“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.

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:

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.

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

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.

(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.

(Very long pause beginning at 10:21.) “The statements I have made regarding the innate nature of the spontaneous self can be of the greatest service if they are accepted. You are trying to redefine the very definitions of personal identity—no easy task. Not just Ruburt alone, but the people of the world are, one way or another, now in the process of just such a redefinition. It is impossible to assign some time element to that (underlined) kind of assignment.

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:

“… certainly it must seem to you both that you begin many therapeutically designed programs only to have them disappear. There is a rhythm to such programs, however, and it is natural for the self to rouse at certain times, begin such activities, then apparently (underlined) discard them.

“They begin with a certain impetus, give you a certain kind of progress, and regardless of how great or small that progress may be, there is a necessary time of assimilation—that is, the stimulation over a period of time is more effective when it is in a fashion intermittent, when certain methods are tried out, applied, and so forth—but by the very nature of the healing process there is also the necessity of letup, diversion, and looking away.

“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.”

“Another point: Regardless of any seeming contradictions, the beneficial aspects of any particular creative activity far outweigh any disadvantages. The nature of creativity, regardless of any given specific manifestation, is reflected in an overall generalized fashion that automatically increases the quality of life, and such benefits are definite regardless of what other conditions also become apparent. I mean to make clear here that regardless of any complications that may seem only too apparent to you, in the production and distribution of my last book, and Ruburt’s (Mass Events), the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages.

“If the apparent trigger of a difficulty is a creative accomplishment, then the difficulty itself is ‘loaded’ also with its own natural therapeutic solutions.”

(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.

“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).

“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.”)

10. Jane had responded beautifully to my suggestion when she began dictating Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: I’d playfully told her at suppertime that she was going to start a new Seth book in the session which was due that evening—and three hours later she did just that. Although she was writing her own Psychic Politics while I worked on the notes for “Unknown” Reality, she was between Seth books, and I wanted her to have one in progress so that it “could underlie her daily life like a foundation.” See the opening notes for the first session in Psyche—the 752nd for Monday evening, July 28, 1975. We held that session four months after moving into the hill house.

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:

“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.”