“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see the material on Jane, mysticism, and religion in the Introductory Notes, the 679th session, and Appendix 1 for that session. In that first appendix, the notes on Jane as an “independent mystic” (despite her denial that she even thinks of herself as a mystic), are especially appropriate here.

(Today we read a long treatise on the “truths” advocated by “holy men” associated with various Eastern religious philosophies — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so forth. Jane’s quick and impassioned response through her own writing, as presented below, reflects feelings deeply rooted within her mystical nature, and also illuminates important aspects of the body and direction of the Seth material as a whole. Given those points, she’s bound to have differences of belief with other views of reality.

(Yet I think more is involved than choosing among the belief systems offered by Eastern or Western cultures, for instance — that is, in more basic terms each personality would make that kind of choice before physical birth, with the full understanding of the vast influence such a decision would have upon a life’s work. Obviously, in those terms of linear time, Jane and I each feel that we chose our present environments.

(Being individualists, then, as I wrote in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1, we don’t concentrate upon whatever parallels exist between Seth’s concepts on the one hand and those of Eastern religious, philosophical, and mystical doctrines on the other; while we know of such similarities, we’re just as aware of how different from them Seth’s viewpoint can be, too. I added that even though we have no interest in putting down other approaches to inner reality, still we’re firm believers in the “inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms.”¹ So, here, we leave it up to the reader to make the intuitive and overt connections between Seth’s philosophy and the material Jane wrote today. The interested reader will also be able to compare her composition with certain passages in her long poem, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, when that work is published in book form in September 1975.

[...] His material was for Jane, and grew out of the paper she wrote this afternoon on Eastern religious thought [see Appendix 15]. The more personal parts of Seth’s delivery aren’t given here, yet enough remains to show Jane’s main challenges some 11 years after she began speaking for him.

(We have two compositions, both of them by Jane, to add to this session. [...]

(Those excerpts, in turn, came from his remarks about Jane’s second composition, which she wrote late this afternoon after we’d finished reading certain material. [...]

(From Jane’s dream journal, then, for Sunday, October 6, 1974: