“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. “

Our program of discussing Seth’s material, as well as our own ideas—which included our taping suggestions for Jane to listen to daily—had come out of those sessions for December 1 and 3. Obviously, we were trying to encourage Framework 2 activity. I spent the next day rearranging all of Jane’s working paraphernalia in her writing room, following her directions, and that re-creation of her world helped also. “Rob and Seth started us on a new program and though we’ve hardly begun, I do feel some relieved more peaceful,” she typed in part on the morning of the 5th as she sat at her new low table, “yesterday i felt the place clicking about me. P.M. I did a little mail but didn’t really get into the notes which are to be a part of the program. My typing is still pretty poor but do know this will improve. I don’t feel any flow in these notes but I do feel a submerged flow rising and i do feel… centered, more content… as I get this far I feel a definite block of expression and some mild enough panic but recognize the fact that a feeling of repression came as I decided to do my notes… writing down at once and will tell rob.”

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

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.

Those branches of probabilities act like remote sensors, seeking out those conditions that will be suited to the seed’s best value fulfillment and development. In the simplest of terms, the life clouds will send forth their contents (pause) where circumstances best meet their own requirements. On the other hand, the life clouds can seed their own worlds completely. Space itself already speaks of a creation “begun,” for no matter how empty space may seem to be it simply appears like a vast cathedral, or tent or pyramid of form, for the moment perhaps vacant inside, with walls so distant that they go unperceived.

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).

(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.

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

“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?

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.

(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.

“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.”

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

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:

5. It was inevitable that Jane’s images would remind me of the note I’d written well over two months ago, on re-creating the past, or updating it, through nostalgia. In Chapter 11 of Dreams, see Note 8 for Session 936. Her images led me to search out the collection of battered black-and-white snapshots of her that somehow, some way, she’d managed to save from her early childhood. Along with scraps of her youthful poetry, the pictures are the only physical remnants she possesses of her first years, and studying them anew I realized just how valuable they really are. I talked of having them copied and enlarged by a professional photographer; I speculated about eventually having some of them reproduced in a book. That idea may have to wait, however: For some years Jane hasn’t cared to be photographed—or have pictures of herself shown, no matter when they had been taken.

“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…

“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 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.

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.