“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But what initiated the “Idea Construction” experience? Even when I wrote The Seth Material, I didn’t clearly understand why it happened or connect it in any way with my previous life or beliefs. It seemed like a complete intrusion. This present book, devoted to dreams and subjective experience, led me into deeper self-examination. In preparation, I reread my own records and poetry. The poetry itself provides a clear record of subjective thoughts and emotions. And it was through reading this old poetry that I found clues that showed me the points of continuity between my life before my psychic initiation and after it.

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.

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.

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.