“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Six weeks ago in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, over 150 officials of the ruling Islamic Republican Party were killed by bomb explosions which destroyed their headquarters building. At first revolutionary zealots blamed the “Great Satan”—America—for the crime. They also accused Iraq, with whom Iran is at war, but it’s almost certain that one of the dozen or more Iranian underground revolutionary groups is responsible. [The most powerful one, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, for example, is a Marxist-based guerrilla organization of “People’s Crusaders” that espouses its own brand of radical Islamic republicanism.] The mass killing resulted in an immediate increase in the government’s campaign to eliminate opponents of clerical [Shiite] rule in Iran. Over 70 dissidents had already been executed by the time of the blasts; many others have been arrested since.

Last month, in the opening notes for Session 931, in Chapter 9, I recorded that on July 8 Jane spontaneously wrote “a complete outline for a book on Seth’s magical approach to reality.” Actually, we’ve been quite aware of the potential of such an idea ever since Seth began that material a year ago.³ After supper this evening we went over the loose-leaf notebook of information Jane has accumulated for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book, and discussed how she could follow her outline in putting all of that material—on our dreams, psychic events and insights, her poetry and our essays—together with Seth’s private sessions on the magical approach. She’d had trouble doing that at various times in the past year. Such a book would involve the publication of much Seth material that could either lie in our files for a long time, or never be published. I now feel that many of those sessions aren’t so private after all, and can help others. The more I talked about the idea the better I liked it. Jane seemed to pick up on my own enthusiasm.

Then just before session time, I mentioned my question about her sinful self’s reactions to our efforts to help her in recent weeks. We have yet to see the kind of physical response we want, and I wanted to know if we’d prompted her sinful self to step up its attempts to keep her “under control.” I explained that I think Seth’s and our own endeavors on her behalf had been negated each time because we’d alerted her sinful self’s fears—making it try harder to protect her according to its own very restrictive orientation.

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

1. Recently I asked Jane if Seth could give us some information on the consciousness connected with nuclear energy—a fascinating question I’ve often speculated about—and she promised me that he’d discuss it soon. I think his material will certainly include many original insights into the whole subject of consciousness-and-energy in general, as well as into the role of consciousness in events like the accident at Three Mile Island. I reminded Jane that some time ago Seth had remarked that as physical creatures we human beings cannot bear to directly confront the basic, vast, unimaginably awesome and creative consciousness of All That Is. Since we cannot bear to face the great raw power of nuclear energy either, I’ve often wondered whether this situation can be an earthly, imperfect and time-ridden analog to what must be the reality of All That Is.

(A note: Six years have passed since Jane delivered the passage I was trying to recall. It’s from Session 747 for May 14, 1975, and I found that I had quoted portions of the session in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality: See Note 11 for Session 742. In essence my memory had been fairly accurate—yet rereading Seth’s material was like a revelation to me. I told Jane that I don’t think anyone else has ever said it as well. Through Seth she expressed the heart of her mystical knowledge:

“All That Is creates its reality as it goes along. Each world has its own impetus, yet all are ultimately connected. The true dimensions of a divine creativity would be unendurable for any one consciousness of whatever import, and so that splendor is infinitely dimensionalized (most intensely throughout), worlds spiraling outward with each ‘moment’ of a cosmic breath; with the separation of worlds a necessity; and with individual and mass comprehension always growing at such a rate that All That Is multiplies itself at microseconds, building both pasts and futures and other time scales you do not recognize. Each is a reality in itself, with its own potentials, and with no individual consciousness, however minute, ever lost.”)

“You do not perceive the consciousness within the self. You do not perceive the consciousness within a star, either—yet the star is the physical materialization in your reality of another kind of consciousness, and all you perceive of it.”

“In the case of our book (Dreams), however, Ruburt himself was worried about your attitude. His overall concerns of course to some extent blocked his creative processes, which further alarmed him. The main issue here is that feeling of responsibility again, so that he writes or whatever because he loves to do it, not because he should or must, and that involves my book as well as his own.