“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings, and on your plane it is necessary for the personality to relate to its fellows. Only after such relationships are established is isolation of that nature beneficial. Jane sensed her grandfather’s feeling of identification with the rest of nature, however, and since as a young child she had not yet developed a strong ego personality, she felt no sense of rejection as did, for example, the other members of the family. When he spoke of the wind, she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.

(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.

(Since Jane began delivering the Seth material, I’ve become more and more interested in questions about the origins of creative [meaning artistic] endeavors. When we start looking for such beginnings in ordinary terms, we usually end up reaching back into the subject’s childhood. But, paradoxically, the origins aren’t to be found there, either, or grasped in regular terms, for according to Seth they’d lie outside the reach of physical life. Without going into Seth’s ideas that time is simultaneous, or that any endeavor is creative, the kinds of origins I’m discussing here wouldn’t have any beginning or end. More likely than not, they’d be chosen by the personality before birth, or outside the physical state.

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. [...] Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [...]

[...] Seth had finished Personal Reality over six months ago. [...] 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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] That material has been given (over the years in a series of personal sessions).