“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It seems that a combination of factors led to those oddly disturbing yet challenging events in the 717th session. One is probably just the state of Jane’s recent exceptional psychic receptivity. Another is my own longtime interest in the American psychologist and philosopher, William James [1842–1910]; he wrote the classic The Varieties of Religious Experience.³ A third is a letter received last week from a Jungian psychologist who had been inspired by Seth’s material on the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung [1875–1961], in Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks. And a fourth factor would be a most evocative experience Jane had Monday afternoon, in which she found herself experiencing consciousness as an ordinary housefly⁴: From that minute but enthralling viewpoint she knew “herself” crawling up a giant-sized blade of grass. She was exploring the “world view” of a fly. This adventure was certainly a preparation for developments in the 717th session.

(The letter from the Jungian psychologist evidently provided the immediate impetus for the fly episode and for Monday evening’s events, though. The author requested additional material from Seth on Jung or his works. I hardly think it accidental now that such an inquiry came just when Jane’s abilities seemed about to ripen in the particular way they did that night.

(The events to come didn’t help matters any, either. No sooner had Jane finished with the lengthy James material than she promptly began to get impressions from “Carl Jung.” This time she was almost apologetic. We decided to go ahead, though Jane didn’t see a book or have any visual data. The words just came to her along with strong emotional feelings that she connected with Jung.

(The material seemed endless. It was a few minutes before midnight when Jane just stopped, saying that she’d more or less “had it” for the evening. The Jung material felt much more animated, she added, with a lot of vitality and energy to it: “‘He really seemed excitable.” Neither of us found the Jung passages as evocative as the James material, however. This is a brief Jungian excerpt:

(I’d just begun typing the “James and Jung” material, so from my original notes I read the rest of it to Jane as we waited for Seth to come through. I also thought she discussed an excellent idea of her own, saying that she believed the James-Jung episode itself was an exercise in making the unknown reality known. She’d already done some writing yesterday, for Psychic Politics, leading toward this view⁵; so whatever we learned through Seth this evening, we already felt reasonably sure that in usual trite terms Jane hadn’t been communicating directly with two such famous personalities. Instead, she was involved in something quite a bit different — and much more believable.)

(10:22.) Ruburt picked up on William James’s world view because their interests coincided. A letter from a Jungian psychologist helped serve as a stimulus. The psychologist asked me (deeper and with humor) to comment about Jung. Ruburt felt little correspondence with Jung. In the back of his mind he wondered about James, mainly because he knew that Joseph (Rob) enjoyed one of James’s books.

(10:52. Jane’s trance had been deep, her delivery for the most part just about as fast as I could write. I told her that Seth’s material was excellent, that it backed up her ideas as to the nature of the James-Jung “communications,” and added more data as well.

(In a sense, both world-view books were “born” in the 718th session and the odd previous one that took place under Seth’s auspices. I write this although Jane had no idea of producing such works when those two sessions were held [but see my speculations in Note 6]. Nothing has been forthcoming on any additional material concerning Carl Jung, however — nor has Jane tried for this.

4. The contents of this note flow out of what I wrote in Note 2: Seth mentions Jane’s fly experience in this (718th) session, and Jane discussed it in more detail in Chapter 5 of Politics. Then in Chapter 6 of her book she presented long excerpts from the James-Jung material as it developed in the 717th session.