“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I hope I have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire.

9:37 P.M. After she came out of trance, Jane and I simply stared at each other. Dreams was done at last! We felt sad, for several reasons. Even though Jane had remarked at the end of last Wednesday evenings session that Seth was close to the end of the book, his actual completion of it still hit us. I congratulated her; I told her that she had created another fine work which would help many people.

However, all of our reactions were much more subdued than they had ever been before when she had finished a book, either by herself or with Seth. No matter what other challenges we had created for ourselves over the last two years and four months, the knowledge that Dreams was in process had served as a comforting foundation in our lives. That had been true even during those long delays in its production. We regret that that support is gone. And we know that as the creation of Dreams begins to recede from our immediate perception other challenges will inevitably move forward. Basically, things have come down to our hopes that Jane can keep going from day to day, and that our new credo will offer her support now that Seth and she are through with their book.

I can’t note the same for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book—the very promising work that Jane and I first discussed a year and a half ago [in August 1980], after Seth had started his group of excellent private sessions on that subject.⁸ I watched Jane try to write the book a number of times; last month, in Note 6 for Session 939 [in this chapter], I finally expressed the opinion that she wouldn’t finish the job. Or, to put it another way, Magical Approach has yet to undergo a resurrection by her! But obviously Jane has the freedom to engage in any project, and she chooses not to follow through with some of them. I think Magical Approach would have been a fine book as she planned it—but that it ended up squelched by at least two major factors: She was too inhibited by the subject matter [her physical symptoms] out of which the magical approach material had grown, and she was bothered because she had chosen to emulate the plodding way in which I put together the Seth books. That way didn’t allow her the creative freedom to spontaneously plunge ahead. As I wrote in Note 6 [for the 939th session], eventually I might try assembling such a work myself.

In a way our joint world came crashing down upon us on February 26, yet we continue to live amid the welter of our beliefs. Again and again in the notes for Dreams I’ve indicated how Jane and I tried to understand the probable reality we’ve created. With the hospital experience, I’m telling myself that if I can write about the storms of consciousness involving whole nations, I can certainly describe and reflect upon our own storms of consciousness. Jane and I must still have an unbelievable amount to learn, even though I think that in more basic terms certain portions of each individual’s reality are consciously unknowable. As Seth said three years ago: “Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development, which also promotes the ideal development of all organizations in which it takes part.⁹

From her mystical orientation Jane chooses what she wants to learn and use from what Seth has to offer. I think that if one isn’t a mystic, such a state of being can only be approximated: There are obviously many variations possible, but the mystic chooses challenges that the rest of us can really understand only in the vaguest of terms. Jane’s mystical creation of her universe is just her own. It always has been and it always will be; she has expressed her way over and over again in her deceptively simple poetry, as well as in the sessions. That way is a fount of creativity I can only partially grasp. No matter that right now our joint reality seems quite opaque to me as Jane lies bedridden. I know that it appears much more translucent to Seth, and that he sees our great active potentials as we cannot at this time.

It’s quite clear, of course, that the nations of the West, including that “Great Satan,” the United States, are, with Japan, keeping the fanatical Iranian mullahs (Moslem religious teachers) in power, so that their country will not be taken over by the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party; that most unwelcome development could place Iran under Russian domination. Iran’s economy is actually at a very low point because its leaders have squandered much of its already reduced oil income on the war with Iraq, and on revolutionary institutions and food imports, while devoting little to the nation’s long-term interests. There’s plenty of oil available from around the world; were the West to stop buying Iranian oil, the regime would quickly collapse. The United States doesn’t want either Iran or Iraq to win their war. In the grimmest of political realities, our side is using Iran to block Russian expansion into the Middle East, and is using Iraq to block Iranian domination of its other, weaker oil-producing neighbors. The Iranian-Iraqi war promises to be the bloodiest one in centuries between the two countries; the West is working for a stalemate that over the years will degenerate into “harmless” border clashes. And Russia continues its remorseless occupation and subjugation of Afghanistan.

I think the main idea we’re trying to bring to consciousness as a species is that we’ve chosen to move beyond the limits of the ordinary, safe world we’ve always created. Until the development and use (by the United States, no less!) of the atom bomb four decades ago, we could routinely kill each other while knowing that most of us, and our homelands, would survive. We’re still fighting our conventional wars, but now we have to face the threat of national or species disaster through the escalation of an “ordinary” war into one in which nuclear weapons are either accidentally or deliberately used.

Our relationship with nuclear energy, then, as it has been with warfare, is mainly adversarial: We still crave protection from our own creations. Now no one on earth is “safe”—in this probable reality our species has given at least unconscious permission (through the dream state, for example) for the great nuclear experiment to continue.

Privation theory has for many centuries been a main tenet of theology: Evil is not a power in itself, but only the absence of good; it is not-good. Room is made for the existence of the devil, who rebelled against the God who created him and constantly inveighs others to follow him in choosing the not-good. I believe that the only devils we know are those we originate ourselves. Through privation theory religion has created unanswerable questions for itself as it seeks to explain man’s inhumanity to man. To me, privation theory is a beautiful example of how man projects his fears of the world he’s created out upon that very world. His focus is much too limited.

I don’t mean at all to put down everything we’ve created in our world, and to proclaim that Seth’s concept of All That Is is the magical solution that mankind has been searching for throughout his existence. I do mean to relate the self-created elements of our interior and exterior, individual and mass worlds to a larger whole of consciousness. It’s inevitable that we’ll grow. How we’ll grow is the question!

Ironically, as individuals and nations we talk about casting off old beliefs while cherishing them as long as possible. Why have large segments of consciousness chosen to operate in such a fashion? I think we’re creating a probable reality in which consciousness has the absolute freedom to explore all facets of itself—every one we can think of, and therefore create. Within our national orientations, within our religious and secular, scientific and artistic structures, we are choosing to go to the extremes of “good” and “bad,” and to deal with the consequences, all stewing together in what seems like an impossible mix of reason and emotion, learning and joy, pain and violence, and life and death. Naturally, many of us don’t like certain facets of our creations, yet we must deal with all of them if we are to make any sense out of our reality. Otherwise, our growing will be too limited; we’ll remain slaves to our animosities.

I do think that through her mystical understanding and interpretation of our probable reality, Jane has indeed offered much to us, and that she will continue to do so. We’ll have to resolve our great challenges through voluntary group and international efforts, though. No one nation or entity can impose its way of consciousness upon the rest, without violating the very concepts it’s trying to espouse for one and all.