“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yet even producing the Seth books — along with a great amount of unpublished Seth material — doesn’t call upon all of Jane’s abilities, for she’s also written 10 books “on her own.” These include works of poetry, fiction, and psychic matters as experienced from her own conscious viewpoint. She has several more books in progress. It’s safe to note, however, that now all of her work bears upon that unique, still-growing view of consciousness expressed by Seth and herself. And so does mine.

(That’s saying a lot, really. We do intend to spend the rest of our lives studying the ramifications of that “unique, still-growing view of consciousness.” We still have a host of questions about Seth’s reality, his concepts, and Jane’s role [and my own] in all of this — that is, questions about consciousness itself, basically: consciousness getting to know itself in endless variations, as I’ve written before, and whether or not it’s couched in physical form.

(For now, let’s postulate that Jane and I think we understand better than we used to that our consciousnesses have no limitations except those we’ve imposed upon them through our individual perceptions and understandings. Consciousness creates all, or all that we know reflects the particularized creations of consciousness, then, and potentially those sublime mental and physical achievements are without end. The idea of infinity is implied here — a concept whose implications make us uneasy, for although Seth’s material can be said to imply infinities of creation upon the part of each of us, still we realize the conscious mind’s inability to truly grasp all of the qualities inherent within such a notion.

(At the same time, Jane and I are extremely grateful that we have the opportunity to study ideas about consciousness with Seth, and this opening up of our individual realities is something we couldn’t have conceived of before 1963. Our appreciation of life has expanded greatly — and if the Seth material did nothing but help us grow in that respect, it would perform a very valuable service. We hope others feel they’ve gained something from the material too. [Actually, I think that what I’ve learned has saved me from bitterness and disillusionment in later life. Jane has also been helped a great deal.] So our aim with the Seth books is to let Seth have his say, to add some thoughts of our own, and to trust that the feelings and meanings in all of this will evoke beneficial responses in each reader. It’s all we can do. I for one think that my own words are pretty inadequate tools of expression to convey the deeper, unspoken meanings within life that I sense but cannot really verbalize.

(“Oh, I don’t believe it,” she said. “This isn’t anything like I consciously figured upon — and you can put that down for one of us to type, two or three years from now…. I can’t get over this….”

(“My mind works in sneaky little ways,” she said. “I don’t tell you everything. I was thinking of something like a question-and-answer format for a book, if we did a new one.” Even that idea was a revelation to me, since she hadn’t mentioned a book, period. Seth returned briefly as we talked:

(“But I’m really surprised. I had no idea of this tonight,” Jane said as soon as she was Jane again — thereupon emphasizing anew some of our endless questions about the Seth phenomenon: What portion of her personality, or entity, whether that portion might be called a Seth, or whatever, had been busy planning — organizing — this new endeavor? And how could such a creative process take place without her having at least some conscious intimations of it? What were the limits of human accomplishment?

To some degree, epidemics and recognized illnesses serve the sociological purpose of providing an acceptable reason for death — a face-saving device for those who have already decided to die. This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in your terms: But such decisions are often semiconscious (intently). It might be that those individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes — but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.

Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to reexperience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.

(“Well,” I told Jane as we went to bed, “right now my idea is that we’ll have only short notes and no appendixes. Doing things that way will speed up the publication date.” I’m all too conscious of the great amount of physical time I’m spending on the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality; I often feel responsible for holding up publication of Volume 2 especially, since Seth finished dictating it almost exactly two years ago. See the chronology of our activities in Note 2.)

Beginning in June 1974, then, while writing notes and appendixes for Volume 1 of “Unknown”, and taking Seth’s dictation for Volume 2, I spent eight months producing the art work for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness and for her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time; I finished all of those drawings in January 1975. In the meantime Jane completed Adventures in August 1974, and started Psychic Politics that October. In March 1975 we took time out to move from the apartment house in downtown Elmira to our “hill house” just outside the city. Jane finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” for Seth in April 1975, and I started my notes and appendixes for it. In July 1975 Seth began The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, and in December of that year Jane initiated work on her own The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation. She finished Politics in February 1976, and Cézanne in September; Politics was published that September also. I completed my own writing for Volume 1 of “Unknown” in October. Our 16-year-old cat, Willy, died early in November, and two days later we obtained a kitten, Willy Two (or Billy, as we soon came to call him), from an area humane society. I finished typing the manuscript for Volume 1 late in November, spent December checking it, and mailed it to Prentice-Hall early in January 1977.

He’s commented before in his books on our medical practices and technology, of course. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, for instance, see Session 703, which was held on June 12, 1974. At 10:36, in part: “People will die when they are ready to, following inner dictates and dynamics. A person ready to die will, despite any medication. A person who wants to live will seize upon the tiniest hope, and respond. The dynamics of health have nothing to do with inoculations. They reside in the consciousness of each being.”