“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(April, 1976. In this appendix I’ve put together some material on mysticism from Jane, Seth, and myself. I wrote the first tentative notes for it shortly after the 679th session was held, in February, 1974, with the idea of adding to them later if necessary. As events worked out, Seth was halfway through Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality before I realized that these supplementary notes would work well as the first appendix in the first volume. The notes may have their own kind of order, but unlike most appendix material aren’t presented in a chronological sequence. As in the Introductory Notes, I want to stress Jane’s role as the creative artist, disseminating her personal view of a larger inner reality, and her intuitive and conscious comprehension of at least some aspects of that reality; for such understanding can easily elude our Western-oriented, materialistic, technological outlook.

(I’m not interested in knocking our technology, however, but in pointing out coexisting inner factors that I’m sure are just as important. After all, our technology is responsible for the very existence of this physical book, thereby making it possible for Seth, Jane, and me to communicate with many others.

(Since Jane began delivering the Seth material, I’ve become more and more interested in questions about the origins of creative [meaning artistic] endeavors. When we start looking for such beginnings in ordinary terms, we usually end up reaching back into the subject’s childhood. But, paradoxically, the origins aren’t to be found there, either, or grasped in regular terms, for according to Seth they’d lie outside the reach of physical life. Without going into Seth’s ideas that time is simultaneous, or that any endeavor is creative, the kinds of origins I’m discussing here wouldn’t have any beginning or end. More likely than not, they’d be chosen by the personality before birth, or outside the physical state.

(As soon as Seth mentioned Jane’s “deeply mystical nature” in the 679th session, I thought of some personal material he’d given us six months earlier. I’ve slightly rearranged excerpts from that session for presentation here:)

Even in his poetry, before our work, Ruburt’s energy led him way beyond “himself” at certain times. He tried to hold himself down because, he felt, the energy was so strong that allowed freedom in almost any direction, it would bring him into conflict with the mores and ways of other people.

Ruburt is literally a great receiver of energy. He attracts it, and it must therefore go through him, translated into outward experience. He is himself. He cannot turn himself or his abilities off … His activities would be strong in whatever level of activity he focused his energy, exaggerated in terms of others by comparison. He is a great mystic. Naturally, that is, a great mystic. That is reflected through his poetry as well as our specific work. So that expression would come through poetry also with its “psychedelic” experience, regardless of specific sessions….

(At about the time that personal session was held, we’d been reading a book on the lives of some of the well-known mystics of the past. Most of them had functioned within religious frameworks, and Jane and I saw how their various environments had given color and shape to their transcendent experiences. [I would add that in turn those experiences obviously enriched those environments.] But in spite of Seth’s material, Jane told me: “I’m not a mystic. I don’t think of myself as one at all — not like those church people.” She smiled. “I don’t have a vision every time I want to do something important.

(“In fact,” she continued, “I’m embarrassed that Seth called me a mystic — a great one, I mean — like that. No matter whether it’s natural or not …” Rather reluctantly, she agreed to let me present that personal material here; but only, I think, because she understood my desire to give what I consider to be pertinent background material for the Seth books. Yet, at the same time, she could say to me: “I hope to go further into consciousness than anyone else ever has.” ¹

(I reminded Jane that since she belonged to no religion now [having left the Roman Catholic Church when she was 19 years old], her mystical nature would choose other avenues of expression than religious ones; as in these sessions, for instance. Perhaps, I suggested, it would turn out that one of her main endeavors would be to enlarge the boundaries of “ordinary” mystical experience itself, to show it operating outside of accepted religious frameworks. I added that within those religious boundaries, mystics across the centuries and throughout the world have given voice to the same ideas in almost the same words, and that as an “independent” mystic Jane was in a position to approach the situation from a freer; more individual standpoint: She would be able to add fresh insights to what is certainly one of the species’ all-pervasive, unifying states. For the mystical way surely speaks about our origins. ²

(Yet, somewhat ironically, Jane’s inherent abilities first began to show themselves, even if on unrealized or “unconscious” levels, within the very disciplined structure of Catholicism. And she had reinforced that framework by demanding her transfer from a public to a Catholic grade school.

(I asked her about her childhood feelings, in line with Seth’s description of her mystical nature in the 679th session. Jane told me that during those years she’d had no idea that she might be anything so esoteric as a “mystic.” She was simply herself, and her sense of self, with her individual abilities and appreciation of the world she created and reacted to, grew in a very natural manner as she matured. Through her involvement with the Catholic church, she became aware of the quality called “mysticism” in connection with the saints of that church — but still she had no idea of attributing such a quality to herself. Her desire, her drive, was to write.

(My own point in all of this is that Jane was different from her contemporaries in more ways than she realized. It was obvious to her in her youth that none of her friends wrote poetry, or talked about the subject matter of much of her own poetry.³ Jane intuitively felt her own nature, without trying to define it. Concurrently as a child, she would take long walks at night and pray, especially when she’d “been bad.”

Besides normal reasons, he was psychically inclined, at a time when Jane was young and herself close to a past life. She sensed his deep and personal inner awareness. It confused and haunted him, since his inarticulateness applied also to thoughts within himself. He felt strongly but could not explain. In his solitary nature he came close to being a mystic, but he was unable to relate his personality as Joseph Burdo with the social world at large, or even to other members of the family. There was a block, regrettably. He felt strongly his connection with the universe as a whole and with nature as he understood it. But to him, nature did not include his fellow human beings. The solitariness that besieged him — because it did besiege him — is dangerous to any personality unless it comes after identification with the human race.

That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings, and on your plane it is necessary for the personality to relate to its fellows. Only after such relationships are established is isolation of that nature beneficial. Jane sensed her grandfather’s feeling of identification with the rest of nature, however, and since as a young child she had not yet developed a strong ego personality, she felt no sense of rejection as did, for example, the other members of the family. When he spoke of the wind, she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.

He never forgave his own children for growing up … Yet he related his own body, at least until the very end, very well with nature. He considered that he aged as a tree will age, but perversely he felt that others aged to spite him … From an early age, however, Jane drank in his feeling of completeness with nature, and it had much to do with her later development …

That will be my thoughts, grandfather.

(After she left the church, she distrusted organized religion in general, and had no idea that her writing would lead to any kind of “mystic experience.” In fact, when Seth began to speak about immortality, Jane was disturbed and said that she wanted the sessions to stay away from any religious connotations.

(Jane often enjoys being up and alone in the early hours of the day. She rises before dawn and makes herself “a simple quick breakfast” — just so she can read, make some notes, and watch the sky lightening outside the kitchen window. She listens to the first songs of the birds. The telephone is quiet. And, as she just wrote for me, on April 3, 1976, “I always feel an odd, right, somehow sturdy satisfaction, as if someone should be up to watch the day come; and it’s me.”

(The night before I’d been working on these notes, and we talked about mysticism, among other things. Because of our discussion, Jane rose early that morning and produced several pages of material. When I got up I found within her output the paragraphs presented below. They make an excellent ending for this appendix. Although she begins by once again expressing doubts, or at least qualifications, about her mystical status, I think her comprehension that she’s part of the day, of the earth, and of time, is surely a description of her independent pursuit of the mystical way. Jane wrote:)

“Rob asked me about mysticism, though, and it’s very hard to think of the word in connection with me because I confuse the various definitions or implications placed upon the word. To me it’s a sort of … yes, sturdy connection of one person to the universe … a one-to-one relationship; a yearning to participate in the meaning of existence; a drive to appreciate nature and salute it while adding to it; but the knowledge that nature is also a touchstone to a deeper unknowable essence from which we and the world spring.

“But as I think the word is interpreted, I’m not a mystic. In usual terms the state implies a far greater compassion and goodness than I possess; an inner graciousness that I sense but rarely achieve; and a patience with people that I lack. A piousness that I dislike, too. These are the Christian versions; but a certain fanaticism often goes with them that I would find most distasteful. Some forms of Zen extoll the virtues of good rambunctious humor, which I favor, but then ideas of renunciation clutter up both Eastern and Western mystic philosophies, as far as I know …

“The idea of the priestess used to fascinate me, before my own involvement in our sessions. But I thought of a priestess-poetess, mixing this with the idea of the mistress when I met Rob. Wherever we live is significant to me; a privileged place; our domestic platform in the universe.

“… I have more sympathy and love for myself now. By making myself better I can really do something to … change a small part of the world. Maybe that’s all I’m responsible for — odd thought — what else did I, do I, feel responsible for? But if people loved the part of the earth that makes up their bodies, then they’d treat themselves more gently. And the earth would know. Like I feel the day knows, when I watch the dawn come.

“I was going back to bed when my last lines suddenly reminded me that I still feel the way I did when I was a young girl; that some part of the dawn does come for me; personally; and that to some extent time didn’t exist before I was born. My birth brought a certain element into the world that wasn’t there before. And with me, I brought time. This happens when anyone is born, but most people don’t feel it — or don’t seem to … Together all of us on earth form time and contribute to its design and to history. This happens whenever one of us is born or dies. I guess I’ve always felt that way.

“I thought that life was a gracious gift, and that we were ‘given’ the natural world along with it. I’ve always been grateful for that. I felt that each person had a purpose, but I didn’t think you had to search for it, because I naturally wanted to write; and that was my purpose. I never questioned it.”

1. Jane made her remark while we were talking about the “daemons,” or guardian spirits, of Socrates. The Athenian philosopher (470?–399 B.C.) believed that happiness was the goal, that one should be “well-daemonized,” that the guidance for life came from God.

2. The mystical way is one of the natural feedback systems that operate between the body and the psyche, as Seth reminds us in Chapter 10 of Personal Reality. See the 640th session for February 14, 1973: “Natural ‘mystical’ experience, unclothed in dogma, is the original religious therapy that is so often distorted in ecclesiastical organizations, but it represents man’s innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own being, and of his experience.”

Two years later, while working on Chapter 22 of Psychic Politics, Jane herself wrote: “No one has really tried to map the natural contours of the psyche. Few even wonder if it can be done … The visions that don’t agree with the various religious and mystical dogmas, that aren’t couched in terms of Christ, Jehovah, or Buddha, might well represent holes in the official picture through which a glimmer of inner reality seeps…. But again, the insisted-upon literal interpretation [of a psychic or mystical event] hounds us.”