My wife, Jane Roberts, dictated The Magical Approach for Seth, the “energy personality essence” she spoke for in a trance state, in 1980—but the pressures of Jane’s illness, and of our producing other books, kept us from publishing it quickly. [...]

[...] She’s worked as a researcher of Jane’s material for The Magical Approach — the book she has “most dreamed of working on.” [...]

[...] Sue is mentioned in The Magical Approach. [...]

[...] I’ve let answering any but immediate business mail go while Laurel and I worked on the manuscript for The Magical Approach.)

[...] Seeing it cheered Jane—yet my wife continued to hassle [as she put it] her efforts on Magical Approach, asking herself again and again whether she really wanted to do that book. [...] It was often difficult going for her, though: Magical Approach still wasn’t flowing the way she wanted it to.

[...] I wonder about the advisability of the entire project [Magical Approach]. Where had the magic gone? [...]

[...] They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. [...] They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. [...]

THE MAGICAL APPROACH, AND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN “CONSERVATION” AND SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENTS

“Anyhow, have been applying the Magical Approach to a variety of other areas, household annoyances, with some gratifying results. [...] Yesterday he tried again, both of us remembering the Magical Approach; me saying mentally that the affair would take place easily, etc. [...]

(9:46.) Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity¹ — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. [...]

(Pause.) With Ruburt: The new orientation is bringing results, and the results do appear effortlessly.² The affair with Mitzi (one of our cats) did involve action at other levels — a magical orientation. [...]

End of session — and again, a magical good evening.

[...] Both Dr. Guy and Dr. Camper have a strong interest in magic. [...] Seth also discussed with Dr. Guy the practice of, and the motivations behind, the art of magic. And in return for Seth speaking, Dr. Guy staged his own little magic show for Jane and me—to our amazement and intense interest—as the three of us sat around the living-room table.

[...] Ruburt accepted the magic of a poem, but not the magic of health or mobility, because he was convinced that mobility stood in the way of his other abilities.

Ruburt’s body is then magically and naturally repairing itself in a function just as creative, of course, as the inner work that goes on in the production of a book or a poem — a fact he is finally getting through his head. [...]

A note added 14 years after Jane/Seth delivered the magical-approach material: Miss Bowman died in 1994, at the age of 96. [...]

[...] Now to others that you do not perceive, you are as magical, you are as nebulous as a shadow falling upon a floor in midafternoon. [...] And as they may not see your magic and your consciousness, so there are other magic shadows and other realities that you think beneath you that you do not perceive. [...]

[...] Let the inner intuitive sense speak for it is the inner voice, and the magic that unites you has no need of conscious words. [...]

I can’t note the same for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book—the very promising work that Jane and I first discussed a year and a half ago [in August 1980], after Seth had started his group of excellent private sessions on that subject.⁸ I watched Jane try to write the book a number of times; last month, in Note 6 for Session 939 [in this chapter], I finally expressed the opinion that she wouldn’t finish the job. Or, to put it another way, Magical Approach has yet to undergo a resurrection by her! [...] I think Magical Approach would have been a fine book as she planned it—but that it ended up squelched by at least two major factors: She was too inhibited by the subject matter [her physical symptoms] out of which the magical approach material had grown, and she was bothered because she had chosen to emulate the plodding way in which I put together the Seth books. [...]

Even so, Jane had the magical approach in mind two days later, when she typed a rough last note for her journal on February 10: “Still annoying problems with fingers… hoping to clear this up, using in part robs new suggestion page [credo] for me. [...] as I see it even that can be utilized in magical approach, again, Seth finished his book monday.”

[...] I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. [...]

(Long pause.) The sessions on magical approach do indeed represent the most “natural truths” about the nature and structure of your world, to the extent that you understand them and put them into practice.

1. “The entire idea of the magical approach,” Seth told us, “is of itself sustaining.

This material very nicely supplements information I’d quoted from the second session Seth gave in his series on the magical approach to reality. [...]

[...] Jane plans to use some of those dreams in the book she’s planning on Seth’s concept of the magical approach to reality.

[...] And that’s how say “black” magic works. [...]

In this deceptively simple but moving poem about her magical childhood responses to the world she lived in, Jane foreshadows from that viewpoint the innate knowledge she was to express a quarter of a century later in the Seth material. [...]

lord let me remember how it was
when i nudged my skin
against the touch of each new morning
and bounded through
the thick thought-forests
that stretched between dawn and noon,
when like magic my lunch was put before me.
lord let me remember how it was
when i was so new
that i thought i was part of the morning.

[...] When you attend to what is there with the proper magical attitude of mind, then the altered organizations can take place. [...]

[...] There is an old saying: Time is money—and in his own way Frank would like to make that kind of a statement, clear, direct, and unambiguous: Turning clocks or time directly into good hard cash, a magic of a sort. [...]

For everywhere there is magic,

with a magic note

Jane, then, wrote those two poems 16 days before she dictated the last session for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche on April 4, 1977; one month before she began dictating Mass Events on April 18, 1977; two years and two months before she began God of Jane on May 6, 1979; two years and six months before she began dictating the Preface for Dreams on September 25, 1979; two years and eight months before she came up with the idea for If We Live Again on November 15, 1979; three years and five months before she began dictating Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality in Dreams on August 6, 1980; four years before she began dictating Seth’s sinful-self material in that book on March 11, 1981; four years and three months before she began coming through with her own sinful-self information on June 17, 1981; and four years and five months before, on August 26, 1981, she wrote the poem in Note 6 for Session 936 of Dreams: “Something in me / ebbs and tides, / as if I let myself / for a while / be washed away / out to sea / while leaving / some spidery shell / upon the shore /….”

So now it’s time to say— / “It’s all right,” /
and pick up the / magic bone / to try / its strange new /
nourishment. [...]

Someone magically / took my leash off / and I was so scared /
I pretended it was / still there even / tighter than before.

“Ahem,” said the magic voice. [...]

1. Jane called her book of poetry If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love, and Prentice-Hall published it in 1982.

[...] Here are her opening lines from the first essay, “Poetry and the Magical Approach to Life”:

“To me at least, poetry — like love — implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at the world. [...]

Reading the sessions of the Magical Approach with some consistency is now in order, where for example I might counsel at another time that they be set aside for a while. [...]

The emphasis should be upon arousing your own individual and joint creative healing abilities—in other words, magical properties of your own minds and hearts, and such intent is bound to put you ahead of the game. [...]

[...] You should begin such a program as soon as possible, regarding it, however, as not a last desperate approach toward an unsolvable problem, but as a proper step of development in your understanding of the magical approach to life. [...]

Forgive the terminology, but you each believed in “magic,” or the sessions never would have started. [...]

[...] I’d mentioned a little earlier an idea for a book she could develop on Seth and the magical approach [she’s had the magical-approach idea for some time], and she wanted material on that. [...]

[...] As I asked Jane the other day when she talked of resuming work on that project: “Can you stand any more complications?” I meant of course, that after 17 books, we’re at our present situation, so I have difficulty understanding how doing another book will suddenly, magically, turn anything around for us as long as we stay on the same old course. [...]

with magic mirrors that open up