“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.

Early in September—magically appearing as though from another reality, for we’d quite forgotten about the situation—we received through Prentice-Hall six copies of the reprinted Dutch-language edition of Seth Speaks. This time the publisher in the Netherlands, Ankh-Hermes, had not cut Seth Spreekt.⁷

6. My ever-present concern for Jane would certainly have turned into outright fear had I seen at once the long, untitled poem she wrote on August 26, concurrently with her work on the second chapter for Magical Approach. She didn’t put the poem into its final form, and she didn’t show it to me. Not that she tried to hide it. Neither of us may tell or show the other everything—I just hadn’t been present when she wrote the poem, and she let it lie in her 1981 journal, where I “accidentally” came across it some time later. Even when I did find the poem I became sad, then frightened, then more hopeful as I read it, and I knew at once that I’d have to insert it here in Dreams. For Jane had been depressed when she wrote her poem. Perhaps it was her poetic art of expression that helped me identify so strongly with her emotions, but I suddenly felt that even I had never really understood the myriad depths of her challenges and her reactions to them. In the poem I saw expressed anew her ancient fear of abandonment, along with her dilemmas over her lack of mobility—and my fright was engendered by what I thought were signs that she might choose to leave this physical reality for good. To die. (I’d had similar feelings seven months before she held this 936th session: In Note 13 for Session 931, in Chapter 9, see my comments following the excerpts from the private session for April 15, 1981.)

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.

When I look up at those three high, old-fashioned bay windows that illuminate the living room of Apartment 4, on the second floor of that house, I visualize Jane sitting behind them at her oak table, thinking and writing, intrigued and comforted by the busy patterns of people and automobiles traversing the intersection she looks down upon: Walnut and West Water Streets. And behind those windows, at night in that living room, she paces back and forth for hours at a time after she begins to speak for Seth in December 1963. She holds ESP classes there. Accordingly, then, a Jane Roberts Butts and a Robert F. Butts live in that apartment I’m creating. I think my nostalgia for those days reinforces our activities in larger realms of consciousness, as well as in our “present” joint reality, in which my wife is now chair-bound.