“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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. “

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

After the holidays Jane worked on several small acrylic paintings of flowers that friends had given us for Christmas. She wrote a few notes and tried some poetry; her handwriting continued to be unsteady; she still made many errors typing. However, she also began to occasionally manifest an upsetting new development—a slight tremor in her voice. I then realized that each time I heard that certain agitation her speech slowed down slightly. We thought the voice effects were connected to her hearing and vision difficulties, which also fluctuated to some degree. Jane was concerned and not concerned, and once again I saw in her that innocent acceptance of the reality she was creating—the one I often had such trouble understanding [as well as my own participation in creating it!]. Not that she uncomplainingly welcomed this physical challenge, but that she overlaid its arrival with a frame of mind in which she kept going as best she could. I tried not to alarm her as we talked, while mentally I speculated about whether the vocal changes could be a further sign of her withdrawal from the world. Before we held the private session for last December 1, I had admitted to her my fear that she was gradually cutting down on her communication with the world.¹¹

Neither of us knew how such a tremor and slowdown might influence the sessions, for example: Jane hadn’t spoken for Seth in several weeks, so we had yet to find out! I took comfort in remembering her excellent vocal power when delivering the private session for December 3.¹² Her voice is a powerful and dramatic connective among realities for her, charged with energy and emotion whether she’s speaking for herself, for Seth, or speaking or singing in her trance language, Sumari.¹³ That vocal steadiness and power, coming out of someone whose weight hovers around 100 pounds, has always been most reassuring to us. We tried what Seth had suggested many times: After discussing her voice effects we gave Jane gentle suggestions that they could be greatly minimized, then turned our attention away from them. Actually, I hoped that our almost childlike trust—which I felt was closely related to at least some of the psychological elements involved in her acceptance of the voice challenges to begin with—would make possible their complete disappearance.

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.

Probabilities may be swirling everywhere, yet remain of course unperceived in any given instant, so that you might in this odd strange analogy (pause) hear a dim brief whirr, as in the whirling of winds, and think it unimportant—while what you heard instead was an entire world of probabilities speed past where you stood (intently).

Your own entire structure of life, therefore, with its acute and precise definitions in the package of reality, is a living life cloud that may or may not be perceived in other realities. That cloud contains within it ever-freshening sources of new creativity. When you dream or sleep or think, you automatically add to other dimensions of a life cloud or dream cloud that emerge from the very actions of your own subjective motions.

(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.

I’m afraid that I did most of the talking in our “discussion,” but once again we tried to view our lives in some sort of joint mental and physical perspective. We didn’t fight, or even argue. We never do, yet I said things that later I wished I hadn’t. Such regrets are inevitable, I suppose, but if I can tell my wife about the storms of consciousness that I think are so active in the Middle East, for example, then certainly I feel like discussing my feelings about our own challenges. Both of us are as concerned as ever about her situation. Jane’s feelings of panic, which she had today, and which I tried to help her through, generate their counterparts within me—no doubt about it. At times I couldn’t believe myself as I talked tonight, even while I was driven once again to think that on the deepest levels Jane’s mystical way is bringing her just what she wants. (In Chapter 9, see Note 13 for Session 931.)

Jane listened to me go on and on: “I’m on the point again—very close—of refusing to help you with the sessions any longer. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I don’t know what else to do. If we don’t see some pretty drastic improvements within the next few sessions, you may end up talking to the wall if you want to have one, or into a recorder if you can operate it. I can’t stop you from speaking for Seth by yourself, or doing it with someone else, but I can refuse to encourage you myself.

“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 don’t want to do that,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t mind trying some things on my own here at the house, like getting an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor here, or an orthopedist—but no hospital. But I’m shocked at what you’re saying about giving up on the sessions.”

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.

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.

“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.

“He certainly expects more of himself than is required, and I have given a good deal of such material, several months back, I believe. I will, however, sort through his experience with your questions in mind, and see what other information I can give you. The other comments are simply handy bandaids, so to speak, but are extremely healthy along the way. When he feels panicky your loving touch—a light quick massage or embrace—acts as quickly on the nervous system as anything else, and far faster than any medicine. Animals even have long been aware of such immediate therapeutic action.

“I will bring the session to a close, then. I have ranged within it on several occasions this evening, to see what other glimmerings might have immediately come to my attention, and I wish you as always a fond good evening.”

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.

How ironic, I thought, that Seth could say he’d be unnecessary if generally we human beings did a better job of creating our reality!

“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.

“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.

“You cannot know what would have happened, for example, had it not been produced (as I’d speculated to Jane late this afternoon), or distributed, so the question might seem moot. In the same fashion, the publication of my next book, or rather the one we are working on (Dreams), is bound to bring you greater advantages than disadvantages. Expression is far preferred, of course, to repression—but more than this, the matter of repression cannot be solved by adding further repression as a therapeutic measure. That is, the problem [of Ruburt’s symptoms] would have popped up in a different fashion regardless of the apparent trigger.

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:

In what past lives
did we live before?
My cells remember
what my brain does not recall.
Your touch
sends images flying up
like leaves rising in a wind
from silent layers
underground.

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.

“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….

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….

(Long pause at 9:03.) “You do not have to worry in an overly strained way about putting the new principles of life into practical experience at once. You do not need to worry or deride yourselves for stupidity if it appears (very long pause, eyes closed), looking over the long annals of work that we have done together, that it should have been obvious that our ideas were leading in certain directions—for not only have I been trying to divest you of official ideas, but to prepare you for the acceptance of a new version of reality: a version that could be described in many fashions. It has been during the annals of history, but many of those fashions also indisputably, and with the best of intentions, managed to give a faulty picture: You ended up with your gods and demons, unwieldy methods and cults, and often with the intellect downgraded. I hope, of course, that our ‘model’ avoids many of those pitfalls.

“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.

Occasionally Jane will record a Sumari song when I’m out of the house; I may hear her play it later, but I don’t “bug” her about sharing it with me. With the increase in her symptoms her songs have become more subdued, more poignant. Although she seldom translates them into English, I know their subject matter. As Seth does, they represent one portion of her psyche offering reassurances to another more conscious portion, in our terms; they deal with her questioning of the reality she’s creating in the finest personal detail—her wanting to know why she’s made her choices, her determination to press ahead, her embracing of our beloved earth and our universe. Sometimes her singing carries from her writing room at the back of the house, through the kitchen, around the corner and down the hall into my studio. And sometimes I hear her voice break in mid-song. She is overwhelmed with her yearning. She stops singing.

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.”