“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane receives 35 to 50 letters a week. The flow of mail to our hill house is surprisingly steady throughout the year, as we’ve often noticed: We never take in 100 letters one week, for instance, and none the next, or 70 one week and 15 the next. In some remarkable fashion, our correspondents space out their communications so that we get them on a steady basis. We have time to read each one. Each Saturday and Sunday Jane catches up with her replies for the week, brief as they often are, so that on Monday morning, when I put out that bundle of letters for the mailman, we’re ready for the next week’s accumulation. All of the mail doesn’t need answering, of course, but the other day we estimated that with very little help from me Jane now replies to around 2,000 letters a year. That total is slowly increasing as her work becomes better known.

(Pause.) You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. (Long pause, then with humor:) It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of your beliefs. The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider’s part — and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well. (Louder:) It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs. You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

1. In recent weeks Jane herself has been quite intrigued by the idea of “personal centering,” as she put it in her notes for God of Jane. She also wants to study the subject for her book in connection with reincarnation, the origins of our species — and even of our world. She’s already written several poems about her own view of reality. The one that follows charmed me as soon as she produced it last May 31. It’ll probably end up in God of Jane, but I’d like to present it here, too:

No matter where I look, I seem to be
at the center of a world that forms
perfectly around me.
No lopsided vision ever shows
the world spread only to my left,
with my image on the last right edge,
nor has the world
ever appeared just ahead,
while nothingness began
just behind my back.