“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mass Events had been a particularly troubling book for Jane to produce; she’d experienced many long delays in giving the sessions for it. While reading those proofs Jane opened up new insights into her reactions to herself and her work. She summarized those conflicts in the note she wrote on our 26th wedding anniversary.³ I saw that same pattern of delay at work in her holding the sessions for Dreams—and to me that meant the same psychic and psychological forces were still operating. We finished correcting the proofs for Mass Events during our very quiet celebration of the year-end holidays, and early in January I mailed the book to Tam.

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?”

Seth also discussed Jane’s persistent psychological abuse and mistreatment by her mother, Marie, over the years, and the young girl’s resultant deep fear of abandonment. Jane never lost that fear, and needed frequent reassurances that she was a worthy person. She’d seldom found that reinforcement while living with a parent who had been divorced and become bedridden by the time Jane was three years old, and who had a host of problems—challenges—of her own to meet.

During her early years Jane had naturally and deeply loved her mother, and tried in every way a child could to please her—yet she became ashamed at the treatment she was receiving from Marie, and for the most part kept it a secret while growing up; we’d been married for some years before I really began to understand the depth of her feelings on that score. Why, Jane’s sinful self even felt guilty, Seth told us, because of her abusive treatment by Marie—assuming that it must have been bad, that it deserved all those years of psychological assault!

Through April and into May, I had problems controlling my own anger and hurt feelings toward Jane’s sinful self as I came to better understand its mechanisms of operation. Obviously. of course, my feelings reflected upon the workings of my sinful self, or upon some similar psychological quality—for how could I be so involved with my wife’s challenges, for almost 26 years, without complementing them within deep portions of my own personality? My anger, Seth told me, was just the way not to react, and even amid the welter of my emotions I had to agree. Jane had refused to listen to that self of hers in earlier years. “The idea is in no way to accuse the sinful self,” Seth said on April 28. “It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood—scared out of its wits, maligned…. Ruburt’s entire group of symptoms do not follow any established pattern. They are the result of applied stress, exaggerated finally by feelings of hopelessness, and by some relative feelings of isolation.” And I was so struck by his reference to Jane’s hopelessness that once more I returned to the private session for April 15. See Note 13, in which I quoted Seth’s material on her search for value fulfillment—how, without the psychic breakthrough of the sessions, “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence.”

“Our explorations involved no second-handed evidence handed down by others, but the direct personal encounter of our consciousness and being with the vast elements of the unknown—a meeting of the self (human and vulnerable) with the psychological realms of gods and eternities; giant realms of mind that our nature felt attracted to … and [was] uniquely equipped to perceive.

“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.”

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.

(8:54.) Actually, that kind of psychological behavior represents the backbone of social organization as far as the species is concerned, and it is the usually hidden but definite past and future memories of reincarnational relationships that cement social organizations, from small tribes to large governments.

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.

It seemed that he could step from any one such existence to the other as you might walk from one room to the other, and he knew that at other levels of the psyche this was indeed possible—and, of course, at other levels of the psyche those psychological doors are open.

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.

People can become quite frightened, then, of any kind of experiences of a personal nature that imply reincarnational life, for they are then faced with the taboos of science, or perhaps by the distorted explanations of some religions or cults. You therefore protect yourselves from many quite natural upthrusts that would on their own give you experience with your own reincarnational existences, and you are often denied psychological comfort in times of stress that you might otherwise receive.

The entire nature of events, then, exists in a different way than you have supposed, only small portions slicing into the reality that you recognize—yet all underneath connected to a vast psychological activity. You might compare events to psychological consonants that underlay or underlie the more unusual features of physical psychological environment.

“We have to go beyond that—back to stressing the creative larger-than-life aspects. Otherwise all we have is a better problem-solving framework…. I’ve rejected all that kind of hash projected onto Seth’s books by others or myself—the assumptions that Seth must prove himself as a problem-solver—or the importance of functionalism over art. The larger view is that art, by being itself, is bigger than life while springing from it; that Seth’s and my books go beyond that simply by being themselves. They automatically put people in a different, vaster psychological space, another frame of reference, in which a good number of problems vanish or simply do not apply….

“I can’t remember the events connected with the nightmare that gave rise to the feelings, but at the same time I was being assaulted or attacked by … a psychological force who wanted me to understand the danger of such a course. When I went back to sleep the entire thing would happen again. Once I think the title of a children’s tale appeared in the air in large block letters, the idea also being that outside of the known order provided by these stories, there were raging forces working against man’s existence. (The old idea of Pandora’s box comes to mind.)

“His poetry acted in some regards as a stimulator. That breakthrough, you might say, with perhaps some exaggeration, was a lifesaver, for without some such expansion Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence. It is not possible to say in words what one person or another looks for in life, or what unique features best promote his or her growth and development. Even two plants of the same kind sometimes require completely different treatments. The sessions, then, opened the door to a particular kind of value fulfillment that was natural to Ruburt’s being. Now to some extent it was that poor, unhappy sinful self, a psychological structure formed by beliefs and feelings, that was also seeking its own redemption, since even it had outgrown the framework that so defined it.

“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.

“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.