“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(“There is a power of growth and value fulfillment within each individual that must be satisfied. It is the power that makes physical growth possible, the power that is behind the fetus. You know ahead of time the nature of the period into which you will be born. You [Jane and Rob, or Ruburt and Joseph] were both born with certain abilities, and you knew ahead of time that you would have to enlarge the framework of conventional concepts if you were to have room to use those abilities. In a way, they gave you both a second life, for in the old framework there was no satisfying [underlined] or creative way to go.

(“That isn’t nearly as conceited a statement as it seems to be, of course, for each thing each person does is also unique in the world. Yet, at the same time I mean that the sessions are truly original and significant, with their contents offering new creative insights and hope to the human species in a way that most endeavors do not do. In that sense the Seth business is a remarkable achievement on Jane’s part. I do believe that prolonged study of the Seth material would yield great results toward our understanding of ourselves….”

(It wasn’t until I was checking the page [or printer’s] proofs for Volume 1 last week that I realized Seth hadn’t followed through on his promise. I’d also forgotten to remind him to do so. I asked Jane if Seth could devote the next session to that subject matter so that I could insert it in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality as a note or an appendix, since I had plenty of work to do yet for that second volume. She agreed; we thought some very interesting material would result. We also thought it was a good time to pose questions for Seth — for just two weeks ago, in the 800th session, he’d finished dictating his own fifth book, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression.²

I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual was to be stressed, and his power to form his private events. Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

(Emphatically:) Many people who would not get the disease in any case are then religiously inoculated with it. The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.⁴ Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.

(Jane had started doing some typing on the final manuscript for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression a couple of days ago. She was also working on her own The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. Yet I thought she needed the stimulus of Seth having something underway. There was more than a little irony in the situation, for I was the one who’d told her flat out, back in July 1975, that she was going to start Psyche, just so that she’d have a Seth book to play with. [I’d also wanted to see what she and Seth would come up with on demand.] But this time Seth fooled me and started Mass Events only a couple of weeks after finishing Psyche. I was all for it, though, I told Jane enthusiastically. It’s always a pleasure to work on a Seth book, to explore with him his unique view of reality, and to try to put at least a few of his ideas to use in our everyday, “practical” world. I repeated my thought that it didn’t matter how many Seth books she piled up ahead of contract, or publication: That was certainly a more creative and exciting position to be in than if one didn’t have anything ahead. Jane agreed, while still worrying about what we were going to do with all of the material as it accumulated year after year. At this time there’s no way we’re going to see it all published.

(11:44.) I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.

Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.

(Long pause, one of many.) I will have more to say about suicide, but I do not mean here to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life. In many such cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases.” Period. Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents’ intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.

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.

2. I don’t mean to confuse the reader by using the titles of Seth’s “old” books, but rather to show how Jane’s and my work encompasses a number of projects at once. That is, we have yet to manage to work on just one book of any kind at a time; that would be too simple! There’s always a long slow rate of turnover in our labors, it seems: As one book or project is finished, another rises almost effortlessly to take its place, and everything rolls along together until the next large change comes about.

At this time, I’m still working on the notes and appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown,” even while Seth has begun Mass Events. Jane and I have already planned our approach to Psyche (which Seth has just finished), and it’s to be published shortly after Volume 2 is. To top off our activities of the moment, we’re having the front porch of the hill house rebuilt — with a new raised floor and screening all around, so that Jane can write there in the summertime. The workmen swarming around all day, and the noise involved, are both exciting and distracting. But I have a feeling that the front porch affair isn’t the end of our construction odyssey: Jane has a certain speculative look when she notes that we have but one car — she doesn’t drive — to occupy the large two-car garage attached to the rear of the house. What better idea than to convert half of the garage into a writing room, with sliding glass doors, and add a screened-in porch there also? After all, she commented recently, the porch would protect our back door, too, especially from all of that winter weather….

As for myself, I took both preventative “treatments” before Jane began speaking for Seth in 1963. One led to a strong serum reaction that incapacitated me for two weeks; the other resulted in a partial paralysis lasting several days. I accepted the vaccines because I yielded (if somewhat reluctantly) to conventional parental and medical pressures, as well as my own beliefs of the time: I was “supposed” to take the inoculations; they would be “good” for me. Even now I must carry a warning card in my wallet. It bears a description of my reactions to at least some vaccines, as well as the most emphatic statement that if I’m found unconscious for any reason — after an accident, say — I must not be given an injection of any kind because I might have a fatal reaction to it. I haven’t had a “shot” since living through those very unpleasant experiences, nor do I intend to. I no longer believe I’d succumb to one of the forbidden vaccines — but at the same time I don’t want to find out what might happen, either!

Still, it would seem to be almost impossible to do without inoculation programs in our society — they’re such a strong part of our national and private medical belief systems. I’m sure that Seth will elaborate upon the whole subject of mass inoculations as he proceeds with Mass Events.