“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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.

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.

Some would argue, however, over whether the next three characteristics on my list are assets of Jane’s, or hindrances. I believe that any of those can be either or both, depending upon circumstances. My position is that all of the qualities listed, by both Jane and me, represent creative portions of her as she is—and I accept them all.

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.

(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.

“Ruburt does not owe me anything. If he decided not to have sessions, or not to operate in the so-called psychic arena, this does not mean that he would be a failure in any way. He does not owe me a sense of commitment. The material I have given on his health I will, however, stand behind, whether or not it is difficult for you to understand, or whether or not you can bring yourselves to accept it.

(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.

“But that would be awful to give up the sessions,” she exclaimed as I wheeled her into the bathroom.

“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.”

“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.

Very clear in Seth’s material, I told Jane after the session, is his message that it would be a great mistake for us to give up the highly creative endeavor of the sessions, regardless of whether they were ever published. I said that I was delighted to retract the observation I’d made before the last session—that on deeper levels she didn’t want to hold the sessions any longer. I added that once again we could try searching the creative matrix of the symptoms themselves for the solutions to her challenges, and mine as well, for that is where those solutions will be found.

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.

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:

“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…