“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.

I hope I have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

For this note I’ll touch upon what I believe are some other characteristics of energy—the consciousnesses associated with warfare and nuclear energy, and the counterpart connections among those great states of being. Then I’ll refer to the concepts of perception theory and privation theory.

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.

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.

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.

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.