“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The placid-looking child (in the photo) was as dogmatic and unyielding in some respects as Ruburt has ever been. Yet leaving the church framework, Ruburt fastened upon the mind as opposed to the intuitions. The child here was convinced that statues of Christ moved. Without a framework to contain that kind of experience, the growing girl began to squash it. Mystical experience became acceptable only through poetry or art, where it was accepted as creative, but not real enough to get him into trouble, or to upset the “new” framework. The new framework threw aside such superstitious nonsense. The mind would be harnessed, and art became the acceptable translator of mystical experience, and a cushion between that experience and the self. He threw some of the baby out with the bathwater.

(10:19.) Without this experience of following such a belief in the church so fervently, however, he would not understand the need of people for such beliefs, or be able to reach them as well as he does. His questioning mind was exercised originally as he began to examine religious beliefs. He was afraid that psychic experience, when he encountered it much later, might lead to a new dogma, and was determined not to use it in such a way.

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.

Always, when Jane and I present personal material in “Unknown” Reality, we have several things in mind. We not only want to give necessary background information relative to the sessions themselves, but to offer glimpses into the very complicated emotional and physical forces that lie beneath close long-term relationships. We think Seth’s comments about our situations can help the reader better understand his or her own beliefs, motives, and desires.

Jane regarded all of these works as being science “fantasy” rather than “straight” science fiction. Her fictional themes especially were extensions of much of her earlier poetry, and contained the same kind of thinking that had led to her breaking with her church. She had no conscious intimations that within a decade she would develop the Seth material. “My mind just worked that way,” Jane said of her stories. “I was concerned with those themes so I wrote about them.”