“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane did feel considerably better by the time the page proofs for God of Jane reached us in mid-January. We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. We found the workings of our national consciousness to be both mightily creative and terribly frustrating in numerous ways. I thought the simple services in which our President and Vice-President were sworn into office were extremely moving: Unable to speak because of my emotion, I sat beside Jane on the couch while we watched the ceremonies on television, and had soup and crackers for lunch. At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

“Well,” I said, groping a bit, “what we’re seeing is the best the country can offer at this time. It’s always this way—you know, the collective expression of our national consciousness—uh, cooperating in whatever way with Iran’s, and with that of every other country on earth….”

Jane, again, dreamed often of walking, running, dancing, moving normally. To me those dreams were messages of encouragement not only from her own psyche, but from that certain other version of herself that I referred to in Note 2 for this session. In that reality [as well as in some others], she did have all of her motive powers. In this one, she was physically uncomfortable much of the time. Early in February she wrote an essay on Seth as a “master event.”⁴ That piece was inspired by her material in an old journal; Jane elaborated upon it in an effort to fit events from our own lives into our national consciousness. If Seth truly is a master event, I told her, the implications of her creative work are great: What she has to offer does count, it helps others in a significant way….

On Monday, March 30, 1981, Jane happily finished typing her manuscript for If We Live Again—and in our nation’s capital that same afternoon our President was wounded in an assassination attempt. We watched television replays of the shooting over and over again during the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, as for the second time within a generation the overall consciousness of the United States struggled, through our leaders, to meet one of the great challenges to our democratic way of life.

“I resent the designation unjustly given me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought—apparently too rigidly—to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence—yours, and mine as well.

“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 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.

2. At times after Jane began to really show her physical symptoms, my awareness of the fact that basically she’s a mystic became submerged beneath many other more “practical” matters. Perhaps I should have stressed her nature more throughout Dreams. I never took that essential quality of hers for granted during those times, but instead accepted it so easily that I lost conscious stress upon it. She doesn’t use the word in connection with herself, yet I think that Jane’s mystical nature, which is so at odds with the realities most people create for themselves, actually offers the only real framework for understanding her physical condition, her choices, in our probable reality.

“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.

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

“Seth as a ‘master event.’ As the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than, say, a normal object or the [materials] that compose it, so is all good or great art more than its own physical manifestation. Consider art as a natural phenomenon constructed by the psyche, a transspecies of perception and consciousness that changes, enlarges and expands life’s experiences and casts them in a different light, offering new opportunities for creating action and new solutions to problems by inserting new, original data.

“The dream representing his grandfather symbolically allowed him to go back to the past in this life, to a time of severe shock—his grandfather’s death—which occurred when (Ruburt, at age 19) was beginning to substitute scientific belief for religious belief, wondering if his grandfather’s consciousness then fell back into a mindless state of being, into chaos, as science would certainly seem to suggest. In the dream his grandfather survives. His grandfather survived in a suit that was too large, which means that there was still room for him to grow. Ruburt had a small experience of hearing a voice speak in his mind (yesterday)—a voice of comfort, all he remembered of quite legitimate assistance he received from other personalities connected with the French life, that came as a result of the French dream.

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.

15. I tell Jane that each book she does is her best—and I mean it each time, for each one is. The Seth books sell better, however, than do her “own” books: How to Develop Your ESP Power, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, Cézanne and James, her Oversoul Seven novels, Dialogues and Emir. (See the opening notes for this 931st session, as well as Note 10, for my description of the demise of Emir.) Now Jane adds God of Jane to her list, with If We Live Again to follow in a few months.