“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At lunch today I read the latest group of poems Jane has prepared for her book of poetry for Prentice-Hall.¹

Poetry was an art and a science. It conveyed quite necessary information about man and the universe. The same can be said of many cave drawings. What you had — what you still have, though you are not nearly as aware of it — was an excellent give-and-take between the inner and outer senses. Through chanting, dancing, playacting, painting, story-telling, man spontaneously translated inner sense data into physical actualization. The physical senses only present you with clues as to your own sensitivities.

1. Jane called her book of poetry If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love, and Prentice-Hall published it in 1982.

Poetry was her first, childhood love, and it remained a powerful creative factor throughout her life. Indeed, in some of her earliest poetry we found concepts that Seth was to elaborate upon many years later. As Seth told us in 1979, Jane had been a poet all of the time, in its most profound meaning. She’d been letting If We Live Again grow for some time as she selected poems for it from the many she had written, and kept writing.

Jane also wrote three introductory essays for the book. Here are her opening lines from the first essay, “Poetry and the Magical Approach to Life”:

“To me at least, poetry — like love — implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at the world. That is, poetry brings out life’s hidden nuances. It delights in forming correspondences between events that seem quite separate to the intellectually-tuned consciousness alone, and reveals undercurrents of usually-concealed actions that we quite ignore when we’re most concerned about thinking rationally. Actually, that kind of vision contains its own spontaneous rationality, and often supplies us with answers more satisfying than purely intellectual ones.”