“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I regard the first one of the four sessions Jane held before starting Chapter 12 as being a key session, an excellent one indeed for us. We feel that it marks a turning point—yet, paradoxically, we’re not at all sure that we can turn in the right direction! Jane came through with the session just a week after giving the last session for Chapter 11 [on November 24, 1981], and I’m presenting it here in Note 1.

Our program of discussing Seth’s material, as well as our own ideas—which included our taping suggestions for Jane to listen to daily—had come out of those sessions for December 1 and 3. Obviously, we were trying to encourage Framework 2 activity. I spent the next day rearranging all of Jane’s working paraphernalia in her writing room, following her directions, and that re-creation of her world helped also. “Rob and Seth started us on a new program and though we’ve hardly begun, I do feel some relieved more peaceful,” she typed in part on the morning of the 5th as she sat at her new low table, “yesterday i felt the place clicking about me. P.M. I did a little mail but didn’t really get into the notes which are to be a part of the program. My typing is still pretty poor but do know this will improve. I don’t feel any flow in these notes but I do feel a submerged flow rising and i do feel… centered, more content… as I get this far I feel a definite block of expression and some mild enough panic but recognize the fact that a feeling of repression came as I decided to do my notes… writing down at once and will tell rob.”

“I begin as best I can… read sessions,” Jane typed on December 7, as she recorded her efforts, and mine, at carrying out our program for her. We played the tape of suggestions we’d made. “I do feel a blockage of expression; my ass hurts typing—a sweet soreness of joints I sit on that brings tears briefly; yet it is a stretching sensation, same right arm. so much I’d like to write down,” she noted later in the day. For although we didn’t know how they’d done so, our suggestions had helped her tune into a number of dear images of her girlhood in her hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York: She’d seen herself at an amusement park—Kaydeross—located on the shore of Saratoga Lake, just outside of town; she’d seen herself “jumproping very young” in the recreation field across the street from the Catholic grade school she had attended; she’d seen and interacted with family members, all dead now. That night she had very vivid dreams.

Five months ago, in the opening notes for Session 936 in Chapter 11 of Dreams, I wrote that by the end of August 1981 Jane had roughed in the first three chapters of The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book. In all of the weeks following she did only some very loose work on three more chapters. On Wednesday, December 9, my idea that she would probably never finish the book was reinforced by her own note.⁶

I think most people would agree that Jane’s singing in Sumari is extraordinarily original, and that she’s an excellent natural dramatist. It’s easy to miss, or skip over, the drama in her lifework because it’s so pervasive in all of her creative endeavors. She was fully aware that that quality became much more obvious in her class singing and sessions, but she didn’t have to consciously evoke it—the drama was just there. In its own form each time, it still underlies our sessions, and her poetry, writing, and painting.

Some would argue, however, over whether the next three characteristics on my list are assets of Jane’s, or hindrances. I believe that any of those can be either or both, depending upon circumstances. My position is that all of the qualities listed, by both Jane and me, represent creative portions of her as she is—and I accept them all.

Understand, however, that the term “dream cloud” would serve as well. [Yet] it is an evocative reference to the way that All That Is packaged itself in the formation of its numberless realities. Such life clouds “still” exist—and you had better put the word “still” in quotations. Each seed of life, of living, contains within itself its own protective coating, its own placenta of necessary nourishment and environmental circumstances, its own system and branches of probabilities.

(A one-minute pause at 10:10.) Even infinity is being everywhere expressed in each moment, for infinity itself is not something apart from what the universe is. As the universe is a portion of infinity’s creativity, in that light there are new species appearing all of the time, whether or not your own situation allows you to perceive that emergence. You yourselves may be portions of that emergence. From your threshold or focus you would be relatively unaware of your own motion on a new time threshold—for to the beings on that threshold you would have already arrived, while to you in your present their existence would at best be theoretical, as if they were future selves. From your standpoint they would be, of course.

At other levels your dreams mix and intertwine not only with those of your contemporaries, but with those of all times and places, living or dead in your terms. Each universe—such as the one you know—serves as a small colony of existence, and is infinite within the characteristics of its own nature.

Some of this evening’s material will only have meaning to you in the dream state, for that matter, and the words of the book may stir some of those meanings into your attention. Each portion of all such life clouds seeks value fulfillment, again, but that term itself is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning.¹⁵

“What I think about illness,” I said, “is that as a people we know so little about it consciously that we’re still literally in the dark ages in that respect. I’ve felt that way for a long time now—that our understanding of what human beings really are is minute at best. Seth offers the greatest insights I’ve ever heard, and I’m more grateful for those than I can say. I think it’s very dangerous to take too hard a position on anything we think we’ve learned as a species, for I can’t imagine that in future millennia we’ll ever cling to very much of it. In the meantime we’re groping around in the dark. To ask any one person to figure it all out now, and to prove it to the world and cure oneself at the same time, may just be asking too much. Learning about our abilities is a social and cultural affair, and you—anyone—need help. Lots of it. Only where do you get the help while trying to learn a few things?

“I didn’t plan to say all of this tonight.”

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.

“Don’t worry, hon.” I laughed. “I know none of it’s going to happen. Maybe I’m wrong about all of it anyhow. I fully expect you to go right on with Dreams. And other psychic stuff too—though I don’t know about Magical Approach.”

But I was afraid as I thought of what could happen to her while she kept on working. We talked about starting up another daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s ideas. It’s not that we disagree with him, really, or find his material unacceptable. It is that we cannot make it work for us the way we want it to—that is, to evidently supersede deep and powerful inner goals. Probably, also, there are things left unsaid because Jane may unwittingly block them. I told her that Seth had said nothing at all about what I regard as the central conflict: the one between her sinful self, so-called, and her spontaneous self. I even agree that our challenges may well be successfully handled in one or more other probable realities, that in those terms that’s an entirely acceptable way for us to learn. Such a course, however, may leave us with something much less than the solution we want in this reality. And there must be resolutions possible here too, I do believe. Where is our faith? We have much to learn.

“Left alone, the self knows how to utilize such rhythms. If you trusted the characteristics of the basic natural person, you would not need such sessions as ours, generally, in the world at all—for such knowledge would be part of it and implied in its cultural organizations, and the daily habits of the people.”

6. I’d always encouraged Jane to write Magical Approach, but my hopes that she would ever finish the book had been declining for some weeks. I didn’t give her any negative suggestions when I read the note she typed for her loose-leaf journal, but I did think the book was dead in spite of the qualified optimism she expressed at the conclusion of her entry. Except for a couple of minor corrections, I’m presenting the note just as she wrote it, spelling errors and all:

“December 9, 1981. Each time I think of beginning MAGICAL APPROACH I feel this reluctance; I’m not sure what bugs me, the copying of records, putting together the days events or what—but i want more of the fun and magic of it for myself, and less hard work. I’d planned a consecutive story line book including some of robs dreams with interpretations yet feel strain there now, showing how this detail or that one fits the picture, this noon it came to me that the approach seemed to rational at this time; i wanted one that was lighter in tone, quicker yet more expansiveso if anything the books technique would be magical itself…. forcing the reader to make some connections from other-than-time frameworks. a possibility came to me of a part 1 consisting of the original abridged sessions one after the other with robs notes included but nothing of mine at all. This followed by a part 2 with chapters following an intuitive shape favoring more association, the sinful self stuff too, showing the portions of psychic motion, could start with a chapter 1 very like the one I have organized and then just have a session or so a chapter until part 2. i don’t know, its a thought…

“i read over that chapter 1 this a.m. and thats about all i did and think about these ideas… and so far this is all i’ve done this afternoon, want to look chapter over again…

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.

“Some mountain climbers, when asked why they climb a certain peak, respond: ‘Because the mountain is there to be climbed’—so the natural approach, the magical approach, is to be used because it exists, and because it represents an open doorway into a world of reality that is always present, always at the base of your cultures and experience. Theoretically at least, the magical approach should be used because it represents the most harmonious method of life (underlined). It is a way of living that automatically enhances all of your abilities and accelerates your comprehensions.

(9:24.) “You should understand that the approach is the best one to use in life, generally speaking, but it will improve all conditions, even if you still have difficulties in certain areas, and its use cannot help but promote the overall quality of your lives. That recognition takes the pressure off, so that you can to some extent relax your old attitudes enough so that you allow the magical approach (long pause) to work in those areas that have been bones of contention.

“The magical approach puts you in harmony with your own individual knowledge of the universe. It puts you in touch with the magical feeling of yourself that you had as a child, and that is familiar to you at levels usually beyond your physical knowledge of yourself. It is better, then, to use the approach because you recognize it for what it is than to use it specifically in order to get something that you want, however beneficial. (All very intently:) There is no doubt at my level that use of the approach can clear up Ruburt’s difficulties naturally and easily. If it is used because you recognize its inherent rightness in yourself, its inherent ‘superior stance,’ then it automatically puts you in a position of greater trust and faith. It opens your options, enlarges your vista of comprehension, so that the difficulties themselves are simply no longer as important—and vanish from your experience in, again, a more natural manner.” (9:37.) “In a fashion, all of the material that I have given you in the annals of our relationship was meant to lead you in one way or another to a place where the true nature of reality could at least be glimpsed. You are at that point now.

“In a manner of speaking, Ruburt’s physical condition represents the bruises, the wounds inflicted upon any individual in his or her long journey (long pause) toward a greater comprehension of life’s experience. In religious terms, you begin to glimpse a promised land—a ‘land’ of psyche and reality that represents unimpeded nature (again, all very intently).

The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. All That Is, I said, might have offered those same incipient forms to the living earth many times, only to have the earth reject them or fail to develop them for many reasons. But even these latest scientific theories are based upon ideas of a past, present, and future; their proponents do not consider that basically time is simultaneous—that the universe is being created now. We had an interesting discussion. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, see sessions 882 and 883.

“Value fulfillment is most difficult to describe, for it combines the nature of a loving presence—a presence with the innate knowledge of its own divine complexity—with a creative ability of infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest, most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all possible variations—and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.”