“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Some ideas came to me as I was taking a walk late one evening during the days I worked on this note. “We don’t want it thought,” I wrote when I got back to the hill house, “that the overall consciousness of Iran is playing with the individual consciousnesses of its people, say, as with toy soldiers, setting its citizens up against the world only to have them knocked down. Nor would this be true of any other country. Rather, we want to relay to the reader that the great consciousness of Iran is made up of the individual consciousnesses of its people—that within that chosen national context the individual does have whatever freedom of creativity is possible. The mental and physical freedoms available will vary widely, according to time, nation, and history, but they will always be chosen. This is hardly new thinking. Indeed, it’s quite obvious, but it’s the best way I can put it into words at the moment….” Once again, I refer the reader to Seth’s excellent material on violence as quoted in Note 2 for Session 933.

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.

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.