“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A fourth entry had been made at Three Mile Island in November, and a fifth, with a 14-man crew, was projected for December 11. We followed the news accounts of the negotiations between the United States and Iran for the release of the hostages, and of the war between Iran and Iraq. Since Jane couldn’t leave the house by herself, let alone go holiday shopping, she had a close friend buy the Christmas presents she had in mind for me. My wife did her own wrapping, though, working at it in her writing room after warning me to stay away until she was through. [With eyes averted, I had to carry my own presents to a closet, where I deposited them until Christmas Eve.] Then late in December the page proofs for Mass Events arrived for our checking. This is the last major stage we’re concerned with before a book is printed, other than okaying routine components like frontmatter proofs—meaning the table of contents, dedications, quotations from Seth and Jane, and so forth—and the index.

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.]

How fortunate she’d been able to dig it all out, we said. And how sad, we said, that others who needed such help might not be able to do the same…. Jane’s material from her sinful self is obviously too long and complicated to present here, but I stress that one of its main concerns is its genuine and ironic puzzlement as to why man has for so long—probably from even before he started recording his history—persisted in the creation of and reliance upon entities like the sinful self! Surely that concern is creative, I told Jane; her sinful self is really questioning why she’s maintained it within such narrow confines.

Once again, we had no guidelines on how to use Jane’s material, except to trust that we’d do the best we could. Achieving results could take a while. “If you do that book on the magical approach,” I asked her, “are you going to use all this stuff on the sinful self, or what?” Jane didn’t know. She did know that she’d been considering an outline for a book on the magical approach. In the meantime, the plan that spontaneously came to me on that last day of her own effort, on June 22, was to present a page or two of her sinful-self material here, then repeat it, along with other excerpts, in the Introduction I’ve already mentioned that I must write for Dreams.¹⁷

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.

Just before the session Jane reminded me that she was most interested in Seth commenting upon the reincarnation-type dream experience she’d had early this morning. This is the second time in four months that she’s had such an experience—most unusual for her—and this one even caused her to reflect upon her sinful self in a new way. After breakfast she wrote a very rough account of what she can remember.¹⁹ She thinks the experience was triggered by a television movie she watched last night. I saw only the end of the program, but it involved, Jane told me, a persons traveling from a present life into a past life. She finds some of the story’s concepts to be quite intriguing.

Time overlays are the time versions of certain events, then. These time overlays always exist. (Pause.) They may become activated, however, by certain associations made in your present, and therefore draw into your present time some glimpses either from the future or the past. So-called present time is thickened, then, by a psychological realization on deep levels of the psyche that all events are interrelated, and that the reincarnational experiences of any given individual provide a rich source of experience from which each person at least unconsciously draws.

In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or dead-ended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures (emphatically). Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support.

As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threatened but retain its prominence—for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended.

Earlier I mentioned several times that we must reach a point at which you are able to see around the corner of seemingly contradictory material,²¹ and this is one of those occasions. (Long pause.) Time overlays present you with a picture in which you have free will—yet each event that you choose will have its own time version. Now those time versions may be entirely different one from the others, and while you certainly initiate your own time version, in terms of usual understanding there is no true place or time in which that version can be said to actually originate (again with emphasis).

In an experience last evening in the dream state, Ruburt received fresh evidence by viewing for himself portions of two other lives—merely snatches of environment, but so dearly filled with precious belongings and loved ones, so alive with immediacy-that he was shocked to realize that the full dimensions of existence could continue so completely in such detail and depth at the same time as his present life.

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.

“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.

“When Ruburt left the church, the concept of the sinful self was still there, but the methods that earlier served to relieve its pressures were no longer effectively present. The concept was shifted over to the flawed self of scientific vintage. Science has no sacraments. Its only methods of dealing with such guilt involve standard psychoanalytic counseling—which itself deepens the dilemma, for counseling itself is based upon the idea that the inner self is a reservoir of savage impulses. Period.

“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.

And for me, at least, the reincarnational dimensions behind our present joint situation were heightened by a third association. It lay in the unpublished 874th session for August 22, 1979—the first one Jane held after having finished Mass Events a week earlier. I felt a distinct start of surprise when I came across this passage of Seth’s, for I’d completely forgotten it: “Jane, for example, entered the fetus when it was about three months old, and accepted this as a new life. You waited longer.” I didn’t remember Jane ever referring to that bit of information; certainly she’d never asked Seth to elaborate. I hadn’t either. (That was one of the few times when Seth had called her Jane instead of Ruburt, by the way.)

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.

“Wednesday, July 15, 1981. Last night or rather this morning I had a strange strange dream experience, very vivid while happening, quite important I felt, and now I hardly remember it. The affair involved an excellent TV movie on reincarnation we saw last night. In the dream experience I think I was considering doing a book, a sequel, to the movie—but I was also seeing one or maybe two reincarnational lives of mine, seeing how a belief in reincarnation helped open a sense of the future in the present: I was learning how to visit those lives, which were still happening and for which I think I yearned—without dying in this life. There was a road and other scenes from my past I wanted to paint too; a significant green bottle; people I dearly loved, and Rob might have been involved too. Lots I’ve completely forgotten about people who loved you in particular lives always in some way being supportive; that we’re caught up in time-to-time overlays Seth has referred to in his late book dictation; that rhythmic time overlays happened as various anniversaries or significant events from various lives overlapped, bringing them momentarily closer (like comets) when entries back and forth, and interchanges, are particularly easier.

20. In this chapter, see the third section of Note 7 for Session 920. I presented Seth’s comments on an example of correspondence involving Jane and me, along with his short, more generalized discussion of the phenomenon.

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.