“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.]

As he progressed with the series, Seth delved into Jane’s sinful self from a number of viewpoints: its birth and growth during her intense relationship with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her early years; the development of her very stubborn core beliefs; her creative dilemmas after she left the church in her late teens; the conflicts she began to experience after our marriage, involving on the one hand her sinful self and the religion she thought she’d left behind, and on the other hand science, art, writing, and the unconventional direction she discovered her natural, mystical abilities were taking via the Seth material; her growing fears of leading others astray; and the very real necessity for her—and for each individual—to achieve value fulfillment.

Now while it seems that your world contains more and more information all the time, your particular brand of science is a relatively narrow one, in that it accepts as valid only certain specific areas of speculation. The areas outside of its boundaries become taboo, so that the realm of the unknown is no longer the material universe or the mysteries of space, but the interior universe and the mysteries of the mind as these are experienced or suspected to exist outside of those official areas. To that degree, the unknown is more feared by science than it ever was by religion.

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.

8. Jane woke me up often while she was having this very revealing experience, and each time I tried to comfort her. Note how she expressed from another perspective the power of her early religious training, as well as religion’s fear of the power of the unknown—and how even now she still has to deal with those factors in her search for knowledge.

“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 session triggered my own associative processes several times. Almost at once I recalled a passage Seth had given in the session of the night before (on April 14), when he’d discussed my attitude toward religion in general and my own sinful self in particular:

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.

“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.