“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“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

“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.

“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.

(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 photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. [...] In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. [...]

[...] The speed of her delivery for Seth has been average, which to me means that I’d been able to just comfortably keep up with my verbatim “shorthand” notes. Jane remembered little of what she’d said, yet now she felt the emotional impact of the material in her stomach — the reaction she often gets, she told me, when the information is of a personal or “charged” nature.

(Before the session I showed Jane a childhood photograph of herself, and one of me. [...]

[...] Many years later she was to tell me, “My mother hated that woman.” [...]