“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:40.) We will speak about health and illness more specifically later in the book. I would like to make one point here, however — that often psychoanalysis is simply a game of hide-and-seek, in which you continue to relinquish responsibility for your actions and reality and assign the basic cause to some area of the psyche, hidden in a dark forest of the past. Then you give yourself the task of finding this secret. In so doing you never think of looking for it in the conscious mind, since you are convinced that all deep answers lie far beneath — and, moreover, that your consciousness is not only unable to help you but will often send up camouflages instead. So you play that game.

(9:50.) Usually when you do examine your conscious mind you do so looking through, or with, your own structured beliefs. The knowledge that your beliefs are not necessarily reality will allow you to be aware of all the data that is consciously available to you. I am not telling you to examine your thoughts so frequently and with such vigor that you get in your own way, but you are not fully conscious unless you are aware of the contents of your conscious mind. I am also emphasizing the fact that the conscious mind is equipped to receive information from the inner self as well as the exterior universe.

If you find all of this difficult, you can also examine your physical reality in all of its aspects. Realize that your physical experience and environment is the materialization of your beliefs. If you find great exuberance, health, effective work, abundance, smiles on the faces of those you meet, then take it for granted that your beliefs are beneficial. If you see a world that is good, people that like you, take it for granted, again, that your beliefs are beneficial. But if you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume that your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them.

(While we had a quick snack I asked her if she thought the recent strange behavior of our cat, Willy, could stem from his reactions to our own psychic states. We’d seen this happen before, although not recently. Early this month Willy had picked up a case of fleas that was stubbornly resisting treatment. He’d taken to staying outside all night as well as most of the day. He was also losing weight. Our other cat, Rooney, had always seemed to be immune to us in such matters, and even now was conducting himself in his usual leisurely fashion.

(“Over here now,” Jane said, designating her upper left, “is Seth on what you were just saying about peer groups — how young people feel it’s so important to fit in with their own kind, and why. And why I felt that way, but you didn’t. Hey, I’ve even got a bunch of history about that, all ready to deliver — a lot of material on each idea…. I was really confused for a while, yet now I see that each thing’s separate, already prepared by Seth. You’re not going to get two sentences about one subject, then switch to another one….” Jane laughed. “Which channel do you want?”

(“I’ve never felt just this way before — like I’ve been programmed in advance. It’s as though I need three voice boxes. That’s really weird. I do get it as sound, though. If I could talk three times at once, I could deliver finished material on those three things. Now I have to pick the right channel to get Seth back on his book; and it almost seems that if someone else came here now and mentioned a subject, I’d have that information all ready too.

(“Each channel is as clear as a bell. There’s no static or bleed-through between them. There: Now I’ve just got another one”— Jane pointed to her lower left — “and it explains all of this.” She laughed again. “Just call me station J-A-N-E….”)

3. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is thought of as the total moral sum of an individual’s acts in any one life — thus determining the person’s fate or destiny in the next. Seth sees reincarnational lives as all existing at once, so there is constant give-and-take among them. A “future” life, then, can affect a “past” one, so karma as it is usually considered does not apply.

(11:00.) It is not invisible, nor do you have to know exactly what you are looking for, which of course would make the situation nearly impossible. All you have to do is decide to examine the contents of your conscious mind, realizing that it contains treasures that you have overlooked.

(11:10.) When you find these thoughts in yourself you may say, and rather indignantly: “But those things are all true. I am poor. I cannot meet my bills,” and so forth. In so doing, you see, you accept your belief about reality as a characteristic of reality itself, and so the belief is transparent or invisible to you. But it causes your physical experience.

(11:17.) These are but a few samples of the ways in which your own quite conscious ideas may be invisible to you while being available all the time, and limiting your experience.

The ego tries to organize all material coming into the conscious mind, for its purposes — the ego’s — are those that have come to the surface at any given time in the self’s overall encounter with physical reality. As I said, the ego cannot keep information out of the conscious mind but it can refuse to focus directly upon it.

(“Not since the sessions started [in 1963] have I felt that Seth’s material was so richly available. I wasn’t able to be that open before this — I couldn’t accept a lot that was right there because it didn’t fit in with my beliefs.” Jane pointed to her left. “Hmmm. Now I could get stuff on archaeology, of all things. Wild….”

Willy likes to go out, but he is not used to being out all of the time. To an extent he feels banished. He simply picked up Ruburt’s feelings, now, which are strong, and Ruburt’s growing vehemence of intent. In a way these were not directed at the cat, yet Ruburt also knew the cat would pick them up.

Willy was always the house cat, you see, and Jane stayed in the house all day, writing. So it is the house cat who changes habits, rather than Rooney (our other cat).

(The furnace, knocked out in last June’s flood, hasn’t been repaired yet because of a shortage of skilled workers in the area. Everything in the house is damp and swollen. Doors especially don’t work easily, if at all, so we’ve been taking the easy way out….)

(By now the members of ESP class are staying on top of each session for the book, implementing the material before the chapters are finished. So are Jane and I. It looks like all of us will grow as the book does.

(“I realized that Seth had a great amount of information all gathered and there, including the biological foundations of both characteristics. Take the amoeba, a one-celled microscopic animal, for instance: I knew that the protoplasm in the amoeba, the essential living matter, represents the individual needing-to-go-out quality. Yet the protoplasm must conform to its environment — in this case the amoeba’s ‘body,’ which can only move as a unit when directed by the individualistic need to react to stimuli.