“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.

We discussed that session thoroughly the next day, December 2, and Jane ended up defending herself from what I had written in some of my notes. She showed more animation than I’d seen her display for some time, and I was glad to agree that she made some good points; others I disagreed with. I asked her to type a summary of her remarks for inclusion with our next session. At the same time, I tried to make it easier for her to do the typing itself. I’ve made things for her before.² Recently she had been having trouble comfortably lifting her hands high enough to reach her typewriter as it sat upon either the oak table in her writing room, or upon her standard metal typing table. I took the time to build a lower, very solid table whose top rides just above her knees as she sits in her office chair; she can operate her typewriter much more easily at that lower level. She makes mistakes typing because her fingers aren’t working well, but is anxious to improve her accuracy through working. [Nor is her handwriting as steady as it used to be.] As she typed on December 3: “Rob just made a new wooden typing table, right height, etc, and I am trying it out now. It worked great, want to start up journal, want to start project… want to get sessions started up again too or tell myself so anyhow. “

“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.

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.

Now—good evening.

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….”

“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 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.

(Seth, beginning at 9:45 P.M.:) “I have some comments to make on your discussion—rather brief for now.

(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.

“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 after reading over rough chapter 1 again, this time it seems fine! so I’ll look over rest I have and see what I think….

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

“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 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.