“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And Jane’s intent and mine, too. Jane’s books are records of her use of certain abilities that we think are very creative; the questions she raises present us with larger fields to investigate. Ordinarily we don’t think of those questions — and challenges — as being mystical in origin, not from our Western social viewpoint. Seth discusses Jane’s early religious background, her “deeply mystical nature,” in the first session of this volume (the 679th), and I add some material on mysticism in an appendix to that session. That information is related to these introductory notes, yet it should be separate.

However, the work we do deals with concepts that consciously we’d paid little attention to in earlier life. (I was 44 years old and Jane was 34 when she initiated the Seth material late in 1963). Jane’s early poetry, as I show in certain notes, clearly reflected her intuitive understanding of some of the concepts Seth came to elaborate upon much later. (This was true even when she was consciously unaware of what she was up to. See the verse from her early poem, Summer Is Winter, which precedes these notes.) As I see it, her task with the Seth material is to place these basic artistic ideas at our conscious service, so that their use in our daily lives can change our individual and collective realities for the better; and by “artistic ideas” here I mean the deepest, most aesthetic and practical — and, yes, mystical — truths and questions that human beings are capable of expressing, then contending with. Much of the response to her work that Jane receives by mail and telephone indicates this is happening. (That response, incidentally, will be discussed briefly at the end of these notes, when Seth’s letter to correspondents is presented.)

It’s plain that many arguments can be brought against all I’ve written in the last four paragraphs, I suppose, yet the material in them briefly approximates the ways Jane and I look at the Seth material these days in relation to other philosophies. Especially do I like the fact that Jane’s work, her contribution to our thought, comes out of her psyche unaided by laboratories, statistics, or tests. That is, our idea of real testing consists in watching to see how the Seth material can assist in practical, everyday living. Other kinds of tests, more “formal” ones that we carried out in 1965–66, are detailed in Chapter 8 of The Seth Material; it’s easy for us to forget now that those early tests were quite successful, and could be resumed at any time. When they were held I wondered (as I still do) why the human animal, of all the creatures on earth, felt it necessary to construct laboratories in which to “prove” what it really is, what its abilities — telepathic, metabolic, or whatever — really are. This subject alone is so vast that Jane and I could write about it indefinitely, so I can barely mention it here.