—has its own taboos built in, and most of these imply abandonment by the community. A firm bonding with the parent ideally implies, however, that the child will not be abandoned, despite parental anger at any given time.

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.