“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have believed that the natural contours of nature were somehow antagonistic to your own existence, so that left in the hands of nature alone you would lose your way. You have believed that in the very framework of your psychology. In your experiences, therefore, all of these things have largely proven true.

Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. (Very long pause.) The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. That world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so forbidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift.

That inner psychological universe is a psychic gestalt, propelled, formed, sustained or driven by value fulfillment, love and desire, by the loving values that have no limit (intently). The universe does not give up on itself, or on any of its creatures. It is ruled by a different set of principles, a different set of values, and by inner cooperative exuberance.

(A one-minute pause at 9:23.) You may need some time before the old beliefs become less prominent, and finally fall into their proper decay—a decay, incidentally, that does indeed have its own kind of majesty, energy, and beauty. But the inner natural leanings of all of consciousness within the realms of your being now yearn for constructive change, clearer vision, to experience again their inherent sense of corporal spirituality, physical and psychic grace. They want to sense again the effortless motion that is their natural birthright.

(All more intently:) I hope that this book to some extent or another puts each of you in touch with your own inner psychological motion, your creative breath, so that you are invigorated and sense within your own minds and spirit a new promise, a new intent, and the exhilaration of earthly and spiritual strength. You dwell in a state of natural grace that is quite alive and vital whether or not science decrees that consciousness possesses its own intent. Nature is supernatural all the while, of course.

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.

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!

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.

In Note 2 for the 936th session, I also described how the NRC had asked the operators of certain nuclear power plants to check for cracks in the vessel walls of their pressurized-water reactors, which are the kind installed at TMI. Now problems with corrosion are being announced. The reactor for Unit No. 1 at TMI is undamaged; it had been shut down for maintenance and refueling at the time of the accident to its twin, nearly three years ago, and a series of delays has kept it idle ever since. In February, again, company officials revealed the discovery of extensive corrosion in the bundles of small-diameter tubes in the two steam generators powered by Unit No. 1, which will delay any restarting of the unit for another six months to a year. The tubes circulate hot radioactive water from the reactor throughout the steam generators. Replacement of at least several thousand such tubes will cost millions of dollars; if engineers simply plug the damaged tubes, the reactor will operate well below capacity. (Steam generators at some other plants have a new problem: the accumulation of a corrosive sludge at their bases.)

The NRC is under a court order that prevents it from relicensing the start-up of Unit No. 1 at TMI until the psychological health of the communities surrounding the power station has been studied.

The mixing of consciousnesses in the Middle East, then, ultimately revolves around the great overall clash of ideologies between the United States and Russia. At the same time, Iran’s mullahs want a continuing war with Iraq to help consolidate their total power; they do not want victorious, high-ranking military leaders back home from the front to challenge their undisputed power (as internal resistance groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq are doing). Iran has become a totalitarian religious theocracy. I wrote in Note 3 for Session 936, in Chapter 11, that despite their egoistic orientations, ultimately Iranians bow to the ancient power of their religion, including the demands of martyrdom. They continue their revolution even with their shortsighted military and economic policies, the war, the assassinations of scores of their leaders, and their country’s isolation by the free world. They export terrorism with a vengeance. They hate both the East and the West. With equal fervor they demand the downfall of the United States, France, Russia, Israel, and Iraq, among other nations. And for their grimly creative focus of revolutionary consciousness they unabashedly take full credit.

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.

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….

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.

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.

Man’s focus is equally limited in perception theory, which is a deadly psychological game played by the United States and Russia. It’s deadly because nuclear weapons are involved. Perception theory rests upon the assumptions of large groups of people in the two countries, including many of their leaders, and by the political rulers of many other nations, that it is vital for the United States and Russia to possess numerically balanced arsenals of nuclear weapons. Both countries passed the point of potential overkill years ago, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter in perception theory is that whenever one side is seen as pulling ahead in the arms race, the other must match that progress, then do better, even though militarily it’s quite unnecessary. Indeed, military leaders in the United States, and evidently in Russia, concur in playing out the illusion of perception theory for their own psychological and political purposes.