“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In those terms I have my own proofs of survival, just as Jane had — and as she still does. We always had far too many questions about such matters to be satisfied with the very restrictive “answers” that our religious and secular establishments offer. I cannot believe that in matters of life and death my psyche would be so foolish as to indulge in wish fulfillment, relaying to me only those ideas it “thinks” I want to consciously know. Each time I may feel my own ignorance about even our own physical reality, let alone other realities, I fall back upon my own feelings and beliefs. I have nowhere else to turn, really, nor did Jane. As Seth told us in a number of ways (and to some extent I’m certainly paraphrasing him here), “Never accept a theory that contradicts your own experience.” Jane and I found much better answers for ourselves, even if they were — and are — only approximations of more basic, and perhaps even incomprehensible, truths. My unimpeded, creative psyche intuitively knows that positive answers to its questions exist, that otherwise it wouldn’t bother to ask those questions within nature’s marvelous framework, that nature is alive and, as best we can sensually conceive of it, eternal. My psyche knows that it makes no sense within nature’s context for the human personality to be obliterated upon physical death.

That vision reminds me of a letter of mine that has just appeared in Reality Change, a magazine its editor is devoting to the Seth Material, and publishing in Austin, Texas. At her request last September, I briefly described my feelings a year after Jane’s death. I mentioned how worthwhile it would be to throughly study the continuous global healing processes that I believe constitute one of the earth’s major forces, so that we could consciously use them to “help our species lead itself into new areas of thought and feeling.” Now I enlarge upon that idea by stating that such processes should be studied amid the earth’s even larger life-and-death cycles — those making up that “flickering gentle glow” my mythical observer would see from space. I think that eventually we’ll regard all life upon our planet — or upon any other — in such terms, that we’ll be led to do so by our own needs and creative curiosity. Beyond that will lie our exploring, as Jane did, the more basic nonphysical nature of reality.

How Seth, Dreams … eventually came to be issued by Stillpoint Publishing, how it can even be thought of as a “lost manuscript,” makes a most interesting account that I’ll just outline here. First, though, I remind the reader that Jane spoke in a trance or dissociated state for a discarnate personality who calls himself Seth; by his own definition he’s an “energy personality essence,” no longer focused within physical reality. Last July my agent, Tam Mossman, phoned to ask that I search Jane’s papers for a manuscript he remembers her submitting to him some seventeen years ago, when he had been a young editor just beginning a career with Prentice-Hall. That manuscript is Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness. As soon as he’d reviewed it back then, Tam had asked Jane to do a book on Seth himself. The result? The Seth Material, for which Jane signed a contract in December 1968. The book came out in 1970; and in it she had used certain portions of Seth, Dreams …

Without taking into account here the essences of other life forms, do I think the human personality survives physical death? Considering the loving, passionate “work” that Jane and I engaged in for more than twenty years, of course I do. No other answer makes intuitive or consciously reasonable sense to me. I think it quite psychologically and psychically limiting to believe otherwise, for such beliefs can only impede or postpone our further conscious understanding of the individual and mass realities — the overall “nature” — we’re creating. I think that all of us seek answers, and that our searches are expressed in our very lives.

The inner senses, then, deliver data from the inner world of reality to the body. [...] However, the inner senses are aware of the body’s own physical data at all times while the outer senses are concerned with the body mainly in its relationship to camouflage environment.

[...] I didn’t have an idea in my own head about anything. In a half hour or so how would I suddenly find myself delivering such off-beat material in a voice that didn’t seem to be my own?

[...] The inner senses deal with realities beneath camouflage … and deliver inner information. [...] As the senses of sight, sound and smell appear to reach outward, bringing data to the body from an outside observable camouflage pattern, so the inside senses seem to extend far inward, bringing inner reality data to the body. [...]

[...] While her husband worked in the factory, he also owned a farm outside of Decatur, and after marriage the couple moved there. [...]

Miss Cunningham had been preparing herself for her own departure since she heard of the possible operations. Yet consciously, she was ignorant of her own inner decision.

[...] I knew, even then, that I had to find my own answers — that each of us does. And yet at that point, I felt duty-bound to question my own experiences, Seth and the sessions because I refused to hide in self-delusions.

At the precise time of Ruburt’s dream, Miss Cunningham was deciding to leave this plane of reality. [...]

[...] But beyond this, Miss Cunningham’s present personality has been gently disentangling itself from this plane of reality — and she simply did not remember him.

As a result of the following sessions, for instance, we began “testing” physical reality for its subjective yields. [...] We tried to experience it differently, particularly after the nineteenth session and an experiment in self-hypnosis that Rob tried on his own.

Rob was intrigued not only by the material but by Seth himself as he began to manifest his own personality more clearly. [...] But on this particular night, Rob watched, amused, while Seth told him in no uncertain terms what he thought of my experiment — using my own lips to do it! [...]

As I mentioned, they carry their own particular camouflage with them. You recognize it as not your own. [...]

[...] The material is included because of its importance in understanding the later concepts on dream reality and the methods of perceiving inner data.

[...] The creative energies build up their thickly-dimensioned pseudo-realities of pain. For a certain amount of time, according to your condition, they automatically create the patterns of fear that belong to the ego.

[...] But the subconscious knows its own meat and its own sauce and the best means for its nourishment.

[...] They listen to their growing as you might listen to your own heartbeat. They experience this oneness with their own growth, and they also feel pain. [...]

[...] I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

[...] In prehistoric times, mankind evolved the ego to help him deal with camouflage patterns that he had, himself, created. [...] The inner senses led him into a reality he could not manipulate as easily as he could physical camouflage, and he feared what he thought of as a loss of mastery.

[...] Here is an account from his own notes:

There is an inner sense, Joseph, that, in a vague manner, corresponds to your own inner images. [...]

Psychological time is so a part of inner reality that even though the inner self is still connected to the body, you are, in the dream framework, free of some very important physical effects. [...]