“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I don’t care for the term “channeling,” since I think it too all-inclusive and already trite. However, I liked both Jim’s ideas of my doing the Preface for Jane’s book, and of publishing a photo of her. And Laurel Lee Davies, the young lady who’s now helping me carry on my publishing activities, at once intuitively picked out from my files the one right photograph of Jane to us for Seth, Dreams … Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts, took the snapshot when she was on vacation with him in Baja, California in 1951. She was twenty-two years old. Jane and I didn’t meet until 1954. That little picture, then, was taken some twelve years before she began “coming through” with the Seth material. Yet, I find in it all of the ingredients that made up the Jane I knew — her great beauty, personality and creativity, her love of manipulating within her physical environment; I see her “steering herself” toward extraordinary accomplishments.

My own imperfect recollection following Tam’s request that I look for it was that Seth, Dreams … was an unfinished collection of records, ideas, and chapters that Jane had struggled with for several years, without selling it. Instead, what I found in a box in the basement was, to my amazement, a completed manuscript — a full book ready to go, one as fresh as it had ever been, and my wife had struggled with it. What emerged as Laurel Davies and I searched Jane’s and my records, including early Seth sessions, was a long story of our doubts and gropings in an area in which we had no guidance except for our own explorations. Seth, Dreams … was rejected by three major publishers while Jane worked on it during 1966-67. She was still an unknown in the field; by mid-1966 she’d had only one small psychic book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, published. Our subject of interest itself was largely denied validity by the social, psychological, and scientific establishments. We were still operating alone, then, even though Jane had been speaking for Seth for about three years. In spite of all of her questions, however, her strong creative vitality — her intuitive insistence upon using her most unusual abilities — kept her focusing ahead, and I helped her as much as I could. I’m still astonished when I think of what Jane was to accomplish in the next few years.

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.

I wrote Valerie that she was gifted psychically and suggested that she might cautiously proceed with learning more about her abilities, to whatever extent she chose. Valerie is thirty-eight years old, and lives with her husband in a western state; they have two children. She works part time in the field of education. She is developing her gifts through study and practice. During the year she sent me a number of messages “from” and about Jane. Some of them subjectively feel right to me; they effortlessly mirror or echo the way the Jane I lived with for almost thirty years often talked and wrote. In fact, at times I found the similarities between the contents of those messages and my ideas of Jane’s own ambience to be striking.

[...] Ideas for poetry, in particular, came so quickly that I hardly had time to write them down. It wasn’t too difficult to trace most of these to the “Idea Construction” manuscript. [...]

[...] Interestingly enough, reincarnation wasn’t a part of the “Idea Construction” experience. Those ideas were imbedded in me so thoroughly that I would never doubt them.

During the rest of that September in 1963, I reread the “Idea Construction” manuscript many times, trying to understand it and hoping to recapture some of the feelings I had had during its delivery. [...]

Because of the Miss Cunningham dream and the “Idea Construction” experience, Rob suggested that I try some experiments in ESP and expansion of consciousness and do a book on the results — negative or positive. [...]

In my operations in your plane, I must use the materials at hand, but despite any ideas to the contrary, this involves a give and take … Ruburt’s “Idea Construction” was rather amazing under the circumstances. [...]

[...] There is a reciprocal agreement here, a give and take, quite different from your friend’s idea of psychological invasion.

“Mark’s idea?” Rob asked.

[...] His subconscious and conscious mind had to be acquainted with certain ideas to begin with, in order for the complexity of this material to come through.

[...] Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

[...] Later I started a poem on the idea, but couldn’t follow it through. [...]

[...] “I was completely alert, and the whole thing brings up so many questions … and ideas for experiments.”

[...] “In that ‘Idea Construction’ thing I didn’t seem to have a body — I seemed to just be my consciousness. [...]

[...] She told Rob that our work with Seth was a lifetime project, that we would publish his manuscripts, and help spread his ideas. [...]

[...] I mean … well, I’m not some poor deluded idiot with the idea that I can solve the world’s problems. [...]

[...] We were both completely unacquainted with such ideas, yet, intuitively, we accepted them. [...]

The idea of dissociation could be likened to the slight distance between the bark and the inside of the tree. [...]

“Both ideas could be part of the whole solution,” Rob said. [...]

[...] I didn’t have an idea in my own head about anything. [...]

[...] I don’t want to give you the idea that existence without your camouflage patterns is bland and innocuous because this is not the case. [...]

[...] Not really a rock, but you get the idea. [...]

[...] When you cross a room, you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to do so, though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move, or of stimulating one tendon or another. [...]

[...] But I’d never read anything like this before, and the idea of fragments and entities was oddly disquieting. [...]

[...] Almost from the beginning he was an objectified personality to Rob; a visitor regardless of the unconventional situation; someone in whose ideas Rob was tremendously interested. [...]

[...] The friends present had no idea we were involved in any psychic work, and the subject never came up in our conversation. [...]

[...] He wants to know where the words are coming from and still wonders if I am a part of his subconscious; and I must admit that I find such an idea appalling. [...]