“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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

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.

The ordinary violence involved with these events leads me to comment upon the theological concept of privation theory, and the military one of perception theory—for again, I think the two are closely related, not only to each other but to the points I’ve made in this note. In mundane terms, both represent longstanding distortions in perception of the great basic creativity of All That Is. I suggest that the reader review Seth’s material on the basically creative use of violence as I quoted it in Chapter 10; see Note 2 for Session 933.

To me, privation theory and perception theory are interchangeable; they represent consciousnesses deeply exploring the misperceptions I’ve listed concerning violence, and the relationships involving the counterparts of nuclear energy and warfare.

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!