“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.)

Although there are similarities, then, in our view there are vital differences, too, between Seth’s philosophy and that of many other organized systems. Jane and I prefer to think about the unities we find in our world as including religions, not being defined by them, and we think Seth stresses this. We go along in our own stubborn ways, knowing that our outlooks are rooted in the Western traditions of the world, but also knowing that there exist all about us these numerous other philosophies or systems, some of them many centuries old, that the human race has created to help it explain reality. Yet we feel no compulsion to intimately know the details of, say, Sufism or Brahmanism. (A simile I often think of here compares Eastern and Western life and thought with the right and left hemispheres of the brain; they’re separate, yet united; each half performs functions that complement and to some extent overlap those of the other, and together they operate as a whole.) But we dislike the idea of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism, which calls for the extinction or blowing out of individual consciousness, and its absorption into a supreme spirit, usually after a series of lives. And we object to the notion that “nature,” in those terms of linear time, has so arranged things that the individual has to pay a karmic debt in one life as the result of actions in a previous one. Why should nature punish anyone if it doesn’t punish anything? The realities of nirvana and karma are not ones that Jane and I want to create.

I feel extremely cheered by the idea that Jane, simply by using her chosen physical apparatus and nonphysical mind, is consistently demonstrating abilities human beings are not supposed to possess. We aren’t satisfied with the answers to our questions that our social orders, whether Eastern or Western, give us. So, we say, each reader can make his or her own sense out of what the Seth material has to offer on such questions as the meaning of life, its depths and mysteries, its infinite possibilities.

“We love to look ‘backward’ at our animal origins. We take it for granted that evolution in those terms is over, and here we are — aha, kings of the mountain. But maybe we’re just in the middle, sensing imperfectly the existence of other remote versions of ourselves that will appear in a ‘future’ too far ahead of us to know. Maybe I’m some distant ancestor of Seth’s in those terms, alive in my life but only a memory in his. But he insists there’s fresh action in the past; so if that’s the case, I’m still searching out my own paths.