“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Within our national orientations, within our religious and secular, scientific and artistic structures, we are choosing to go to the extremes of “good” and “bad,” and to deal with the consequences, all stewing together in what seems like an impossible mix of reason and emotion, learning and joy, pain and violence, and life and death. Naturally, many of us don’t like certain facets of our creations, yet we must deal with all of them if we are to make any sense out of our reality. Otherwise, our growing will be too limited; we’ll remain slaves to our animosities.

However, all of our reactions were much more subdued than they had ever been before when she had finished a book, either by herself or with Seth. No matter what other challenges we had created for ourselves over the last two years and four months, the knowledge that Dreams was in process had served as a comforting foundation in our lives. [...] And we know that as the creation of Dreams begins to recede from our immediate perception other challenges will inevitably move forward. Basically, things have come down to our hopes that Jane can keep going from day to day, and that our new credo will offer her support now that Seth and she are through with their book.

[...] In notes at the end of this session I’ll briefly consider the latest expressions of large-scale consciousnesses concerning Three Mile Island¹ and the countries of the Middle East,² and then will unify those discussions by explaining how I think those great events of consciousness have counterpart relationships, just as “living” entities do.³ I’ll also refer to our country’s space-shuttle program.⁴ Next, I have to put into final form the complicated notes I began for a number of sessions for Dreams as Jane delivered them. After that will come the job of typing the finished manuscript for this massive two-volume work; I do not know when I’ll have it ready for our publisher. And therein lies another reason for our somber moods: Our dear friend and editor, Tam Mossman, almost certainly will not see Dreams through the publishing process. [...]

[...] One of Tam’s many generous acts was his initiating our contact with officials at Yale University Library just over three years ago. As a result, Jane and I have arranged that upon our deaths our estate—including the Seth material—goes to the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Library. My plan in the meantime has been to transfer copies of as much of our work as possible to Manuscripts and Archives, so that the material can be indexed and made available to researchers and to the public. [...]

(In relation to Seth’s material on the fund, I told Jane, it seems that creativity obviously has many more facets to it than we ordinarily think—if we need or want money, for example, with it just serving as a means to an end—our doing our work—it will be provided if we’re not closed to the idea. And it doesn’t matter how it comes, as long as it’s honest—through our “earning” it in the conventional way, or whether we find it on the ground or it falls out of the sky, or someone gives it to us, or it comes through insurance, or whatever. [...] As we talked Jane said the idea may even have ramifications that may touch Pete Harpending, our attorney. [...]

That is why so many of them promote our work, buy books for others, and form their own kind of grass-roots organizations. [...] The fund idea represents many people’s opportunity to feel a part of our venture. [...] The people are definitely well-meaning, of good intent, and they welcome the idea of expending energy, time, and money on our behalf. [...]

[...] Our answer could range all the way from yes to no, with any combination of stops in between. [...] One thing became quite clear as we talked: The fund idea abruptly led us into looking at our beliefs and motives and “work” in new ways—a valuable service right there. [...]

You have little idea (long pause) of the magical feeling of discovery (pause) with which many of our readers regard our work. [...]

Nor am I trying to justify class behavior by noting that Jane and I and our guests were much better behaved during the Friday-night gatherings in our apartment. A fine group of young friends with both similar and quite different interests than ours slowly developed, each one, each couple, dropping in at the end of the workweek to relax and talk. [...] Especially as we came to realize that our having such friends made up for interactions with others that Jane and I had largely missed out on in our own earlier relationships. [...]

[...] Not only because of our simple love for one another and our mutual interests—but even then, I came to understand, because we could intuitively sense the fine creative adventure in consciousness that was to become the Seth material. (We didn’t give a thought, however, to anything like reincarnation, let alone to such connections involving us.) Even now, 18 years after Jane’s death in l984, I’m as committed to our work as ever. [...] I welcomed it after my first hesitance at accepting her themes in Idea Construction, and as it created its many-faceted path through our lives. On November 26, 1963, when Jane and I received those first incoherent “messages” on a borrowed Ouija board, our world views began to change, to enlarge. [...]

[...] Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. [...]

[...] So with our obvious consent and the great variety of his very intelligent and fluent discourses, Seth became the discarnate entity who spoke through Jane for the next 20 years and eight months. [...] Jane was living her challenges just like each one of us does, and her efforts were inextricably bound up with the world even as, I was sure, we were creating our human versions of the earth and its own reality. [...] Our mail alone began to speak written volumes, almost always approvingly, that we had never anticipated. [...] As with other details of our experiences to come, many were still unknown to us on conscious levels—we’d have been incredibly wise to have known it all in advance! [...]

That all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole is surely one of our oldest concepts, growing, in those terms, with us out of our prehistory as we struggled to grasp the “true” nature of reality. Traditionally we’ve cast that feeling or knowledge in religious terms, for want of a better framework, but I think that more and more now the search is also on within science for a theory—even a hypothesis—that will lock up our often subjective variables into what might be called a more human equivalent of the still-sought-for unified theory in physics. [...] From what Jane and I can gather (through our reading especially), at least some of the world’s leading scientists are becoming willing to contend with consciousness itself. [...]

In these last few pages (since I began discussing my beliefs about Jane’s early psychological conditioning), I’ve indicated the only kind of thinking by which I can personally make sense out of our world these days. Particularly when I consider the “news” on the typical front page of the typical daily newspaper: All too accurately the “stories” of war, pollution, corruption, and poverty and crime show just how little we human beings know or understand ourselves at this time—and how far we have to go, individually and en masse. As the years have passed, I’ve come to trust more and more my own insights into our behavior as a species within the framework of a nature that I believe our kind has co-created with every other species on the planet (to confine my theme to just our immediate environment for the moment). [...]

It should be obvious by now that in a large measure all of the selves and approaches I’ve delineated in these essays simply represent Seth playing around semantically, as he tries to get various portions of his ideas through our heads at certain times. All is one, basically, as he knows—and can feel—far better from his vantage point than we can from ours. (Yet, “Our lives and deaths are now,” Jane wrote in Chapter 10 of God of Jane, quoting herself from her own “psychic library.”)

Some of our readers, sending us recent books and copies of articles written by scientists working on these subjects, have noted that it must be nice for Jane and me to have concepts that Seth has been discussing for years “corroborated” by the establishment (often we already had the material on file, by the way). But once again irony enters in on my part, for I’m afraid our answer is that in general science isn’t even aware of the existence of the Seth material, notwithstanding the letters of approval and/or encouragement we receive from individual scientists, representing a variety of disciplines. [...] Not for a long time yet, in our opinion, and for many reasons.”

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, I suspect that our relationship is far more complex. [...] He has given us instructions that allow Rob, my students and myself to take our own sometimes faltering steps out of our usual physical reality. He initiated our exploration into the universe of dreams, for example, and is therefore largely responsible for this book. But we must return to our normal daily dimension of actuality. [...]

According to Seth, dreaming is a creative state of consciousness, a threshold of psychic activity in which we throw off usual restrictions to use our most basic abilities and realize our true independence from three-dimensional form. In dreams, Seth says, we write the script for our daily lives and perceive other levels of existence that our physical focus usually obscures.

It often seems to me that only when we close our eyes do we begin to see, literally and figuratively. [...] Our ordinary consciousness shows us only one specific view of reality. When we learn to close off our senses momentarily and change the focus of awareness, other quite valid glimpses of an interior universe begin to show themselves.

[...] It was 10 A.M. on the last day of our first tour to promote my book, The Seth Material. This was our fifth television show. [...]

(7:20.) It is impossible in our time scheme to intellectually know our own potentials without trying them out, without testing them against the world’s edges. We must activate our impulses and desires, try out our abilities, seek out our strengths by joyfully advancing into the given world of physical energy, physical time and space. In the development of each individual we act and reenact the startling events that brought our own universe into existence. The universe was not created in some dim past, but is newly recreated by our own thoughts, dreams, and desires—so that reality happens at all possible levels at once. And in that living endeavor we each play our part.

When we hesitate, hold back, falter, when we hold back energy in the hopes of saving it, when we allow fear rather than trust to guide our activities, when the quality of our lives becomes less than we know it should be—then warnings flash. (Long pause.) One crisis after another may arise to gain our attention. [...]

[...] Beyond saying that Jane was a writer and that I was an artist, we told no one of our interests in life. We weren’t there to impose our beliefs upon anyone else. We’d made the conscious, joint decision during a time of crisis to seek certain kinds of help from skilled practitioners in the medical field, and we were willing to learn from them, even if those people were pretty certain to have belief systems very different from ours. [...]

[...] Although she’s not entirely in agreement with me on this point, I think that essentially Jane is a mystic—not an easy thing to be in our extroverted, materialistic society, for it represents a way of life that’s little understood these days. [...] The tape goes into our files, although I’d love to know what she said on the rest of it….

(Right after the first snowfall two weekends ago, our landlord appeared with his Jeep and snowplow attached, and cleaned out our long curving driveway and the garage area in back of the apartment house. [...]

(By the time the landlord realized we couldn’t shovel our own way out, he couldn’t get his own plow into the driveway, nor could he hire help; everyone was busy. [...] I felt the brakes on our car needed adjusting so I wasn’t planning to drive personally regardless; this made it somewhat easier to be objective about the whole thing. [...]

[...] Our landlord is a complex and generous man who has lowered our rent and the rent of some of the other tenants over the last few years.

[...] Following the father’s death our landlord’s wife had several vivid experiences involving the deceased father; Seth said these were legitimate experiences involving contact with the father, and not dreams. It appears that our landlord’s wife is a good receiver, or relay station. [...]

(Sumari:) It is with this always we begin, and we begin our classes. It is with this chant always that we begin our endeavors in our space. [...] It is always with the facsimile of what we have heard that we begin our work, and in many guises and in many ways you are acquainted with our activities. We have always been here, in your terms, as you have always been in other places and other times, and there is a great familiarity and wonder on our part that you are still involved in these endeavors which were begun in your terms so many centuries ago, and in ways that you cannot now presently comprehend. [...]

[...] Thank you for coming to our class. [...]

(Our visitors were a young couple from next door, stopping briefly before continuing on other errands. [...] After their departure, we agreed that our friends probably sensed that something unusual was going on. [...] And as Bill Gallagher pointed out, they probably heard the deep Seth voice while in the hall outside our door; upon admittance they saw no one with which to identify such a voice. [...]

Our Jesuit with the ulcer—shall I say our ulcerated Jesuit—may derive some benefit by reading a few of our immediately previous sessions, in which we spoke of dream therapy.

There is some material that has already been given, and our friends should read it as a preliminary to our own study. We will therefore be concerned with the pyramid gestalts of which I have spoken, and it will be to our advantage to have this as a unit.

And welcome to our friends. I am always glad to see our Jesuit, and we shall certainly discuss the God concept for him, tonight or during another session.

[...] Seth has said again and again that these changes represent improvements growing out of our better understanding of our beliefs, our artistic/creative work, and indeed our whole life-style. [...]

(That topic ties in with my idea that I mentioned to her this afternoon, about it hardly being a coincidence that many events in our lives are coming to a head at the same time: Our deep upset about Jane’s condition; the trouble with the disclaimer idea for Mass Events; Prentice-Hall’s reorganization into the General Publishing Division, in which all of their narrative books will be phased out, thus eliminating any real need for Tam and his job; indeed, Tam is looking at other job offers even now. [It’s been my position for some time now that Tam will end up leaving Prentice-Hall, or will be let go.] If and when he does go, we will be without our friend there, and will have to make decisions based on that departure. [...] I doubt if we would follow Tam helter-skelter to another publishing house if he left Prentice-Hall tomorrow—especially in light of our decision to hold off on Dreams. [...]

[...] Any hope we have in all of this is that our new stance will allow us to focus on the good things we have in life, and to create a synthesis of old and new ideas that will result in Jane returning to normal mobility. [...] He also stated that our old frameworks of understanding force us to continue to explore reality for larger definitions. [...] The hope is that our hiatus as far as encountering the public goes will give us some valuable time to organize new approaches to our lives.

[...] Again, without checking, I think that an examination of our records would show that her symptoms flared up, indeed worsened, as she worked on each Seth book, and that behind her labors on each book there lay this fear that she was going too far with each one she produced. [...] This present session represents, then, our latest attempt to come to terms with all of our personal, public, and creative aspects involved with the Seth material—not just those we’d chosen to deal with in past years.

Although there are similarities, then, in our view there are vital differences, too, between Seth’s philosophy and that of many other organized systems. Jane and I prefer to think about the unities we find in our world as including religions, not being defined by them, and we think Seth stresses this. We go along in our own stubborn ways, knowing that our outlooks are rooted in the Western traditions of the world, but also knowing that there exist all about us these numerous other philosophies or systems, some of them many centuries old, that the human race has created to help it explain reality. [...]

[...] We seem to be forever prowling around the confines of our own nature. Maybe our idea of identity is like a magic circle we’ve drawn around our minds, so that everything outside seems dark and alien, unselflike. There may be other psychic fires lighting up that inner landscape with a far greater light than ours; other aspects of consciousness to which we’re connected as surely as we’re connected also to the animals in a chain of being we barely comprehend.

[...] See the verse from her early poem, Summer Is Winter, which precedes these notes.) As I see it, her task with the Seth material is to place these basic artistic ideas at our conscious service, so that their use in our daily lives can change our individual and collective realities for the better; and by “artistic ideas” here I mean the deepest, most aesthetic and practical — and, yes, mystical — truths and questions that human beings are capable of expressing, then contending with. [...]

And, finally, what of our efforts to handle the steadily increasing volume of mail that’s resulted from the publication of Jane’s books? (Incidentally, we have on file most of the letters and cards we’ve received over the years.) Our latest attempt to cope here consists of three pieces we’ve prepared for correspondents: a short form letter from Jane and me; a longer one dictated by Seth in April, 1975, soon after he finished Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; and a list of all editions of Jane’s books. (We prepared such a list in answer to many requests, and it’s being continually updated, of course.) Yet the form letters aren’t really a satisfactory answer for the correspondent who’d like a personal response from Jane and/or Seth; given our characteristics, they merely represent the best we can do within the time we have available. [...]

[...] We have our primary existence in it after death and spend a good deal of physical time wandering through it, unknowingly, in sleep. Clues as to our creativity and the nature of our existence can be found there and from it emerges the organizational qualities of normal consciousness as we know it.

In extracting material on dreams from our many sessions, I have, to some extent, ripped it out of its living context. Each session, for example, includes Rob’s notes which provide a constant physical framework and reference to our daily activities. [...]

[...] This lets us briefly examine the nature of our consciousness by allowing us to view its products — the events and experiences that it creates when released from usual physical focus.

I wanted to show the direction in which we were moving since our first experiences with interior events of this nature, and also generally provide guidelines for others who may wish to do their own investigations. [...]

I will indeed now close our session. For Ruburt’s benefit, may I here add that in my remarks of our last session, I was speaking of our sessions only, and did not mean to take credit for any of Ruburt’s own creative work. [...]

I know that indeed our last session so involved you, Joseph, in lengthy notetaking, and typing chores. [...] In the last section of our previous session in particular, I attempted to make a more direct emotional communication, and to some extent succeeded.

Our material concerning the construction of the physical universe and of physical matter in general may now, perhaps, give you an idea of how important suggestion is. Also consider our material on expectation, for indeed expectation comes closer, as a term, than does suggestion.

(Due to the very long unscheduled session of last Sunday, May 30, our regularly scheduled session for the next day, Monday, May 31, was not held. [...]

(The connection between the envelope object and our two visits to Mother Goldsmith’s is strong enough, in that Jane and I ate there both years. [...] We did not see Nate Goldsmith or his wife on the first visit, and the reasons we did not see either of them on our second visit are given in our data interpretations.

(It wasn’t until Jane and I began to study the envelope data that we realized it referred to more than one visit to Saratoga on our part. [...] Interpretations became elusive indeed, and part of our knowledge that two visits to Saratoga were involved was subjective only. [...]

[...] On our second visit, in 1964, Jane and I were told that Nate Goldsmith had died. We do not know just when he died, but believe it was after our first visit. [...]

I will give you our Instream material now. [...]

(It will be remembered that our 2nd envelope test, held during the 180th session, was held on August 23, and that it featured a photograph of Jane at York Beach. Now checking our records, we saw that an unscheduled session was held on August 28. [...]

[...] Our table at the dancing establishment Saturday night had a top of simulated wood grain. The house can be our own, the several people of course Jane and me and Bill and Peggy Gallagher; the Gallaghers were with us Saturday night when I picked the label as a test object.

[...] Jane and I did our best, recalling it.

(Our encountering the Gallaghers last Saturday evening led to the strange unscheduled 192nd session, incidentally. [...]

[...] But no matter what we may accomplish as a species, or how far we may travel, in those terms we started out utterly dependent upon our earth, with its fantastic variety of resources and life forms. That sublime framework still exists for us in all of its great beauty, and I want to always return to it: We create our human version of it each day, and I think that even now we’ve hardly begun to understand what we are and have. I’ve come to believe that the predominantly outdoor life would give me a certain understanding of our temporal and spiritual worlds impossible to grasp otherwise, and that my painting would inevitably mirror that greater comprehension. [...] Of course, what I’m really stressing here is living the independent life as much as possible within our ever-more-complicated national and world cultures. But we all have our dreams.

Just as though it had been waiting for the right moment last night, a screech owl began to sound its sorrowful descending cry in the black woods on the hill behind our house. [...] At least from my viewpoint, each of nature’s rhythmic signs implied a continuity, an inevitability and security, that I’ve often felt is lacking in our all-too-human affairs—this, even though I wrote in Mass Events that Jane and I are aware, of course, of all the “good things” we humans have constructed in our mass reality. Actually, I thought, our concepts of religion and science aren’t as contradictory as at first they may seem to be. [...]

I wrote quite a bit in Mass Events about our publishing activities, just to show for the record how complicated certain aspects of the creative life can be as we juggled sessions, manuscripts, proofreading, and deadlines [to list a few of our endeavors]; we “worked” at any time of the day or night—which didn’t bother us at all. [...] All of them are related to our work with the Seth material and Mass Events, however, and will, I’m sure, be reflected in Dreams. [...]

[...] Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. [...] [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. [...]

13. During the 10:36 break for Session 740, which was held a couple of months ago, I wrote that the list of house connections associated with our move to the hill house had grown to over 40 items, “and continues to grow.” [...] It’s neither the most inconsequential item on our list, or the most spectacular — but recently we learned through a close relative of the Steffans (I’ll call them), the couple from whom we bought the hill house, that at a small social gathering over two years ago Jane had spontaneously given something of a psychic “reading” for Mrs. Steffans. Moreover, this event had taken place in the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; not in our own quarters there, however, but in the apartment of another tenant whom we’ve known for a number of years.

Let me note at the end of this account that the mutual friend who introduced Jane and Mrs. Steffans has participated in some of our other house connections also — a function similar to the one enacted by our new acquaintance, Frank Corio, whom I referred to in Note 11 for Session 740. Jane and I saw this kind of situation develop with several other individuals also, once we began our active house hunting in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in April 1974.

As class gradually receded into the past, through our own default, as it were, Jane and I kept in touch with some of our local counterparts from class, while we saw less and less of certain others. Each choice seemed to be a matter of mutual, unspoken agreement among all concerned, and we kept in mind that each individual had the complete freedom to do as he or she wished about maintaining contact with us — just as we had in our relationships with them.

In a way, Ruburt’s book (Psychic Politics) will continue our material from another viewpoint while you are preparing our “Unknown” Reality.

(I also stressed that our changing attitudes would be sure to change our attitudes toward others—that instead of trying to act “normally” toward strangers when they came here, especially when they were unannounced, we should simply be ourselves, secure in the abilities of our own natures; if any of these actions could be taken as “flamboyant” in a negative way, then so be it. That would be their hassle, not ours, I added. Our goal now is to simply speak our minds, if in a nice way, usually, to others, and let the chips fall where they may. I added that it would be ironic and hilarious indeed that if this new behavior brought to us everything we’d always wanted for our life’s work.

(I might add that today, Thursday, Jane experienced a dramatic further release in her neck and other areas of her body, so we are getting results with our program. [...] I made a brief note about the three words on a sheet of our pendulum questions.

(Our exploration of “flamboyance” came about through Seth’s use of “extravagant” in this session, as I scanned the original notes this morning while coming up with some new questions. I guess the realization that the basic mistrust of one’s own nature could have such dire results was what triggered our conscious realization that we could do something about the whole business of symptoms, etc. [...]

You have both done well since our last session. [...]

Some of my descriptive passages in Dreams as I deal with Jane’s personal challenges are harrowing; they strike at the very heart of our fears of illness and disability, and even death, leading us to consciously face those possibilities while at the same time they perfectly mirror our equally profound inner needs and drives. [...]

[...] Neither of us were ever interested in turning out a series of just “psychic books” per se, devoid of all of those human and intimate details that are piling up during our lifetimes, enriching the moments and the days, the weeks and the years, creating the seamless wholes of our lives. [...]

I do feel that part of that enrichment involves a worldwide (and possibly universal) healing action, contributed to by each living form—that here on earth, at least, this vital force of our own creation sustains us in an unending grand synthesis of regeneration. [...] Our species should study the whole subject of global healing, so that it can use the knowledge gained to lead itself into new areas of thought and feeling.

Our publishing company had very patiently waited for several years while Jane and I struggled to produce the book; in all that time no one ever exerted pressure upon us to hurry up and finish the job. [...]

We endow the elements of our environment with an even greater creativity that is difficult to explain. [...] But the intensity, the condensed psychic strength of our psychological natures forms new dimensions of activity. [...] In our environment, however, we could actually create whatever dimensional effects we desired. All of these abilities are not ours alone. [...]

[...] Our psychological time could be compared in terms of environment to the walls of a room, but in our case the walls would be constantly changing in color, size, height, depth and width.

Our psychological structures are different, practically speaking, in that we consciously utilize a multidimensional psychological reality that you inherently possess, but are unfamiliar with at an egotistical level. It is natural, then, that our environment would have multidimensional qualities that the physical senses would never perceive.

We will return to our Chapter Two.