“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Three months ago, way back on August 13, following the outline she’d written on July 8 for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book,¹ Jane began work on the first draft for Chapter 1 of that project. That same evening she held the final session, the 935th, for Chapter 10 of Dreams. Since then she’s given but two short private sessions, on November 9 and 12. All through those weeks her physical states had fluctuated considerably. Seth reassured her in both sessions. In the first of the two he remarked that “Ruburt is still dealing with spin-off material following or resulting from his sinful-self data….” In the second one he stressed that although Jane was still afraid of spontaneous bodily relaxation, “[Ruburt] is safe, supported and protected—that is, of course, the message that he is trying to get through his head at this time.” Before going into our chronology of personal events for those three months, however, I want to continue my brief study of the affairs—really the consciousnesses—involving Three Mile Island, Iran, and the war between Iran and Iraq. I last dealt with those subjects in the first, 933rd session for Chapter 10.

The killing in Iran continues—and hardly just because of that country’s war with Iraq. At the end of August, only two months after the group assassination by bomb explosions of more than 150 leading officials of the Islamic Republican Party, both the president and the prime minister of Iran were killed by another bomb; so were six other men. This time a leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the largest of the resistance groups in the country, announced to some of our news media that the killings had been carried out by his organization.

Right after that Sue Watkins called from her home in upstate New York to tell us that she’d just received from Prentice-Hall her first printed copy of Volume 2 of Conversations With Seth. She’s to send us an autographed copy after more reach her. Both Jane and I congratulated her on producing a fine pair of books. Even though we could hardly be called impartial, we knew that in her long account of much that had taken place in Jane’s ESP classes, Sue had produced superior work both for herself and for us, through her viewpoint offering new dimensions and insights concerning what all three of us—four, counting Seth!—had been, and still are, trying to do. Our copy of Conversations did arrive from Sue early in October. Seeing it cheered Jane—yet my wife continued to hassle [as she put it] her efforts on Magical Approach, asking herself again and again whether she really wanted to do that book. Her intuitions always affirmed that she did. It was often difficult going for her, though: Magical Approach still wasn’t flowing the way she wanted it to.

Then on October 23 Jane’s creative contentions led to her “attend” material—in which she picked up from Seth that her only responsibility in life is to herself: “Attend to what is directly before you.” Seth told her that she bore no onus to save the world. In relief, Jane wrote a short poem to accompany Seth’s message, then wrote further that she “realized that like many I’d become afraid of faith itself.” I’ve presented this cluster of material in the frontmatter for Volume 1 of Dreams. Her insight helped both of us. However, she hadn’t had a session, regular or private, in over 10 weeks [since August 13], so on October 27 she recorded in her journal the continuance of her daily creative struggles: “And once again I’m way behind in sessions and writing. This A.M. I ‘worked’ from midnight to 3—without getting anything done. I wonder about the advisability of the entire project [Magical Approach]. Where had the magic gone? Where was my inspiration? Those were my thoughts when it occurred to me that I should be writing them down, because they’re part of the whole picture. I felt better….”

Dreams often serve as the frameworks in which sudden remarkable insights appear that later enable a man or a woman to envision the world in a way that was not earlier predictable. The world’s activities always include the insertion of surprising events. This is true at all levels of nature, from microscopic to macroscopic. As I have said before, all systems are open. The theories of both evolutionists and creationists strongly suggest and reinforce beliefs in the consecutive nature of time, and in a universe that begins in such-and-such a fashion, continuing on to such-and-such an end—but there are horizontal events that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal entry points and exit points in all experience. These allow for the insertion of unofficial new energy, the introduction of surprising events. Period.

As “the times change” you tire of the old ways. Even your dreams begin to reach out into new avenues. The relationships between nature’s natural conservative behavior and nature’s need for innovation are stretched. More and more remarkable events begin to occur, both in private and mass experience, in physical and mental behavior, in the events, say, of both stars and man.

8. Our four visitors had become our dear friends long ago. I was sure that, by arriving just when they did, they contributed much to Jane’s latest improvements. They offered enthusiasm and faith and reinforcement to both of us, and renewed in us a fine nostalgia for old, seemingly more innocent times—even though all of us knew that that was illusory: Basically, those class days, those class years, couldn’t have been any more innocent than any other times; it was just that hindsight helped!

Very briefly: More so than Jane is, I think, I’m intrigued by and susceptible to nostalgia. I create a feeling for it. I used to equate the emotion with sentimentality—but leaving aside the basic merits of the latter, I’ve come to understand that nostalgia, growing out of its inevitable counterpart, memory, represents a facet of Seth’s idea of simultaneous time. For if past, present and future exist together (and continue to develop), then I see nostalgia as expressing a legitimate searching by the conscious mind as it seeks to grasp that the past exists now, and is not “dead.” The quest for nostalgia is one way to bring the living past up-to-date. The yearning I feel each time I drive past the apartment house Jane and I lived in for 15 years, just west of the business section of Elmira, represents my conscious reunification of the past with the present, and even a projection of both into the future in ordinary terms.

10. Seth dealt with our personal challenges for almost all of this session on Monday evening, November 9. After supper Jane had announced that she wanted to try for a session—she didn’t know whether it would be private, for Dreams, or on other material. She’d just finished rereading a number of book sessions. She was both nervous and impatient at the prospect of her first session since last August. Here are excerpts: