“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

From the 19th of August through the 28th, then, Jane worked on Chapter 2 of Magical Approach.⁶ Three days later, when she was writing Chapter 3, we received from an editor in the trade production department of Prentice-Hall the frontmatter proofs for If We Live Again. They were easy for Jane to check, and she called in her approval of the few little changes that had already been made.

We have an excellent stone fireplace in the living room of the hill house, and often during the winter months I used to build a fire in it at suppertime; we ate while sitting on the couch. Jane and I really enjoyed all of the deep implications conjured up by the wood fires. We had the fireplace cleaned a couple of years ago, however, and with that break in routine I gave up using it: By then my time had become so taken up each day with what seemed like an endless list of things to do—with trying to help Jane, with working, with running the house, with answering the mail and so forth—that I just stopped making fires.

Early this morning we heard strange scratching sounds on the other side of the closed fireplace damper. These soon became intermixed with a series of musical chitterings and chatterings. A bird, or birds? We didn’t think so. Next we speculated about squirrels, since there are plenty of them living in the woods out back—yet the sounds didn’t seem quite right for one or more of those creatures, either. The noises stopped after an hour or so.

(8:49.) Many people might wish that I would add many more methods to help you study dreams and their nature. In such a manner also dreams suggest nature’s spontaneous order throughout the centuries, and allow you to look at the species in a truer light. Your lives, for that matter, are dependent upon the curious relationships that are involved. Colon: You would not get by for one day if the conserving principles and the unexpected did not exist exactly as they do. There is so much you must learn and remember in life, and so much you must spontaneously forget—otherwise, action itself would be relatively meaningless.

(9:01.) In private living and in so-called evolutionary terms, however, life necessitates the intrusion of surprising events, unforeseen actions, leaps of insight or behavior that could not come alone from any accumulation of knowledge or simple conservation of energy, but seem to suggest entirely different new developments.

People want, then, to throw aside old structures of belief. They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. They begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion that attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten. They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. At such times the conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as they did before. Surprising events that were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the behavior they expect from others. You are in such times now.

I cherished Jane’s ending for her poem, for in it she’d reaffirmed at least the possibility of her self healing itself. Yet, my hope was tempered even as my fear lessened, for she hadn’t mentioned outright the integration of a more understanding sinful self into her psyche. Jane’s physical challenges, her symptoms, are with her now, I thought, and we must deal with them on the way to rejuvenation. I was left caught as we talked after I’d read her poem: suspended between despair for my wife and the hope that she would choose to go on living, in our terms.

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.

(Note: All of the photographs of Jane that appear in The Seth Material were taken in the living room of Apartment 4 early in 1970; glimpses of the room appear in those shots. The first and last photos show Jane before the bay window that faces the northwest, with the trees and the backs of the houses lining the east side of Walnut Street in view.)

“I did briefly give him a message (on October 23, 1981): Attend to what is before you, for it is there for a reason. In each person’s life, and in your own, at each and every point of your existence, the solutions to your problems, or the means of achieving those solutions, are always as apparent—or rather as present—within your days as is any given problem itself. What I mean is quite simple: The solutions already exist in your lives. You may not have put them together yet, or organized them in the necessary ways. The solutions in Ruburt’s case lie in all of those areas with which you are normally concerned—the mail, the sessions, the psychic abilities. When you attend to what is there with the proper magical attitude of mind, then the altered organizations can take place.