“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We sat for the session at about 8:30. Once again Jane used many very long pauses as she spoke for Seth. I think that through Seth tonight she beautifully discusses several of her key insights into the nature of reality—and I don’t think it has ever been done any better.)

(Jane took a very long pause in trance at 10:25—so long, in fact, that I thought she might have fallen asleep as she sat there on the couch with her eyes closed.)

3. As I think the ideas in the session proper are among Jane’s best, so do I think those in the material she delivered for herself are equally good.

To me, Jane’s sensing of those “cousins of consciousness,” those “friendly colleagues,” and her very cautious reactions to her inner knowing, are clear signs of the consistency of her beliefs and her work through the years. And as I’ve shown in the notes for Dreams, it’s also obvious that in spite of Seth’s reassurances, and my own, she hasn’t felt safe wherever she goes.

Her consistency of attitude was strongly reinforced for me when, as I put together the notes for this session, I came across two rough, untitled poems that she’d produced on March 19, 1977—four years and eight months ago. I think it hardly coincidental that I found them just at this time. Jane had written them in colored ink in one of her 4 by 6 sketch pads. She hadn’t typed the poems for her journal, or shown them to me, but had quite forgotten about them. They’re presented a little later in this note.

The freshness of those poems was so vivid to me, their contents so pertinent to Jane’s situation today, that they seemed devoid of all that time that had passed since she’d written them. At once I thought of trying to explore that timelessness in the only way I could as a physical creature—by, contrariwise, taking the time to list a flow of events since she had conceived the poems, putting their creativity into perspective while still feeling it as if it were new. Arbitrarily, I chose professional events from our own lives, and thought of all of them as happening at once (as, according to Seth, in a larger framework they do). Obviously, anyone can compile such a list, involving any group of subjects. This happens to be the one I made:

Jane, then, wrote those two poems 16 days before she dictated the last session for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche on April 4, 1977; one month before she began dictating Mass Events on April 18, 1977; two years and two months before she began God of Jane on May 6, 1979; two years and six months before she began dictating the Preface for Dreams on September 25, 1979; two years and eight months before she came up with the idea for If We Live Again on November 15, 1979; three years and five months before she began dictating Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality in Dreams on August 6, 1980; four years before she began dictating Seth’s sinful-self material in that book on March 11, 1981; four years and three months before she began coming through with her own sinful-self information on June 17, 1981; and four years and five months before, on August 26, 1981, she wrote the poem in Note 6 for Session 936 of Dreams: “Something in me / ebbs and tides, / as if I let myself / for a while / be washed away / out to sea / while leaving / some spidery shell / upon the shore /….”

I see that expanse of time (that four years and five months), as being really an emotional bridge between Jane’s poem in Note 6 for the 936th session and the two she wrote in March 1977. All three are entirely consistent not only with her beliefs and emotions, but with my own. For I feel now, in connection with the two “new” poems, the same profound sensations I had concerning Jane’s challenges when I wrote in Note 6: “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.” All three poems, then, are of a piece, in which she explores across time and emotion different facets of a common set of beliefs about friendly psychic colleagues and feelings of safety.

Now, however, I took another small step and understood that if the three poems reflect deep fears Jane has, revolving around her abilities, they’re also united by her determination to press on with those gifts. Her “undeviating direction,” expressed in Poem One below, is directly related to the material about her that I quoted from Seth in Note 6 for Session 931, in Chapter 9 of Dreams: “Nothing, however, would have kept him at the sessions for this amount of time unless he wanted them.” (The session I cited had been held in February 1980, when Jane had been speaking for Seth for more than 17 years.)

Once again, as I did in Note 6 for the 936th session, I’m running together Jane’s short lines in each stanza of her poetry, separating the lines with virgules.