“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I finished typing the last half of Monday’s session just before the session tonight. I reminded Jane that I think it’s an excellent one, and that I want to type copies for us of the material between 9:15 and 9:36, wherein Seth explains that the intellect needs to realize that it doesn’t have to go it alone, that it is supported and aided by other portions of the self. I think this insight can help Jane greatly. I also told her I want to quote portions of Monday’s session in Seth’s current book, Dreams.

(“Good evening, Seth.”

(See my notes of July 17, 1980.¹ Seth continued to stare at me as he proceeded in the same manner:)

(Seth may have made his humorous reference to a cat’s whiskers when he did because our cat, Billy, had just meowed rather frantically as he chased a dusty-looking moth through the living room.)

You needed this background, for I want to build up the atmosphere in which this magical approach can be comprehended. Then specific material can be utilized.

Ruburt’s [recent] mental conversation with “Mary,”⁴ and your own dream about Mary with the sketchbook sheets⁵ — all of these experiences are indications of the exquisite kind of reasoning that goes on at the levels of awareness that are usually considered unreasonable. That kind of material enriches the intellect and reassures it.

(This is certainly magical — Jane’s performance as Seth, in the sessions. This note, which I wrote a couple of days later, was inspired by Seth’s material in this session:

(“Seth, of course, not only dictates his magical material — the session — but must keep the whole session in mind while doing so, so that each sentence as he delivers it makes sense compared to its predecessors, and those to follow. Quite a feat on his part, and Jane’s, once you stop to think about it. How is this possible? Seth has no script to go by, nor can he refer during the session to my own notes to check up on what he’s already said.

(“I’d say that a great memory must be involved here, coupled on deeper levels with a shortening of time as we think of it. Seth’s abilities remind me of material I’ve written recently on how certain portions of the personality or psyche must very shrewdly and carefully construct dreams in advance, so that when the dreams are played back they render just the right message to the parts of the psyche that need it. I’m not being contradictory here when I write that the dream is a spontaneous production, also.

(“These comments about Seth’s abilities seem obvious when they’re considered as I’ve just described them, yet I don’t think I’ve thought of what Seth can do in just that way before. They make his performances all the more remarkable. See the material after 9:44 in the session of August 13, about the intellect and the ‘undisciplined and unreasonable’ intuitions. Actually, that whole session applies here.”)

1. When I wrote these notes on July 17, I hardly expected that several weeks later Seth would so effectively “put them in their place,” so to speak, as he enlarged upon his discussion of the magical approach:

“Boy, Seth,” I thought after tonight’s session, “did I go overboard in that piece! You helped me understand some things, yet what I wrote still contains truth for me, too. I’m angry because I think — I know — that we human beings have the blessed creative capacity to do so much better. So why don’t we?”

“Another great dream of Rob’s. In our sessions lately Seth has been talking about the natural self or natural person, saying that it is also the magical person. In this dream Rob is in the process of working out that idea, visually. His closest connection to magic would be his comics experience when he drew Captain Marvel — a magical character. The resulting image, in two parts, shows that the idea is almost completed in his mind, just needing to be put together. In the dream he sees himself returning to the comics, only the Sunday edition (special), and the superhero character is much more prominent than the comics would ordinarily have it; the smaller head representing, I think, the idea that the intellect’s place is smaller or of a lesser nature than he earlier supposed. At dream’s end Rob says that the head was almost too youthful for the body he’d drawn — maybe a reminder that the natural person is younger in ways than the intellectual self. I think that Rob is himself in the dream, represented by the super character as the magical self; and also that he is the assistant who had prepared the figure’s head.