“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.

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.

(Even so, through her school years Jane didn’t particularly talk about her thoughts, or the abilities she sensed within herself — not with her mother, the priests she came to know well [and who didn’t approve in any case if she carried her religious devotion, her mysticism, “too far”], or even with her grandfather. Jane wrote about her inner world instead. She had boyfriends, but no dreams of marriage, children, or keeping house. Essentially, then, she “felt alone” in her constant desire to write.

“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 …

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.”

5. Jane deals with her profound alteration of consciousness in Part 2 of Dialogues: “The Paper and Trips Through an Inner Garden,” and in Chapter 9 of Adventures.