“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It seemed that each time I searched through all of those unpublished sessions (covering well over a decade) for just the right supplementary material, I found something new. More often than not, this made me redo my own notes in unanticipated ways — always a creative challenge that was most enjoyable, and yet, paradoxically, one that at times was very frustrating. Such episodes often caused me to take much longer to produce finished work. I learned a patience that I hadn’t suspected was possible for me. For this patience, employed in conjuring up thoughts and images through words, was objectively and subjectively quite different in quality from that which I was so used to using in producing painted images. I could feel my mind and abilities, using either words or pictures, stretch as a result.

I used that information of Seth’s many times while working with “Unknown” Reality. Even so, I learned that on such a long-term project it’s easy to lose that acute sense of what one really wants to do and show — but I also learned how to constantly renew my focus. This presented me with what seemed like an endless series of challenges, yet I discovered again and again that I enjoyed them: Each time I sat down to work, whether on the most routine short note or the most complicated appendix, I searched for that particular, personal sense of intense concentration on the matter at hand. And each time I achieved it I experienced once more that complete inner and outer, mental and physical, involvement in which time was often significantly negated. These were actual, felt episodes during which I rose above those frustrations mentioned earlier. (I’ve often wondered how much one’s ordinary bodily aging processes are either slowed or superseded during such periods of great focus.)

In Jane’s case, at least, the role of the “medium” (or of the investigator or initiator) is extremely challenging. It’s also arduous: In our Western societies it’s much more comforting to grapple with chemistry, say, or farming or salesmanship, or with any of numerous other “practical” jobs or disciplines, than it is to confront the inner senses.

“In a way, with [this] book and with your art, your purpose is the expression of the ideal, and that expression must be physically materialized, obviously. Your joy, your challenge, should be in the manifestation of the ideal as you see it, whether or not you can in your terms count the consequences or the impediments — whether or not the expression comes to fulfillment in your terms — and even if it seems to fall on ground on which it will not grow.