“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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

“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.

(She hasn’t undergone a classical religious conversion of the kind William James describes in his The Varieties of Religious Experience,⁴ yet more than once she’s known her own forms of ecstasy, or deep alteration of consciousness, or illumination — whatever one chooses to call such states. From two perspectives she rather briefly describes one such episode, which actually lasted several hours, in her Dialogues, and in Adventures in Consciousness.⁵

2. The mystical way is one of the natural feedback systems that operate between the body and the psyche, as Seth reminds us in Chapter 10 of Personal Reality. See the 640th session for February 14, 1973: “Natural ‘mystical’ experience, unclothed in dogma, is the original religious therapy that is so often distorted in ecclesiastical organizations, but it represents man’s innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own being, and of his experience.”

(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. [...] I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. [...]

(Pause.) For various reasons already given, concerning your joint relationship, and your own purposes (to me), it has taken some time for a newer, suitable framework to form itself — one in which Ruburt is free to pursue mystic experience in a practical structure; one in which unconventionality of thought is allowed to continue freely. [...]

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

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