“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It came about because of several factors I’ll try to list in at least rough chronological order. The first of these would be Jane’s nearly extreme physical changes over the past few months, her ups and downs as far as mobility, feelings, aches, restless sleep, etc., are concerned. Seth has said again and again that these changes represent improvements growing out of our better understanding of our beliefs, our artistic/creative work, and indeed our whole life-style. We have tried to go along with his pronouncements, but also have felt numerous misgivings, as may be quite natural.

(Jane’s sessions have been very irregular also, and she hasn’t worked on Seth’s latest book for some months now. Therein lay one of those clues that was right in front of us, yet invisible at the same time. In each Seth book there have been layoffs, so to speak—long or longish periods in between certain sessions, while, usually, we held personal sessions in the interim; these were usually devoted to trying to get at the root causes of Jane’s symptoms. This pattern was most pronounced while Seth was producing Mass Events, but without checking at the moment we remember similar if shorter layoffs while the previous books were being produced. This has always bothered me to some extent, but I usually told myself that was Jane’s way of working, and to forget it. It did make for some tricky work writing notes for Mass Events, say, to explain these long periods in between certain sessions in the book.

(I didn’t fully grasp the significance of these interludes while working on Mass Events, not until I reread the other night Jane’s paper of December 27, 1980. She’d written that treatise at my request following some remarks she’d made. I’d read it, but it hadn’t penetrated sufficiently at the time. In it she tied her eye trouble and other symptoms with her fears about public reactions to her Seth work—her fears of its rejection, etc., and that she might—indeed, has—found herself outside the accepted realms of science, religion, etc., because of her psychic work.

(Yesterday morning, then, while painting, the thought came to me clearly: Jane does the Seth books just to please me. I knew at the time that this was likely to be an oversimplification, yet I also knew at once that it contained the key to the puzzle; this rather simple idea helped me assemble all of the information already described in these notes, half of it in ways I cannot consciously describe. But it did lead to the discussion I had with Jane this noon [on the 4th], and this session. All at once I had several ideas I wanted to talk over with her.

(Coupled with all of this is the statement Seth made recently to the effect that we “have made no major errors.” This is one of those bits of data that I return to much later and begin to question, after having let it pass at the time. “Well, if we’ve made no major errors,” I said to Jane recently, “what do you call the hassles we do have?”’ I was—am—quite aware of the humor implicit in the whole situation. At times I for one can agree with Seth, but at other times I have strong doubts.

(This noon after lunch, then—on the 4th—Jane and I had a discussion about the ideas mentioned above. My latest efforts to cope with our challenges involve her letting go of Seth’s latest books. Dreams, for some time. That is, we can work on it if we want to, but with no thought of deadlines or signing a contract, which would commit Jane to additional public exposure. The idea is that she’ll be free to do what she wants with the Seth material, for as long as she wants to, without our adding fuel to her fears until we’ve had a chance to work things through. I told her I was sure I was on the right track here, without knowing positively that I was, and without having pat answers that would solve all of our hassles.

(Putting off Dreams, it seemed to me, was a necessity at the moment because I now believed that the long interlude in her dictation was, again, a clear sign of resistance to the project on Jane’s part. The idea is an attempt to at least call a halt to something that she has resisted from the start, or so it seems in retrospect—and I mean the start of the sessions, not just Dreams. I reminded her that I was the one who first suggested we start publishing the Seth material, and that she’d had reservations about doing that. It seemed to me now that a clear course of hanging back had been displayed by Jane all though our psychic endeavors, and that it could be easily charted if we took the time to do so. I said that she would have probably used her psychic gifts in some fashion in her writing, but that the Seth books might very well have not come into existence except for my own interest—hence my mental insight this morning that Jane did the Seth books to please me. I know things aren’t that simple, but I do feel that the fact of public exposure represented by the Seth books has always bothered Jane. And currently she has been bothered more than ever, as she has described in her December 27, 1980 paper. This upset includes her work on her own latest, The God of Jane.

(Even today’s mail, which we read after finishing our discussion, contained several beautiful examples of points I’ve described above. This brought up another matter—our being confronted with the work we have published, as well as by Mass Events and God of Jane. No way to get away from those fifteen books of the past, I said, so to that extent we have to live with the results they engender. I too wondered about dispensing with answering the mail, while being very reluctant to do so, since many of the letters are openly laudatory, and we save them for reference [although we haven’t actually used any for such purposes]. But therein lies trouble, too, I said, because they would reflect Jane’s concern about public exposure, her fears about leading people astray.

(Putting off the publication of Dreams, then, is only a ploy to gain some time to defuse the present situation, while Jane’s body struggles to right itself as much as possible. We do believe Seth’s assessment, to the effect that her body is righting itself in numerous areas after years of disuse, of being held down, but at the same time it’s very difficult not to have qualms and doubts about what’s happening at the same time. At Christmastime I discussed with Jane the idea of seeking medical help, and asked her to tell me what she thought of this idea later, but she has yet to bring up the subject. I knew she’s not in favor of it, but as I said at the time, this seemed to mean that she was indulging the idea of spending the balance of her life sitting down —quite immobile for all practical purposes. I’d told her at the time that I had no great hope that medicine could help much, but still I wondered often enough if the medical profession might be able to offer some sort of help. I didn’t want Jane to get so bad that she was forced to turn to doctors, before at least considering outside help. At times I feared something like this would happen if she wasn’t able to “pull out” of her symptoms on her own—that is, with her own, Seth’s, and my help.

(I repeated in our discussion that it was perfectly all right with me if Jane chose not to publish any more Seth books, but concentrated on her own works, and she said she understood this. It’s my personal opinion, at least of the moment, that it will be quite a while before Dreams is either finished or printed. At least Jane now has some breathing space, and the cycle of resistance may be interrupted, say, if not reversed yet. We now have time for Framework 2 to operate. In this interim I may do some work on Dreams myself, or start something of my own.

(Perhaps our biggest challenge from now on will be how to deal with the “fallout” from work we’ve already done—those 17 books out there that are constantly drawing a very mixed group of reactions from people “across the board.” Not all of this is bad, of course, and I trust that here again Jane will gradually come to an accommodation with such responses, seeing them not as implied threats, but as true reinforcements of her abilities, which, as we have learned, really do have the power to move others in a variety, and often profound number of ways.

(By 8:52, then, Jane said she felt Seth around. She’d perked up a little, although she was still quite bleary-eyed. At the same time she sat quite upright in her chair, not leaning back, and I read this posture as a sign that she was still very uncomfortable sitting there. She began the session at her usual pace of delivery, but after a few paragraphs slowed down considerably.)

Now, my books do not pretend to even accept those conventions, but start out from a different viewpoint entirely. That viewpoint alone makes a difference. That viewpoint alone establishes a different kind of pattern. It assumes to know. It speaks of knowledge that is self-evident from my point of view. It offers no apologies for itself. It presupposes a vaster structure of personality and identity, period.

The books that I have written are excellent conveyors, not only of content but of essence. In a fashion, as far as the psyche is concerned, they come from a portion that is indeed immersed in knowledge that is self-evident.

Now. Your social systems have very few frameworks that even take such experiences into consideration. (Pause.) There are the esoteric schools, for example, the spiritualistic societies, the Eastern traditions. Overall they involve a very small esoteric group. The mainspring of society becomes touched by such groups now and then—but in the world of, say, the usual public encounter there are no accepted frameworks for such experiences.

(Pause.) He is appalled with the way that many people interpret my material. Sometimes it seems he would prefer even a smaller but more select group of readers (with amusement)—readers who were tops in their fields, or who in one fashion or another earned his respect. The point is that our books reach all kinds of readers in all walks of life. That is because all kinds of people are innately acquainted with the nature of self-evident knowledge.

They may misinterpret its nature, project it outside of themselves, turn it into a hobby, a chore, a religion, an art, a rigorous set of laws—but reading my books, they recognize the authority of the inner psyche.

Now Ruburt understood quite well in a fashion that his own experiences were taking him outside of that cohesive framework, not simply outside of science’s or religion’s dictums, but outside of those areas that science and religion ignored, deplored, or denied (all very intently).

Before even hearing the poetry no such audience, Ruburt felt, would question the fact of poetry itself—its techniques, traditions or value. My books, however, by their very existence appear in a world that largely does not concern itself with anything but the most surface elements of psychological reality. (Long pause.) The matter of duplicity almost immediately arises. Ruburt feels the existence of innumerable barriers in that regard—having, he feels, to fend with the questions that ensue.

(Pause.) I must be, as Seth, true or false, fiction or nonfiction, personality essence—spirit, if you prefer—or Ruburt’s own psyche in definitions usually accepted, playing at best a dubious role. And to a large degree those questions would be there even if our material quite agreed with the established knowledge of your world—but it does not. It contradicts much of the world’s knowledge.

If Ruburt wants to disagree with the world’s knowledge, he feels that it is his right—and again, would defend such ideas forthrightly. They would be based upon experiences that are his own—many that you have shared as a result of your own personal experiences together. But Ruburt is not aware of my subjective experience. My self-evident knowledge comes even if I were no more, again, than a part of his larger psyche, from reaches that would be inaccessible in those terms to him (all emphatically). That is, in those terms I would be delivering self-evident knowledge to him, revealing it (long pause), delivering it. I could not hand over the psychological quality of self-evident knowing, however. In that regard he does not have the same kind of inner experience with which to back up my words.

I will have far more to say, but that is enough for discussion one. I know that it is difficult to understand, but the challenge is one of growth, one that exists in a fashion because you have moved into an ever-expanding framework —but in an uneven course.

(10:15 PM. Jane came out of trance very heavy-lidded. Then: “I guess it’s me —but write this down, if I can get it quickly enough—about creativity and dogma. I think it’s in relation to my book dictation.”

(Now it’s Friday night [the 6th] as I finish typing this session. Seth’s reference to “grievous errors” was obviously in answer to my own comment as recorded in the opening notes. At first when I asked her, Jane said the session hadn’t done anything to “relieve some of Ruburt’s stress.” But then we decided that it had helped her somewhat Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday night she’d had a dream involving our Instream-Oswego experience, and a copy of that is attached under February 5. And she had a pair of positive healing dreams that afternoon during her customary nap. These dreams were quite good.

(These notes at the end of the session are meant to round out the opening notes, and to suggest new questions for us and for Seth. The other day I’d told Jane that I had given up on the idea of donating our work and assets to Yale University Library —indeed, that in the year since we’d had our will made out I hadn’t sent them any material at all. Jane agreed that the idea of Yale had made her uneasy. I hadn’t even answered Larry Dowler’s long letter of acceptance beyond sending him a short note of thanks for all his work. Jane, now, did not urge that we contribute to Yale. Our will still commits us in case of accident, say, but that document can be changed.

(After this session was held we briefly talked about things we might do in order to ensure privacy, should we decide to be more active in the pursuit of that quality. There would be moving to a new location, perhaps, or doing something about the mail—answering labors each week. I suppose we might use the post office’s impending rate increases as an excuse to save on postage, and either cut way down on, or eliminate, answering the mail, if this will help. I’m willing to do most anything, but our ideas here as yet are very vague, and I haven’t discussed with Jane yet whether she thinks a move would do any good, really.

(That topic ties in with my idea that I mentioned to her this afternoon, about it hardly being a coincidence that many events in our lives are coming to a head at the same time: Our deep upset about Jane’s condition; the trouble with the disclaimer idea for Mass Events; Prentice-Hall’s reorganization into the General Publishing Division, in which all of their narrative books will be phased out, thus eliminating any real need for Tam and his job; indeed, Tam is looking at other job offers even now. [It’s been my position for some time now that Tam will end up leaving Prentice-Hall, or will be let go.] If and when he does go, we will be without our friend there, and will have to make decisions based on that departure. But we may be in the process of making such decisions even now, I suspect. I doubt if we would follow Tam helter-skelter to another publishing house if he left Prentice-Hall tomorrow—especially in light of our decision to hold off on Dreams. And the irony of the situation is that, even though we detest the idea of the disclaimer for Mass Events, we see it as another means of protection in the public arena....

(Today I also reminded Jane about a question we’ve thought about at other times: Why does the portion of her that’s raising such a fuss about protection not understand the damage it’s doing to the whole personality—including itself? The circle becomes self-defeating, of course, and as far as I’m concerned reached that status years ago. Yet it persists.... Any hope we have in all of this is that our new stance will allow us to focus on the good things we have in life, and to create a synthesis of old and new ideas that will result in Jane returning to normal mobility. In this session Seth referred to Jane’s need for value fulfillment as she explored her psychic gifts. He also stated that our old frameworks of understanding force us to continue to explore reality for larger definitions. All very well, if such explorations can be carried out with a reasonable feeling of safety or protection, evidently, but if that essential ingredient or feeling is missing, then more caution must be used by us—and as I see it, that’s where we stand now. The hope is that our hiatus as far as encountering the public goes will give us some valuable time to organize new approaches to our lives.