“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The second game of the World Series started at 8:30 — I think — tonight, although I hardly glanced at it on television as we made ready for the session; the set went off after the first [scoreless] inning anyhow. I had a letter half done for Jeanne Miles, my well-known artist friend who lives in New York City. Mitzi was chasing one of her paperfoil toys down the cellar stairs. …

Early man, for example, spontaneously played at acting out the part of other animals. He took the part of a tree, a brook, a rock. Acting became a teaching method — a way of passing on information. (Long pause.) Man always possessed all of the knowledge he needed. The task was to make it physically available.

People like Ruburt translated inner knowledge in many ways — through acting it out, through singing or dancing, through drawing images on cave walls. It was the intellect’s job to put such information to practical use, and thus the intuitions and the intellect worked hand in hand. (Long pause.) Man dealt then with spontaneous knowing in a more direct fashion.

It was left to man to translate his inner information with a free hand. He is able to form many different kinds of cultures, for example. He puts his sciences and religions, his languages, together in multitudinous ways, but there must always be a translation of inner information outward to the world of sense. There still is. Man’s capacities have not dimmed in that regard. Thinking, for example, is as automatic as ever (amused). It is simply that your culture puts the various elements together in ways that stress the qualities of what you refer to as rational thinking.

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.

In the deepest of terms, the world always was and always will be. It changes its patterns of activity, it comes and goes, but it is always itself in its comings and goings. To me, that is exceedingly simple — but as far as your concepts are concerned, it can seem to imply irreconcilable complications.

(9:56 P.M. “Boy, I was out with that,” Jane said. “That really hits me: you can tell you’re out there so far, with all of this energy, but you can’t go any further, you know what I mean? At the same time, it’s so simple… It was a different session in some way. My feelings are that I was different, although I don’t know about what different things you might get down. Right now I’m looking at the clock — and it seems that you were so far away that it seems I should take four hours to get back. Not that I had any sense of time in the session. …”

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.