“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now when children walk down streets, they count the cracks in the sidewalks. And so our city will have its own kind of tricky walks! There will be sidewalks within, and above and below sidewalks. But it is for each individual to decide which one he or she will follow. When Ruburt (as Seth calls Jane) was a young girl he wrote a poem in which he declares:

(In that class session Seth had much more to say about the dream city. Because of the individual freedom of creation implied in the city’s very existence, and in Jane’s early poem in Note 2, I’ll close this appendix with another of her verses. This one is from an even earlier poem, Lorrylo, written when she was but 15 years old:)

2. Seth didn’t quote Jane’s little poem exactly from 26 years ago, but paraphrased it. It’s called Echo, and Jane wrote it in 1948, when she was 19 years old. Once again in an early work we see clear signs of the Seth material to come (in 1963). Echo begins:

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.