“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

“I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the ‘creative self to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain—the tragic flaw—[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite those feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.”

Jane’s nature has even led me to speculate more than once that in most basic terms she may be visiting our probable reality from one that’s actually far more native to her nonphysical entity, or whole self. I don’t mean that as a physical creature she has magically switched temporal realities, but that she’s closely allied with that version of herself in that other reality. When I mention this to her, she nods but says little. Jane’s “mission” (a term she wouldn’t use) would be to give us not only greater insight into what our species has done within our historical context, both for better and for worse, but to signal what we can do—to open up unexpected vistas before us, to encourage us to explore those realms far more actively than we have so far.

“In medieval times, to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched both the soul and the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.