“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.

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 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.

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.)

Yet from the very day of the accident, this question has existed along with each step of the cleanup process, and will continue to do so: What to do with Three Mile Island, that enormously complicated human creation that now has its own consciousness, and that has in its own way exerted the force of that consciousness throughout our civilized world? To dismantle TMI seemingly would solve the “problem”—but only partially, for once born its consciousness will (like all others) continue to live. I repeat, however, that in this country no public citizen has been either seriously injured or killed in an accident at a commercial nuclear facility (as have a few workers).

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.

As I finish this note—and Dreams—I believe it quite safe to predict that whenever this book is published the reader will find that the general situation in the Middle East is essentially the same: The consciousnesses of the countries involved, then, will continue to resist all outside overtures to “sanity” that do not help perpetuate the exploration of their long-term goals. In the Middle East (as anywhere else on our planet) there’s plenty of “time” for peace later! There are endless variations of peace to be ultimately explored, to be held in delicious abeyance, to be savored by each consciousness there, no matter how great or small, like the knowledge of a fine wine or a rich dessert still to come….

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.