“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“You make your own reality.” That statement is one of the cornerstones of Seth’s material, stated almost from the beginning of our sessions and emphasized throughout his books. In Mass Events, though, Seth goes further, maintaining that our private impulses are meant to provide the impetus for the development of our own abilities in a way that will also contribute to the best interests of the species and the natural world as well. He’s speaking of our normal impulses here, those that we’ve been taught are dangerous, chaotic, and contradictory. Seth maintains that we can’t trust ourselves while distrusting our impulses at the same time. Much of this book is concerned with the purposes of our impulses, and the reasons for their poor reputations in the eyes of science and religion. What Seth is really saying here is that our impulses are meant to help us create our own realities on a personal basis in a way that will enhance both our private lives and our civilizations.

When Seth began this manuscript, I was personally working with the idea of “heroic impulses” (those separate from our usual ones) that would operate as inner impetuses toward constructive action. In this book, though, Seth states that it is our normal everyday impulses that we must learn to trust. Even I was taken back! Our usual impulses? The ones I ignored while I was looking for the “heroic” ones? And finally I began to understand: Our normal impulses are heroic, despite our misunderstanding of them. In a way, this entire book is an introduction to our impulses, those we follow and those we deny.

While Seth was dictating The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, for example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred; and had the affair turned into a disaster, our Chemung County would have been used to house refugees. Many spectacular national events have happened, of course, since our first sessions took place late in 1963, but Seth seldom mentioned such issues, and then only in answer to our own questions. In this current book, however, he discusses in depth how our private realities merge into mass experience. For that reason he examines the public arena, and devotes a good deal of material to Three Mile Island and to the Jonestown mass suicides as well. Both situations occurred as Seth was dictating this book, and while they are contemporary, both cases are classic in their implications.

So even if I was focused elsewhere and my consciousness turned inward, a spotlight was thrown upon our world from that other viewpoint, almost as if a character in one of our dreams suddenly came awake, walked out of the dream, and dared comment on our waking world. Perhaps this isn’t a good analogy — Seth is far from a dream character, and in fact I hardly ever dream of him at all — but he is a personality whose platform of reality isn’t the same as ours, a personality who writes books through me, but from his standpoint, not mine.

[...] We are finally free to utilize our energy in those directions. We face many challenges of quite momentous nature, and we realize that our purposes are not only important in themselves, but for the surprising offshoots that develop in our efforts to pursue them. In working for our purposes, we realize we are blazing trails that can also be used by others.

[...] We are much more aware of our own thoughts than you are. We realize our freedom to choose our thoughts, and we choose them with some discrimination and finesse.

Simply because we have at our command the full use of our energy, it is not diverted into conflicts. We do not fritter it away, but utilize it for those unique and individual purposes that are a basic part of our psychological experience.

[...] We play, for example, with the mobility of our consciousness, seeing how “far” one can send it. We are constantly surprised at the products of our own consciousness, of the dimensions of reality through which we can hopscotch. It might seem that we use our consciousness idly in such play, and yet again, the pathways we make continue to exist and can be used by others. [...]

Our week just past had been filled with a desperate energy as we struggled to get settled so that we could return to “work”—to our arts—on some sort of a regular basis. To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. [...] I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.

If life has such great potentials, as Seth maintains, if it began—and begins (and continues to begin) at such rich creative and productive levels—then why did our experience so often make it seem that we struggled against unknowing or uncaring cosmic forces, or that we were at the most so ignorant of our own source and creativity that our hands were tied, or that we were forever shut off from our natural heritage?

In later years it’s become impossible for me to close my eyes to the multiple pressing differences that exist between Seth’s explanation of the nature of reality, and of our own private experience of it. In this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, for example, Seth portrays us as a vibrant, well-intended species—a physically attuned kind of consciousness beautifully tailored by our own cosmic ingredients to live lives of productivity, of spiritual and physical enjoyments, with each individual life in charge of its own fate and adding to the potentials of all other life as well.

[...] “The toughest week of our twenty-seven years together,” I told a neighbor last night. [...] We were living in Sayre, Pennsylvania, a middle-class railroad town in which I’d grown up, which lies only 18 miles southeast of our present home in Elmira, New York. [...]

The collection will include our family trees; my father’s journals and photographs; Jane’s and my own grade-school, high-school, college, and family data; our youthful creative efforts in writing and painting; the comic books and other commercial artwork I produced; our early published and unpublished short stories; my original notes for the sessions; session transcripts, whether published or unpublished, “regular,” private, or from ESP class; tapes, including those made in class of Jane speaking for Seth and/or singing in Sumari; our notes, dream records, journals, and manuscripts; our sketches and paintings; Jane’s extensive poetry; our business correspondence; books, contracts, and files; newsletters about the Seth material, published in the United States and abroad (independently of Jane and me); the greater number of letters from readers—in short, a mass of material showing how our separate beginnings flowed together and resulted in the production of a joint lifework.

Even though making our wills led us to think of our deaths, in ordinary terms, still that making implies both order and things accomplished during our lifetimes. We have achieved a situation beneficial to all—for Jane’s will and my own each declares that upon the death of the survivor of the two of us, our estate is to be donated to the Manuscripts and Archives division of Yale University Library, in New Haven, Connecticut. Our physical effects, even including the hill house and the car, are few. But our creative work is everything, and so it, and whatever pertains to it, go to a place where all will be preserved and protected, yet made available for study by researchers and lay people alike as it is transmitted there.

At first we thought of keeping the collection closed until after our deaths, as donors usually request to be done, but we’ve decided to make everything accessible as soon as we can, both for scholarship and for study by the public. To make this possible, we’ll be transferring copies of many of our papers and tapes to the library while keeping the originals with us to work with during our lifetimes. [...]

(This noon Jane and I signed our wills, with our attorney and his wife serving as witnesses. [...]

[...] Both of us have had our psychic expressions (really isolated episodes) involving what can be called simultaneously existing reincarnational selves, and we’ve published accounts of a few of these. Some of our experiences have come in dream states. Our independence relative to reincarnation may represent just conscious cussedness on our parts, but we believe that each of us (meaning anyone, that is) always has the freedom to accept or reject any such choice or causality —whatever we choose to do. No, instead we think of our current challenges as contributing to the knowledge of our whole selves in most specific ways, rather than our being swayed that much by our reincarnational and/or counterpart associations. [...] I do know that regardless of local variations an acceptance of reincarnation has encircled the earth for millennia, and that in our country recent polls show a quarter of the population believing in it.

Since I’m so closely related to Jane in this life, through marriage, as well as through at least several reincarnational and counterpart roles (according to Seth and our own feelings), I’m as deeply involved in this search for redemption as she is. Given our present ideas about the limitless nature of consciousness, we think our joint quest has been underway since before our births—by choice—and we expect it to continue for the rest of our physical lives. I don’t mean that physical or psychic healings, for example, can’t or won’t take place “this time around,” but that if they do happen they too will be deeply connected with those overall, much broader patterns of our lives. [...] That we believe such things speaks for our own brands of faith, then, and also signifies that Jane and I think we have much to learn. And we try to keep in our minds Seth’s statement that “your intellect does not have to know the answers to all of your questions.”

[...] He said that basically both our genetic structure and our reincarnational history are systems of consciousness, that they’re “intermixed.” The former is physical, the latter is psychic, a part of our inner bank of knowledge. I don’t doubt that he’s right—that is, in our temporal lifetimes we call upon whatever systems of consciousness we desire to, at whatever “time”: a matter of choice and free will operating within the broad parameters of our sexual orientation and other personality factors.

Our attitudes, then, may point up our unconscious strengths and weaknesses when it comes to our acceptance and use, or nonuse, of at least portions of the Seth material. We may be more “prisoners,” or more deeply rooted in our times and concepts, than we like to admit. [...]

“OUR PARENTS DO NOT BETRAY US”
JULY 23, 1974

Our parents do not betray us

Our parents do not betray us

our parents lead us into truth

[...] To us, much of the turmoil in the world results from our steadfast refusal to accept a major portion of our natural heritage. We project our inner knowledge “outward” in distorted fashion; thus on a global scale we thrash about with our problems of war, overpopulation, and dwindling natural resources, to name but a few.

I don’t think our conventional social systems, including our scientific ones, are going to resolve our questions within Jane’s and my personal lifetimes. I’m not putting down our cultures and science either, since they very accurately reflect the collective lives and conditions that we’ve chosen to create. [...]

[...] Who is to help initiate meaningful changes in our psychological and social orders? Surely Jane feels the necessity to turn aside from the selected dogmas of our time. For to her, and to me, our world’s present definitions of personality are as limited as the conventional meaning implied by the term ESP. [...]

[...] I wanted to show the ever-widening vital reactions that Seth’s dictation of “Unknown” Reality had on our personal lives, and how those effects rippled outward. It’s almost impossible to describe the creative frustration I sometimes felt — for no matter how fast I worked to record the sessions themselves, noted our day’s activities, hunted down the references pertinent to a given discussion, I couldn’t truly keep up: Reality kept splashing over the edges of my notes. [...]

Actually, I think that the selves we know in normal life are only the three-dimensional actualizations of other source-selves from which we receive our energy and life. Their reality can’t be contained in the framework of our creaturehood, though it is being constantly translated through our present individuality.

[...] These are activated according to our ideas about reality. “We are gods couched in creaturehood,” Seth says, given the ability to form our experience as our thoughts and feelings become actualized.

Seth often uses episodes from our lives as specific examples of larger issues, and our experiences with the flood served as a starting point for his discussion of personal beliefs and disasters. In several other instances he also used our life situation as his source material — an intriguing turnabout.

My idea briefly is this: Our usual orientation is focused pretty exclusively in what we think of as the “real” world, but there are many realities. By shifting our consciousness, we can glimpse these alternate realities, and all of them are the appearance that Reality takes under certain conditions. [...]

I will let you take a break, since I am attempting to take the human limitations that are involved in our situation into consideration. [...] First however, I wish to give particular greetings to our friend Mark, who has consented to visit our circle. [...] By all means take your break, and we will continue with our session.

[...] We will however progress at our own rate, without due speed, and we will in all cases keep our own sessions as uncomplicated as possible.

[...] I began to wonder what our neighbors might hear, since our windows were open. [...]

[...] We will however in our next session return to our usual format.

[...] Our lives have been irrevocably changed—by choice—and not for the worse, either. Jane and I used our wills to intensify our focuses in certain areas. And I’m sure that as the reader works his or her way through the essays, it will become quite apparent that I wrote them just as much for Jane and me as I did for others—all in our ceaseless attempts to better understand, to grasp a bit more firmly, those mental and physical adventures that we’re trying to delve into “this time around.”

Moreover, the choice of presenting the material in essay form proved to have one virtue that was more valuable than all the others combined: It allowed us to delve into the events I describe, and “our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them,” a little bit at a time. [...] At our ages (52 and 62, Jane and I, respectively), why have we created lives with such nightmarish connotations? [...] Why are our lives ending like this, when we feel that simply getting through each day is an accomplishment?

[...] Since we’ve always wanted to make sure that our “psychic work” is given within the context of our daily living, I’ve undertaken to present in these essays intensely personal material relevant to the creation of Dreams. (The mechanics of Jane’s still-fascinating trance phenomenon have been described in some detail in the six previous Seth books she’s produced—with my help—and they’ll also be referred to, if briefly, in Dreams.)

The essay form gave us chances for at least a minimal study of the various forms our creative learning experiences have taken to date. [...] We adjusted in ways that a few weeks previously would have seemed unbelievable to us—and, ironically, as must often happen in such situations, once we’d moved into our new joint reality, it appeared that those particular challenges had always been incipient for us.

In our case the impressions emerge as verbal. [...] I am, as I have often told our friends, an educator. Ruburt, and Joseph also, have known me in past lives, and our overall psychological structures have very significant similarities that make our communications possible.

—and our greetings to our new friend.

In the beginning of our relationship our communication was somewhat less smooth. [...]

[...] (To Venice:) our new friend reminds me of the Jesuit when he first came to our sessions (Bill Gallagher)—watching, when break came, to see when Ruburt and I should fall apart from each other. [...]

[...] It has little to do however with the framework within which our tests take place. The idea of a game will indeed work more to our advantage, for this is not an intellectual exercise. The intellect can be used most handily in tabulating our results, but it will not help us to get our results, unless it is utilized as a means toward discovering how best to harness the emotions for communication purposes.

[...] And if you yourself have a more flexible, easier, less intellectual attitude toward our tests, this will make our task easier.

While this is not completely overcome by any means, we are certainly on our way to overcoming it, and this will help matters. [...] This and the dream material will be our next subjects of discussion.

[...] It involved a peculiar heavy sense of premonition of some kind, as of us personally, or our families, but might be related to John’s family. [...]

[...] We delight our consciousness with the enjoyment of simple existence. [...] Usually however we are highly active, our full energies focused in our work and in new challenges.

[...] Our existence takes us into many other environments, and we blend (gesture) into these. [...] All of us here are teachers, and we therefore adapt our methods, also, so that they will make sense to personalities with varying ideas of reality.

[...] Our work, development, and experience all takes place within what I term the “moment point.” [...] It is difficult to explain this clearly, and yet the moment point is the framework within which we have our psychological experience. [...]

Now I will end our session. I would sing a lullaby — this is not for the book — for our small friend here (Sean Watkins, who was nursing again). [...]

I am taking the opportunity to speak concerning these matters, since I had already decided not to cover any complicated material for our session. [...] Our material in general however can now expand; and indeed, though not always, some extra dimensions and perspectives may be added to our sessions.

It is only when I am not concerned with our weighty material that I can afford thinking in these directions. The second phase of our program will include definite expansions in the scope of our general material. [...]

[...] It was most necessary that we go slowly, particularly in the beginning, for if our foundation was not strong we would have never progressed. [...] Our venture was not fated to be. Our venture represents gestalts of energy coming together in quite natural manners. [...]

Whenever it is possible, I would suggest that our gentleman with the ulcer read our last sessions. [...]

But how can we — how can anyone — bring more of our inherent knowledge to consciousness, to use? How can we become more keenly aware of the facts and implications of our dreams, for example, and the very great influences they exert in our lives? Often our dreams are doorways to other realities. Yet I know that we’re delving ever more deeply into our psyches; Jane’s work with Seth, as well as her poetry and other writings, show that. The great gifts of our psyches are all there, waiting …

When Jane began delivering the Seth material in 1963, I became very conscious of the record we’d leave, not with Seth but concerning our private lives. [...] Hardly an original idea, yet one that I often see ignored in the surface activities of our daily lives. Other facets of our physical and nonphysical lives could help us tremendously if more conscious attention was given to them, regardless of “when” they happened.

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” [...]

Ah, there’s the challenge, then — to understand our inherent creativity. [...]

6. Perhaps I should have briefly discussed it in Volume 1, but ever since Seth originally gave his “Joe, Jane, Jim, and Bob” material (as I call it) in the 683rd session, I’ve wondered about possible connections between the probabilities described in that session and our own reality: How much of our species’ distorted, intuitive knowledge of those probable realities may appear as myth and oddity in our camouflage universe? [...] Considering our personal lack of conscious knowledge about androgyny and such related concepts at the time, Jane and I think it most interesting that Seth came through with that particular material in the 683rd session.

A little investigation gave us glimpses into numerous instances in which blended masculine and feminine qualities are contained in the gods of our very ancient myths. The same principles of androgyny can be found in much of the literature of our own century. Whether scientific or not, myths may contain the deepest truths of all for our species, at least in conventional terms: Jane and I are intrigued to think that the sources for those verities could spring partly from other realities.

(Jane and I consider Seth’s concept of counterparts to be an intriguing psychological framework, spacious enough to serve as a workable thematic structure in which the social and nationalistic characteristics of our species can be studied, as well as the components of the individual psyche. That is, the private person is here seen as interacting with others because there is, beneath our awareness, an inner “person-to-person” relationship connecting each individual with his or her physical counterparts, though they may well be living in other parts of the globe while sharing the same historical period. [...]

[...] Although reincarnation and its variations has been discussed by Seth almost from the very beginning of our sessions, the subject didn’t represent one of our own main concerns. [...]

Physically we can only handle so much data at once, since we are dependent in that respect upon our neurological structure. Each sensation we have received since our birth is still intact in the subconscious. [...] We focus our attention upon a certain group of events—the “present” ones—and then drop them into the subconscious where they seem to fall away and become distant. If we could keep our attention on these past events and still concentrate on the present ones simultaneously, then our sense of present time would be immeasurably enlarged.

We identify with our bodies, as indeed the psychologists tell us that we must. [...] Obviously, according to this idea, we couldn’t perceive anything if we were out of our bodies. In fact, there would be no self to get out to begin with, since our consciousness would be the result of our body mechanisms. [...]

[...] We are, to some extent, free of our physical bodies. We can see and feel and learn while our consciousness is separated from the physical form. [...] Hallucination is not involved, unless I am hallucinating now as I write this page, sip my coffee, and feel honest indignation that some of us would limit our abilities to protect limited concepts. Why should we take it for granted that concepts are right, if they contradict our experience?

[...] We know little about our own psychology and less about the nature of consciousness. To learn more we must be willing to examine our own consciousness, individually. [...] In sticking so close to the confines of egotistical physically oriented awareness, we may be closing ourselves off from answers to our deepest questions, knowledge that can help us deal more intelligently with physical life.

Our joint concentration has become like a brilliant light directed upon first one event and then another. Because Jane still requires regular care, our sleeping patterns remain much more evenly divided between the daylight and nighttime hours (see the essay for April 16). [...] I work around these creative outpourings by ministering to my wife, running our house and the many errands connected with our daily living, handling our publishing affairs, seeing visitors—expected and unexpected—and trying to answer at least some of the mail, which is threatening to accumulate beyond control. [...] Nor have I resumed the midnight walks I used to take over the hilly streets of our neighborhood; I used to look forward to seeing the shadowy deer as they moved down into the streets from the woods north of the hill house. [...]

There must be a vast amount of pertinent dream information ready for the tapping, however, and maybe with Seth’s help Jane and I can eventually learn more about the undoubtedly therapeutic roles our joint and individual dreams have played as we contended with the challenges posed by her physical difficulties. Many questions arise: Even granting our personal reservations about influences being exerted within our current lives through past, future, as well as other present existences, what about exchanges on dream levels concerning Jane’s symptoms between or among any of our reincarnational selves, our counterpart selves, or various combinations of the two? [...]

[...] That such feelings are rearoused in us at this time is hardly coincidental in view of our lifelong habits and belief systems; our tendencies toward secretiveness and our desires to be as self-sufficient as possible—even with Jane’s very dependent situation. Different modes of behavior don’t fit our chosen courses of action in physical life “this time.” Once again I note that in my opinion Jane’s dependency represents, at least in part, a search for a “redemption” that encompasses other motivations and realities than those concerned with “just” our temporal lives; that indeed, her impaired state grew out of her mystical nature itself (but was hardly caused by it!).

[...] What they really signify for the long term is (as I wrote in the essay for April 16) a continuing program of intense study for Jane and me—and yes, for Seth, too—as we seek to better understand our chosen commitments in our present physical lives. Our questions reflect those that everyone has, whether consciously or unconsciously—and among them is that eternally human “Why?” behind each event that we know. [...] We’d like to publish much of it, even though it’s hardly all flattering, and even though some of it, because of our ordinary human limitations, may not be very useful in everyday life. [...]

Aside from anything Seth has said or ever may say about other probable realities, or even about human origins here on earth, I think it most risky at this stage in history for anyone—scientist or not—to dogmatically state that life has no meaning, or is a farce, or that attributes of our reality of which we can only mentally conceive at this time do not really exist. [...] Moreover, why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as epiphenomenalism through which to comprehend our reality? [...] Truly, our individual and collective ignorance of just our own probable reality is most profound at this time in our linear history (in those terms). Jane and I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately, as a result of mankind’s restless search for meaning, we didn’t end up returning in a new official way to our ancient concepts of spirit within everything, animate and inanimate. Such an updated animistic/vitalistic view would take into account discoveries ranging from subnuclear events to the largest imaginable astronomical processes in our observable universe. [...]

Our visiting psychologist left us a couple sets of the tests Seth referred to. Jane had resisted filling them out during our meeting with him, and has little intention of doing so now. Even our guest said the tests were very experimental; I believe that actually a colleague of his had devised them in large part. [...]

Our editor, Tam Mossman, has verified for us that the contract between Prentice-Hall and Ankh-Hermes contains a clause prohibiting cutting, unless Jane’s and my permission is given. [...] Jane and I regret this, now that our first anger has passed. We’re caught between the economic realities of the situation as far as Ankh-Hermes is concerned, and our own intense desires that translations of the Seth books match the original versions as closely as possible. [...]

There is a part of man that Knows, with a capital K. That is the portion of him, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body’s “machinery,” ⁶ so in our book we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people write, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material—and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. [...]

Seth maintains that inner information often comes into our minds, though it is sifted through our individual psyches and tinted by our own lives so that frequently we never recognize its source. [...]

[...] And yet I feel that only a portion of his consciousness is here during sessions — the part expressed through me — so that whatever the nature of Seth’s native experience, his performance in our world only hints of a psychological complexity quite beyond our present understanding.

As most of our readers know, Seth began calling me Ruburt, and my husband, Rob, Joseph, early in the sessions. He explained that these were our entity names, and I was half amused to have a male one, and to find Seth referring to me as “he” or “him.” [...]

Seth maintains that our inner knowledge usually merges so smoothly with our present concerns that we seldom recognize its source, yet it provides the individual and the species with a reliable, constant stream of information through a psychological lifeline to which we are each connected.