“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I feel no great responsibility for any of your beings. [If I did] then I would be denying you your own power, and therefore seemingly building my own … I am here because I enjoy it. I am a teacher, and because I am a teacher I love to teach. A person who loves to teach needs people who love to learn. That is why I am here and why you are here … My view of reality is different from your own, and that is fine, and so I can teach. A true teacher allows you to learn from yourself. I enjoy the great vitality and exuberance of your reality, and our city will have joy and exuberance. Now joy sounds quite acceptable, but (with amusement) our city will also have fun — which in many spiritual circles is not so acceptable!

I also do not take my responsibility lightly, and to a great degree I feel responsible for you, and for any results coming from your communications with me. If anything, the personal advice I have given you both should add to your mental and emotional balance, and result in a stronger relationship with the outside world.

(Now I’ll refer the reader to Chapter 20 of Jane’s The Seth Material. She called the chapter “Personal Evaluations — Who or What is Seth?” In it she made a number of excellent points concerning her relationship with Seth and Seth Two; for example: “If physical life evolves [in ordinary terms], why not consciousness itself?” The questions we had at the time can be found throughout the chapter. Indeed, we still have many of them — or, I should note, we’re still intrigued by the latest versions of those “old” questions, for like consciousness itself they’re endless in their ramifications. But here I want to call attention mainly to the excerpt in Chapter 20 that Jane presented from the 458th session for January 20, 1969. Seth discussed the psychological bridge Jane and he have created between themselves for purposes of communication; yet most of his material came through in response to my question about his availability to us. “We [Rob and I] both know that some sessions seem more ‘immediate’ than others, and now as Seth continued we saw why,” Jane wrote in Chapter 20. Seth, briefly, from the 458th session:)

Seth continued: “Each of the particles within the atom is perceptively aware of all of the other particles within that same atom. They move in response to stimuli received from each other, and to stimuli that come from other atoms … Each atom within a cell, for example, is aware of the activity of each of the other atoms there, and to some extent of the stimuli that come to the cell itself from outside it.

28. Seth’s remarks here are actually an extension of a long discussion on individual beliefs and spontaneity that he’d initiated in a class session two weeks ago: “Now, my words will not, I hope, be used to begin a new dogma. My dogma is the freedom of the individual (my emphasis). My dogma is the sacrilegious one — that each of you is a good individual. There is nothing wrong with your emotions, or feelings, or being. When you know yourself then you are joyfully — joyfully — responsive, and, being joyfully responsive, you can carry your society to the furthest reaches of its creativity.”

31. “In late 1963,” Jane wrote in Chapter 2 of The Seth Material, “some months before our sessions began, we’d taken a vacation in York Beach, Maine, hoping that a change of environment would improve Rob’s health. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with his back and suggested that he spend some time under traction in the hospital. Instead we decided that his reaction to stress was at least partially responsible, hence this trip.”

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.