“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Another two months have passed during Jane’s production of Dreams. We had a very subdued holiday season. Now the new year is almost a month old; the weather is cold but the frozen ground is practically bare of snow. Our mail is as heavy as ever. Those “unused gaps of time,” those long weeks passing between recent chapters for Dreams, have become very worrisome to me, for they fall outside of Jane’s natural creative rhythms. She hasn’t even had many private sessions during those breaks in book work; she gave but two private sessions between chapters 10 and 11, and four between chapters 11 and 12. That very infrequency itself is an obvious “symptom” of our psychic and physical challenges.

And a very positive event took place that afternoon. Jane received from Prentice-Hall the first copies of her book of poetry: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. We had looked forward to seeing that handsome little volume ever since she first conceived of it well over two years ago, before she had a title.⁴ If possible, Jane was even more pleased at the publication of If We Live Again than she had been when her book of poetic narrative, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, came out in 1975. If We Live Again once more carried her back to her earliest days of creative work, which in turn had led to her teenage dreams of becoming a published poet [she was born in 1929]. As I’ve shown in various notes in the Seth books, through the art of her first love, poetry, Jane presents her beliefs with an amazingly simple clarity, combining her mystical innocence and knowledge with her literal-minded acceptance of physical life.

Over two weeks passed after the holiday season before Jane finally hand-lettered the first formal entry for her 1982 journal:

I told her I think that on those levels she really doesn’t want to hold the sessions anymore, that we’re surrounded by clues to that effect, that such a strong part of her is now so against her psychic work, so afraid of its implications—of being swept away, of going counter to her early religious imprinting—that her fear has put her in an impossible position physically. Since she’s becoming more and more helpless, I said, we can hardly say we’re solving our challenges in ordinary terms. “And don’t tell me your present state means that you’re getting better, like Seth says, because you’re not,” I said. “You haven’t walked for how long?—two weeks over a year now, I think it is. Not even with your typing table. I’m aware that you may be coping with certain lifetime challenges through the psychic method, so the question becomes one of how far you want to carry the thing. In this probability I put physical survival first, obviously, but do you? Sweetheart, I’ll have to admit that sometimes I wonder….”

Jane’s main puzzlement, however, is that even with Seth’s and her own sinful-self material her physical symptoms persist to such a degree, in spite of an occasional lessening. Evidently, she said, both of us are still consciously unsure of what our challenges and fears are on certain levels. Obviously, I’m as deeply involved in her symptoms as she is. We talked about the many delays involved in our producing Mass Events and Dreams. She’s “felt good” about finishing Chapter 11 of Dreams a week ago, but has done little on Magical Approach recently, except to reread her rough work for the beginning of that book. (She began to slack off from Magical Approach early last October—two months ago—after working well on the first three chapters.) Tonight, I even speculated, admitted my fear, that in a way she’s embarked upon a long-range campaign to at least drastically reduce, if not eliminate, her communication with the world, for one sacrifice follows another in an order that can hardly be accidental, Jane revealed that she’d had similar thoughts.

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:

4. I first mentioned what was to become If We Live Again early in the Preliminary Notes for the Preface to Dreams—those leading off the private session of September 13, 1979. By the time I wrote the opening notes for Session 886 in Chapter 2, three months later, Jane had decided the book would contain “some of the poetry she has dedicated to me over the years since we met in February 1954.” Seth agreed. Rather immodestly, I present below the first verse of a love poem Jane wrote for me on November 5, 1965. It’s in Section Two, which section bears the title of If We Live Again itself. Jane often reworks her poetry, but for the book she changed only two words and added one in this verse which she wrote over 16 years ago. She was 36, and we’d been married for 11 years:

5. It was inevitable that Jane’s images would remind me of the note I’d written well over two months ago, on re-creating the past, or updating it, through nostalgia. In Chapter 11 of Dreams, see Note 8 for Session 936. Her images led me to search out the collection of battered black-and-white snapshots of her that somehow, some way, she’d managed to save from her early childhood. Along with scraps of her youthful poetry, the pictures are the only physical remnants she possesses of her first years, and studying them anew I realized just how valuable they really are. I talked of having them copied and enlarged by a professional photographer; I speculated about eventually having some of them reproduced in a book. That idea may have to wait, however: For some years Jane hasn’t cared to be photographed—or have pictures of herself shown, no matter when they had been taken.

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.

Once in a while, Jane will sing to herself as she sits at her table in her writing room and looks east through the sliding glass doors at the side street rising into the woods to the north. Across the street is the white clapboard house of our neighbors, whom we love and who love us. Our friends have a large yard beside their house. It’s filled with trees and flowering shrubs—a view Jane cherishes, and one she has painted and written about a number of times. Indeed, she was looking out at that view at four o’clock on a foggy morning in June 1979 (over two and a half years ago) when she was inspired to name that certain part of her “that is as clear-eyed as a child” the “God of Jane.” Out of that insight she titled the book she had started a few weeks earlier The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. In Chapter 9 of Mass Events, see the opening notes and Note 1 for Session 860.

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: