“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.

(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.

(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

(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.”

(The photograph of Jane is 33 years old. It was taken by an older lady friend who was treating her to an outing at a spa just outside of the New York State resort of Saratoga Springs, where Jane lived with her bedridden mother, Marie, and a housekeeper. In a childish hand Jane had scrawled her friend’s name on the back of the picture, along with the date. [...] Jane is 12 years old. [...] Jane also wears a short-sleeved pullover sweater. [...]

[...] 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. [...] 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. [...]

(After a pause at 12:02, Seth delivered a page of material for Jane before ending the session at 12:16 A.M. As I interpret his information on the photographs, then, Jane’s depicts an individual who was to become a probable Jane to the one I know, while mine is pretty much an early version of the self who’s always lived in this reality …)

2. Indeed, Jane was to hold several sessions before we realized that Seth had begun a new book — see the 683rd session in this section. [...] For some months we’d known her death was coming, and so had arranged our affairs around that irrevocable event; I spent weeks preparing the final manuscript of Personal Reality for the publisher; Jane conducted her ESP class whenever she could, and worked on her two books, Adventures in Consciousness and Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. [...] We ended up calling a portion of one of those the 678th session and added it to our records, since the material, which Jane received at my request, concerned probabilities and Jerusalem. [...]