“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.

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.

That evening Jane came through with the third of the four private sessions she held before beginning Chapter 12. Her hearing and visual difficulties were continuing. Once again Seth offered us material relative to our daily program—but that’s not the only reason I decided to present the full session in Note 7.

(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.

What do I mean by such attention? Attention to the moment as it is presented. Attention to the table of rich reality as it appears before you. Attention to the kind of person you are, and to the loving appreciation of your own uniqueness. To attend to your life in such a fashion brings you into a clearer communication with the inner action of your own existence.

1. Eight weeks later, I’m presenting only a summary of my very long notes for this private session, which Jane held on Tuesday evening, December 1, 1981. The notes stemmed from the unexpected discussion we began at about 8 o’clock, a few minutes after Jane had told me she wanted to have a session on herself. I returned to the living room and found her leaning back on the couch, asleep—and with a lighted cigarette in her hand. A long cone of ash fell into her lap as she woke up with a start: “I never never do that when I’m here alone!” she exclaimed, chagrined. Yet she dozed again when I went out to her writing room after her office chair, which I use while taking notes for the sessions. I thought her sleeping after saying she wanted a personal session was a poor sign. Yet I think that in this session Seth reached core beliefs of ours that we have yet to fully grasp, let alone surmount. He can do better for us only if Jane allows him to, but after we’ve struggled for so many years I’m no longer sure that she can.

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….”

“It certainly does not seem to either of you that he is getting better. It often seems instead that the opposite is true. You may presently just find it too difficult to take the leap of faith required without more evidence to back it up—this despite the quite frequent feelings of release that Ruburt does experience, along with the much more apparent difficulty. If those feelings go no further, then what good are they? So you both are bound to wonder.

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:

I like that entire poem, of course—but in a different way I like just as much the untitled poem Jane wrote on a different subject almost 15 years later (on August 25, 1980). She was 51. I borrowed this poem for the opening notes for Session 920, in Chapter 9 of Dreams, and urged her to give it a title and present it in If We Live Again. Jane did so on both counts, in Section Six: “Strange Liberty.” She also changed the format of the poem, but not the words of what I consider to be one of her best creative insights.

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:

“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 ‘proper’ question to ask is not: ‘Can I enter that land?’ The land is here, where you are, and it always has been. The methods, the ways, the beliefs, the modes of travel to a destination create the destination itself. (A one-minute pause.) It is impossible for you to operate without beliefs in your present mode of existence (another minute), ‘for beyond’ those glittering packages of beliefs, however, there exists the vast reservoir of sensation itself, the land that does indeed exist ‘beyond beliefs.’

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.