“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Jane’s “early spontaneous Saratoga images,” as she called them, her re-creation of her own past, had continued the next day. I found her visions particularly poignant, because in them she had seen herself as having the full and unconscious freedom of physical motion that the very young so take for granted. I wondered whether a part of her might be viewing her childhood in order to remind her of that mobile heritage, to help her regenerate it in the present.⁵ “see myself jumproping [again]… but the places themselves seem more significant to me [today] rather than people,” she wrote. “they are fairly extensive, in color and i look out from them at the view thus going inside them to a degree; must cover the… time period when I was about three…. vague ideas that when I was around five an older man died in the neighboring house where I’d played on the porch and that someone took me to see the body—my first such experience…. Well, now I’ll read a magical approach session, rob and I together read recent session this a.m….” And she had more strong dreams that evening.

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

Jane worked less and less as the holiday season approached, although on December 15 she gave her fourth private session; its most evocative subject matter—art and child psychology—is separate from our themes for Dreams. We saw only a few friends. I was busier than ever, however: running the house, preparing for Christmas, helping my wife in various ways, working on the earlier notes for Dreams and trying to accumulate some painting time. Jane didn’t do any more on her manuscript for Magical Approach, nor anything about obtaining the medical help she’d mentioned on the first of December. Our program of self-help gradually began to diminish, as had many of them before.⁸ Finally, in an effort to cheer up Jane one day as she sat idly at the typing table in her writing room, I tried a variation of a tactic that had worked so well for her inception of Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche almost six and a half years ago: This time, standing in back of her, I put my arms around her and rolled a clean sheet of paper into her typewriter—but here’s the note she wrote the next day:

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.

(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.

“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.”

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:

I’d also written in the notes for the last session (of December 1) about our difficulties producing Mass Events, and that Jane has “done little on Magical Approach recently….” Seth this evening:

“The sessions on the magical approach… can serve as valuable springboards to release from your own creative areas new triggers for inspiration and understanding, and hence for therapeutic development. That should be part of the program, in other words, regardless of what Ruburt intends to do bookwise with those sessions.

It’s not that my mind knows less
than it did before,
but that its reason
finally deduced
the magic of its source,
and sensed beneath
the logic of its ways
the deeper spontaneous
order
that powers its own thought.

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…

“Now instead i am impatient with sinful self syndrome, want to ally myself with magical self;”

Finally: After considering my interpretation of Jane’s note—that she wouldn’t complete her book on Seth’s magical approach to reality—I began to speculate about eventually putting together such a work myself….

(Seth, starting at 8:49 P.M.:) “Ruburt is truly beginning to understand that the magical approach is indeed the natural approach to life’s experience.

“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.

“To some extent tonight’s relatively brief session should remove senses of urgency on your parts, or of self-criticism, that make you question when or how [you] can ‘learn to make’ the magical approach work in any specific way—that is, why you cannot learn to make the approach work in, say, helping Ruburt’s condition in a faster, more effective fashion.”

(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.

“The universe is not dependent upon your belief in it in order that it can exist. It contains within itself its own comprehension of its own knowledge, its own magical recognition of itself, its own harmonious laws and orders, its own cabinetry. It possesses and holds intact even the smallest probability, so that no briefest possible life or creature or being is ever lost in the shuffle of a cosmic mechanics.

“To even sense the existence of that kind of reality, however, you must have already ‘opened the doorway’ to Framework 2, and begun to use the magical approach as your natural instinctive way of dealing with experience.” (With a smile:) “End of session, and a fond good evening.” (10:05 P.M. “Good night, Seth.”)