“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all,” Jane wrote for her journal, “but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Very early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of a nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale and a toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child, named Susie, and thought the world of. Anyway, the point is that the story … and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time.

“They were these: that the entire world with its organization was kept together by certain stories, like those of the Roman Catholic Church; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them for the truth, and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since … on the other side, so to speak, there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent; powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten not just personal survival but the fabric of reality as we know it. So excommunication was the punishment, or damnation … which meant more than mere ostracism, but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities … without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well-intentioned behavior, then … and retribution had to be swift and sure.

“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.)

“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….”