“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That child took a different course than this woman did (Jane indicated herself as she sat in her rocker). The dogmatism prevailed. The child’s mystical nature, while strong, was not strong enough to defy the church framework, to leave it or to rise above its provided symbolism. It [the mysticism] was to be expressed, if curtailed, relatively speaking. The mind would be harnessed so that it would not ask too many questions. That child (in the photo) joined a nunnery, where she learned to regulate mystical experience according to acceptable precepts — but to express it nevertheless with some regularity, continuously, in a way of life that at least recognized its existence.

(Intently:) Ruburt here chose the writing structure, and has stuck to it as unswervingly as he once stuck to the church, yet always seeking a new framework. For a while he idealized you. Your guidance and strength were his framework. When it became apparent that you were also human, and not a framework, he became frightened. When you encouraged the emergence and expression of his mysticism, then you could no longer act, he felt, as a framework to contain it. By then it seemed to threaten the joint structure of your lives. He knew intuitively that you also used artistic creation as a buffer between yourself and mystical expression.

It’s taken us some years to understand that behind Jane’s symptoms lay her efforts to understand and express the very strong creative energy she’s sensed within herself since childhood. Yet the conflict that developed between her writing self and her mystical self, as explained by Seth in Personal Reality, was only one facet of her intuitive drive toward that expression: As Jane matured, she realized that there were other challenges for her to contend with too. Among them were the resolution of some old family relationships — and nowhere in this note am I talking about past lives or probable lives, but just the working out of hard questions rooted in this present physical reality. From Seth and ourselves we’ve accumulated much unpublished material about Jane’s symptoms and attendant matters. The bulk of it is often applicable to others, and eventually she may write a book about the whole subject. Should she do so, it would certainly be a history of one person’s long efforts to grapple as fully as possible — and not always successfully — with her own human qualities. But I also think that in many ways it would be her most illuminating work. She fully accepts the idea that she creates her own reality.

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

[...] So that expression would come through poetry also with its “psychedelic” experience, regardless of specific sessions….

(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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]