“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On Monday, November 4, I mailed to Jane’s publisher all of the art due for her Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology: the 16 diagrams I’d just finished, plus two older pieces of work. All are in “line,” or pen-and-ink. I thought it interesting that as I was completing work for Jane’s first book on aspect psychology, she was starting Psychic Politics, the second one in the series. But now I can return to my longer project — the 40 line drawings for Jane’s book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. Adventures and Dialogues are to be published by Prentice-Hall in the spring and fall, respectively, of 1975. Other references to both books can be found in Note 1 for Session 714.

(We were discussing the letter and half-facetiously wondering whether Seth might respond in any way, when Jane suddenly told me that she was picking up material on the “essence” of William James. Because of his own persistent melancholy, she said, James had been able to understand others with the same kind of disposition. As she continued to give her impressions, though, I wondered: Why James? He wasn’t mentioned in the psychologist’s letter, for instance. Why this picking up on, and identifying with, a famous dead personality? Most likely my own interest in James’s work exerted some kind of influence upon Jane’s newly developing abilities, I thought; but still, that didn’t answer my questions.

(Which pointed up our dilemma, I thought at the time. I said little to Jane, but I was most uneasy that she was delivering material supposedly from a member of the famous dead. Actually, we’d always thought that such performances were somehow suspect. Not that mediums, or others, couldn’t communicate with the “dead” — but to us, anyhow, exhibitions involving well-known personages usually seem … psychologically tainted. So our feelings about the night’s affair weren’t of the best at that point.

(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.)

Quite rightly, he did not interpret the event in conventional terms, and Joseph did not suppose that James himself was communicating in the way usually imagined (but see the opening notes for this session). Joseph did recognize the excellence of the material. James was not aware of the situation. For that matter, James himself is embarked upon other adventures. Ruburt picked up on James’s world view, however, as in your terms at least it “existed” perhaps 10 years ago.⁶ Then, in his mind, James playfully thought of a book that he would write were he “living,” called The Varieties of Religious States — an altered version of a book he wrote in life.

Ruburt tuned in to that unwritten book. It carried the stamp of James’s own emotional state at that “time,” when he was viewing his earthly experience, in your terms, from the standpoint of one who had died, could look back, and see where he thought his ideas were valid and where they were not. At that point in his existence, there were changes. The plan for the book existed, and still does. In Ruburt’s “present,” he was able to see this world view as expressed within James’s immortal mind.

(11:49. Jane rested a minute or so, still in trance. Her fly experience of last Monday afternoon is mentioned in the opening notes for this session. When Seth returned, he delivered half a page of material for Jane and me, including this passage: “He [Ruburt] has made an extraordinary leap into his [psychic] library, and it is freeing him physically. You have made as vital a leap, and it is freeing you artistically. The library is valid, and in the most legitimate of terms it is far more important, for example, than a physical library….” Seth finished his personal material at 12:10 A.M., and we thought the session was over. Jane was very tired, much more so than she usually is after a session. She wanted only to sleep.

There are, in those terms, gradations. When I used the word “conscious” (or “consciousness”), I meant it as I thought you understood it. I thought that you meant: conscious of being conscious, or placing yourself on the one hand outside of a portion of your own consciousness — viewing it (intently) and then saying, “I am conscious of my consciousness.”

The fly is intensely conscious, at every moment engrossed in itself and its environment, precisely tuned to elements of which you are “unconscious.” There are simply different kinds of consciousness, and you cannot basically compare one to the other any more than you can compare, say, a toad to a star to an apple to a thought to a woman to a child to a native to a suburbanite to a spider to a cat. They are varieties of consciousness, each focused upon its own view of reality, each containing experience that others exclude.