“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 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.

Even the damage that potentially can stem from a peacetime nuclear accident, as at TMI, can be great indeed. In Note 1 for Session 933, in Chapter 10 of Dreams, I speculated about nuclear energy being an earthly analog of the illimitable loving being of All That Is. Now I believe that it is. My conviction was triggered late the other night after I had been struggling with this note. I relaxed by watching a television travelog; I saw a great waterfall in an isolated jungle setting; the cameraman zoomed in on the foaming, surging water leaping at the base of the waterfall—and staring at that eruption of energy I suddenly realized the obvious: It’s not the force of any nuclear reaction that we fear, but the consciousness of the event. We must mature quickly enough to learn to “control” the contradictory potentials of the nuclear energy that we’ve helped guide into being. We have barely started to use that great power for peaceful purposes. I believe, then, that unwittingly we’re translating compartmentalized glimpses of All That Is through the extraordinary consciousness of nuclear energy. Isotopes of some of the elements involved with that energy have “half-lives” of millions of years—far longer, quite possibly, than our species will exist in those terms of time. Those reaches of time are so great, so timeless, that I see them as another earthly analog of All That Is.

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.