“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

These poems were all written in spring and summer of 1963 and concern life in general:

One and one makes nothing.
Arithmetic destroys us all.
Subtraction is the answer
To our hypothesis.

We’ve never learned to add
For all our numbers’ worth.
Division and subtraction
Will total up to death.

On this hazy, lazy day
All thoughts drop to sudden end,
As if the sullen air
Into itself a puncture drew,
So trees and houses and all we know
Were gently drawn to follow through —
Then quickly, like a holocaust,
A container tipped at end at last —
All our thoughts slide away
Into a hole that time has made.

Magic was my middle name,
I was so brave and tall.
No one knew who I was then,
Myself least of all.

In other words, my poetry finally revealed to me my state of mind before “Idea Construction” and Seth. Little by little, using it as a guide, other memories came back to me — all trivial in comparison to real tragedy and yet, to me, bitterly depressing. The death of a kitten that year led me to write:

A small household tragedy, the death of a cat, yet to me it contained the question of the uniqueness of life and the value of consciousness. Didn’t anyone or anything care that one cat had died? I felt guilty even considering the question. In a world where humans slaughtered their own kind constantly, who in their right mind would give a moment’s thought to a cat’s consciousness? Yet either all life was sacred, or none of it was. So I brooded.

And when I looked around me, it seemed that for all of man’s good intentions, he only transmitted the errors of his race; that each man or woman unknowingly perpetuated the peculiar sins and failings of their families. I wrote one of my most pessimistic of poems:

I dig my own grave
With dignity.
We are all gone.
There is nothing else to say.

Now I remember that spring, recall sitting at my desk writing poetry, caught up in a feeling that nature was betraying us all with its promise of hope and renewal. It was almost mechanical, I thought, as if some second-hand god kept reusing the same leaves each year, over and over again, and we were too childish to see beneath the subterfuge.

Though this criss-crossed fleshmesh
Tastes like peach and feels like peach fuzz,
All utterly mergings of gold and green and red,
Sunnily rendered, dizzy and delicious,
Still, touching it with eyes is like peering
Through a fence
With wires cunningly connected,
A million to an inch.

Time and time again, the inner centers of our being come to our aid through subjective promptings — either in waking, dream or trance states. Through the dream experiences related later in this book, this will become quite clear. Dreams, inspirations, experiences in mystic consciousness — all, I believe, have their prime source outside of our usual consciousness and mode of activity.