“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Before the session I showed Jane a childhood photograph of herself, and one of me. The two pictures are roughly the same size, about 3¼ by 5". They also look remarkably alike in their brittle and discolored condition — almost as though they’d been snapped at the same time — yet mine is older than Jane’s by 20 years.

(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. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. 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. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? 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. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

Your own character is in its way more direct, meaning that you maintained a more immediate focus. When that picture was taken, however, your parents were beginning to realize their difficulty. Your first year was one in which your father and mother were filled with expectation. Linden sensed that lack. He was secure, but not as secure as you had been, as the division between your parents was beginning to show.

6. It took more than a little while for Jane’s mystical nature to show itself in prose. Two years after we married, she published her first work of fiction, a short story about reincarnation called “The Red Wagon”: It appeared in the December, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [© 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., New York, N.Y.]. She was 27 years old, and most pleased with the beginning of her professional career. Within the next several years she sold a number of additional stories to the same magazine, as well as two short novels, and also published poetry and a little fiction in other markets.

[...] 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. [...]

(Yet, somewhat ironically, Jane’s inherent abilities first began to show themselves, even if on unrealized or “unconscious” levels, within the very disciplined structure of Catholicism. [...]