“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“After lunch yesterday with a mild sense of horseplay, Rob had put a piece of fresh paper in my typewriter. Just title it Chapter 1 and start in on a new project,’ he’d said. He went back to his studio and I closed my eyes trying to visualize my [psychic] library;⁹ nothing, I tried again and just as suddenly I saw a woman seated opposite me [at] the living room table.”

1. Eight weeks later, I’m presenting only a summary of my very long notes for this private session, which Jane held on Tuesday evening, December 1, 1981. The notes stemmed from the unexpected discussion we began at about 8 o’clock, a few minutes after Jane had told me she wanted to have a session on herself. I returned to the living room and found her leaning back on the couch, asleep—and with a lighted cigarette in her hand. A long cone of ash fell into her lap as she woke up with a start: “I never never do that when I’m here alone!” she exclaimed, chagrined. Yet she dozed again when I went out to her writing room after her office chair, which I use while taking notes for the sessions. I thought her sleeping after saying she wanted a personal session was a poor sign. Yet I think that in this session Seth reached core beliefs of ours that we have yet to fully grasp, let alone surmount. He can do better for us only if Jane allows him to, but after we’ve struggled for so many years I’m no longer sure that she can.

I explained that lately I’ve been thinking about what can happen when a person chooses to be born with very strong gifts, but then discovers that for whatever reason or reasons he or she cannot use them, or has to pay a high price to do so. At first I thought it contradictory that such conflicts can arise within nature’s framework—then I realized that they must happen all of the time, and so, actually, are natural after all. I used to think that nothing could keep an individual from showing a great ability. Now, I told Jane, I realize that things are far from being that simple. The use or nonuse of an attribute can have as many ramifications as there are human beings who possess whatever version of it: ranging all the way from being completely buried in a life, to being simply left alone, used just “as is,” or thoroughly transformed in expression.

“Ruburt does not owe me anything. If he decided not to have sessions, or not to operate in the so-called psychic arena, this does not mean that he would be a failure in any way. He does not owe me a sense of commitment. The material I have given on his health I will, however, stand behind, whether or not it is difficult for you to understand, or whether or not you can bring yourselves to accept it.

“It certainly does not seem to either of you that he is getting better. It often seems instead that the opposite is true. You may presently just find it too difficult to take the leap of faith required without more evidence to back it up—this despite the quite frequent feelings of release that Ruburt does experience, along with the much more apparent difficulty. If those feelings go no further, then what good are they? So you both are bound to wonder.

(Very long pause beginning at 9:59.) “I would never stand in the way, however, of Ruburt’s recovery as you understand it. Nor would I feel that Ruburt has let me down, or that you had in any way. Ruburt does need a return to an earlier orientation. That sense of beauty, that reorientation, can relieve the feeling of responsibility that he has at times taken upon himself. He needs an orientation toward the simpler issues—those that carry within themselves a simpler childlike magic. He needs to turn away from an overconcern with life’s more ‘weighty problems,’ to lose the feeling that it is up to him to solve those problems for himself and you and for the world.

(More and more slowly:) “Most of that should be obvious to you. The stresses and strains are in a fashion not simply those of one person and that person’s relationship with his own nature. Those (underlined) issues are compounded by Ruburt’s understanding, as of now, of other people’s lives as they write to you. At the same time, he does not deal directly with such people, so he cannot follow through, for example, as a therapist might. His class gave him some direct encounters through the years as he personally helped to direct others, and could watch the results through their achievements or behavior.

“He certainly expects more of himself than is required, and I have given a good deal of such material, several months back, I believe. I will, however, sort through his experience with your questions in mind, and see what other information I can give you. The other comments are simply handy bandaids, so to speak, but are extremely healthy along the way. When he feels panicky your loving touch—a light quick massage or embrace—acts as quickly on the nervous system as anything else, and far faster than any medicine. Animals even have long been aware of such immediate therapeutic action.

3. After the personal session of December 1 (see Note 1), I’d suggested to Jane that we initiate a daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s material. In keeping with that idea, two nights later Seth recommended that we begin studying the sessions on the magical approach to life and on the sinful self. Then he commented in general on the cyclic and beneficial nature of such undertakings:

How ironic, I thought, that Seth could say he’d be unnecessary if generally we human beings did a better job of creating our reality!

7. Seth not only designed his material in this excellent session to help Jane and me, but others as well. In my opinion, he also answered my wife regarding the note she’d written earlier in the day (see Note 6, above). Aside from all of those points, however, I think it quite remarkable that despite her physical hassles Jane approached the rolling cadences, the inspired certainty of delivery, that she’d achieved over two years ago in some of her sessions for chapters 1 and 2 of Dreams.

Jane initiated Sumari in ESP class, and largely let it go when we ended class and moved to the hill house four years later. As with her speaking for Seth, her greatest power and drama in singing was engendered in class. For the most part in our regular, private, and book sessions, Seth speaks to me with a quieter, businesslike energy; I always feel his vigor and humor, but he isn’t nearly as loud or quick or boisterous as he was in class. Jane was obviously sensitive to the infusion of energy from 30 or more people during those gatherings, and through her Seth responded masterfully. The same was true of her singing, when she ranged from the most delicate soprano trills and nuances to powerful, much deeper emanations.

14. When Seth quoted me as referring to a “life cloud,” he went back to the discussion Jane and I had at lunch today, concerning recent news reports and articles: Some prominent astrophysicists, mathematicians, and astronomers have announced their belief in a theory of “panspermia”—that in ordinary terms of time life on earth was “seeded” from space, instead of arising by pure chance in some primordial ooze or sea on our planet. Those men believe in evolution—that once it originated, life, as Charles Darwin proposed, has ever since been growing in complexity and “evolving” through natural selection and random mutations, or DNA copying errors, into the life and beings we see and are today. Among other signs, the rebel scientists cite the evidence for vast clouds of microorganisms in space, and the identification in certain meteorites of bacterial and fungal micro-fossils, along with a number of amino acids. They claim that even at 4.6 billion years, the earth mathematically is not old enough for life to have had the time to evolve (beginning about 3.8 billion years ago) into its enormously complex current forms. That lack of ordinary time in evolutionary theory is a question Jane and I have often wondered about.

15. Seth may think that his own term, “value fulfillment,” “is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning,” but over two years ago, in Chapter 2 of Dreams, he gave what I think is an excellent interpretation of that quality. In Session 884 for October 3, 1979, he came through very emphatically in one of Jane’s best sessions: