“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane and I outlined a “credo” for her that we hoped she could follow back to the productive endeavors she loves so much: writing, poetry, painting, the sessions, the mail, cooking, feeding our cats, Billy and Mitzi, and so forth. (We still receive from 30 to 50 letters and packages a week.) After supper I wrote a version of the credo, stressing Jane’s ability to write prose and to handle the mail. I don’t know what I think about whether the statements will have any beneficial effects for her.

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.

My own role in the physical production of Dreams is far from over, however. In notes at the end of this session I’ll briefly consider the latest expressions of large-scale consciousnesses concerning Three Mile Island¹ and the countries of the Middle East,² and then will unify those discussions by explaining how I think those great events of consciousness have counterpart relationships, just as “living” entities do.³ I’ll also refer to our country’s space-shuttle program.⁴ Next, I have to put into final form the complicated notes I began for a number of sessions for Dreams as Jane delivered them. After that will come the job of typing the finished manuscript for this massive two-volume work; I do not know when I’ll have it ready for our publisher. And therein lies another reason for our somber moods: Our dear friend and editor, Tam Mossman, almost certainly will not see Dreams through the publishing process. Tam has grown restless; he needs a change; he plans to leave Prentice-Hall.⁵

In Note 1 for Session 939, in this Chapter 12, I quoted myself as telling Jane last December 1 that she hadn’t walked for “two weeks over a year now, I think it is. Not even with your typing table.” In the opening notes for that session, I quoted her as writing on December 7: “I do feel a blockage of expression; my ass hurts typing—a sweet soreness of joints I sit on that brings tears briefly; yet it is a stretching sensation.” At the finish of Dreams, her span without walking has increased to 14 months and 22 days. She is still uncomfortable sitting—more so, even, and I fear that her flesh will break down from the constant pressure; I’ve seen what I interpret as signs of that happening.

Jane hasn’t contacted a doctor. Her hearing and handwriting remain impaired. Her voice tremor and slowdown remain mild and intermittent; she’s done well during sessions. And as I write these closing notes I remind myself once again, as I often do, of those promises we made each other when we married in 1954—“that neither one of us would interfere with the other’s creative approach to life, no matter what resulted from the actions we individually chose…. Yet as the years passed I still had to learn the obvious—that Jane’s creative powers are inextricably a part of her whole approach to life, including her symptoms. How could it be otherwise?”⁶

In Volume 1 of Dreams, see the first session in the Preface. Well over two and a half years ago, I wrote in the opening notes for that session that Jane had “some 17 chapters in fairly good shape for her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time.” She had laid it aside to begin work on God of Jane. Although she considered resuming work on Seven Three at various times while she was producing Dreams with Seth, she never did; the status of that novel remains the same. Recently, however, she’s talked about finishing it, and I expect that she will.⁷

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.

Even so, Jane had the magical approach in mind two days later, when she typed a rough last note for her journal on February 10: “Still annoying problems with fingers… hoping to clear this up, using in part robs new suggestion page [credo] for me. typing weth right hand. as I see it even that can be utilized in magical approach, again, Seth finished his book monday.”

A note added a month later: Jane’s journal entry is indeed a last one, for on the 26th of February, 18 days after finishing her work for Dreams, she was admitted to a local hospital for treatment of hearing difficulties, rheumatoid arthritis, and several other afflictions. Jane’s and my hospital experiences have already become so involved that I’ve begun to think of describing them—and whatever they may develop into—in a series of chronologically ordered introductory essays for Dreams, instead of the more conventional introduction I’d been expecting to write. The shocks have been great for us, and are continuing. Without knowing anything, I know that we’ll need much time in which to understand all of the deeply moving and conflicting emotional, psychic, and intellectual events connected with this development. Each day as I look at my lovely wife lying in her hospital bed after years of struggle, I feel the surge of those events—and I see them in Jane, and feel them in her!

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

What, then, are those “ideal developments” Jane and I are growing toward? Questions like that must intrigue Seth even more than they do us; his dealings with us—but especially with Jane, of course—are as much learning experiences for him as they are for us. After all, here he is, engaged in a “lifelong” process with my wife, and just as dependent upon what he can get through her psyche, as she is upon what she can get from him and then let through to me and to others! What storms of consciousness, as well as peaceful reaches, must Seth travel through in order to help her even as much as he does’? As far as he’s concerned those storms and reaches aren’t physical, but instead consist of intensities of feeling—as they do for us too, basically.

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.

Although Jane has had intimations from Seth in the hospital, she hasn’t spoken for him, and I do not know whether she will or not.

Now—and I borrow the greeting of a certain energy personality essence: I can note some three and a half years later, shortly before Dreams goes to press, that copies of many items from our estate have been transferred to Yale University Library. These include the thousands of pages of the Seth material, regular and deleted [or private]; Jane’s and my own journals and other miscellaneous manuscripts, written records, and notes; ESP class tapes; some of Jane’s poetry and art, and some photographs of each of us. I have also sent to the library the originals of many thousands of letters from readers. And the transfer continues.)

1. In Chapter 10 see Note 1 for Session 933, which Jane held six months ago. I described asking her if Seth could give us some information on the consciousness connected with nuclear energy. She promised me that he would discuss it soon—but we have yet to receive any such commentary. This is as much my fault as hers; I let the question get away from me amid our day-to-day activities. Now that Dreams is finished, we’ll probably not get the information for use in this book. (However, I do have a few related remarks of my own to offer in Note 3 to come.)

3. “I am not assigning human traits to energy. Instead, your human traits are the result of energy’s characteristics—a rather important difference,” Seth told Jane and me almost two and a half years ago. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, in Volume 1, see Session 884 for October 3, 1979.

According to Seth, and Jane’s and my own experiences, each individual is a member of a group of “counterparts”—each is psychically connected to other men and women alive on earth now, in various countries, who are exploring related lifetime themes in ways that no individual could ever do. Counterparts may or may not meet, yet all share intuitive connections. Although Seth hasn’t gone into the idea yet, I believe that events have counterparts also, just as does any “living” organism, whether human or not. The counterpart notion is Seth’s timeless version of his concept of consecutive incarnations. (And yes, I think that events have reincarnational histories also, but in this note I’m confining myself to the counterpart thesis.)

Moreover, I believe that counterpart relationships do exist between wars and nuclear energy. (Such associations also apply to large geological and geographical events, for example, and I wish I had the time and space to go into those!) But if Jane and I, say, as counterparts are exploring certain long-range connections through our own adventures in consciousness, then the consciousnesses of related major events must have much greater abilities and desires for fulfillment. Consider the following group of events as seen through a narrow window of ordinary time; consider the moral, economic, and diplomatic impact they have had—and are still having—upon our own national interests (let alone the interests of other nations). These events must interact with each other on many levels: The revolution in Iran came to a head with a change of leadership in February 1979, after a ruler long favorable to the United States had been deposed; the accident at TMI took place in March 1979; the American hostages were taken in Iran in November 1979; Russia invaded Afghanistan at Christmastime 1979; and less than 10 months later Iraq invaded Iran. This list can either be expanded almost indefinitely, or compressed—but, I think, these events and states of being all are psychically related. Many fascinating connections could be traced out.

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.

It should be obvious in this mere sketch that I’m groping for answers through which to understand Jane’s and my own joint world. I cannot make the words express my thoughts and feelings the way I want them to.

4. The troubled, brief second flight of our country’s shuttle spacecraft, Columbia, took place three months ago, and I described it in the opening notes for Session 936, in Chapter 11 of Dreams. However, Seth-Jane finished this book before the third flight, which probably will be launched early in April, could begin. A fourth flight could go in June.

In Note 3 for this session I referred to what I think are a couple of earthly analogs of All That Is. To Jane and me, our species’ venturing into space is another such analog: Our physical motion off the planet is certainly an objectified version or translation of our tentative explorations of inner space. In conscious terms, we have barely touched upon the fantastic inner complexities of All That Is, from which all else emerges, and which for a number of reasons we still fear.

5. Jane has worked with Tam ever since he encouraged her to write The Seth Material 13 years ago; that book was published a year later, in 1970. One of Tam’s many generous acts was his initiating our contact with officials at Yale University Library just over three years ago. As a result, Jane and I have arranged that upon our deaths our estate—including the Seth material—goes to the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Library. My plan in the meantime has been to transfer copies of as much of our work as possible to Manuscripts and Archives, so that the material can be indexed and made available to researchers and to the public. I have yet to begin the work of copying, however, although I hope to start it soon now that I can see an end to my involvement with Dreams. In Chapter 2 of Dreams, in Volume 1, see Note 1 for Session 887, which Jane delivered in December 1979.

6. In Chapter 9 of Dreams, see Note 2 for Session 920, which Jane held on October 6, 1980.

7. I last quoted Jane about Seven Three in the opening notes for Session 920. I also referred to the very slow-moving production of a motion picture based upon Jane’s first Seven novel: The Education of Oversoul Seven.

8. In Chapter 9 of Dreams, see the opening notes at superscript number 5 for Session 920, which Jane held on October 6, 1980. Then see Note 5 itself, as well as sections C, D, and E of Note 7 for that session.