“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The entire poem, Dear Love, which Jane wrote for me in December 1973, can be found in Note 3 for the 713th session. I want to repeat the first verse of it for obvious reasons, although all of the poem is an excellent creative exposition of counterpart ideas:

(During that same month in 1973 Jane wrote Apprentice Gods, a long poem that’s included in Chapter 16 of Adventures in Consciousness. In the poem she probed for the origins of our personified gods, and referred to counterparts as follows:

9. It’s interesting to see how Jane’s Apprentice Gods echoes and enlarges upon the following lines from another long, but quite youthful and dramatic poem that she wrote in 1949, when she was 19 years old:

[...] And in the 653rd session in Chapter Thirteen, we go into those involved with the writing of her long poem, Dialogues of the Speakers, on April 2, 1973.

(After the massage, which lasted quite a while, she dictated this poem. [...]

[...] She wrote one verse of a poem this morning, but isn’t very pleased with it. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s own inspiration operates with its own rhythms: his Stonehenge poem, or whatever. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

(Jane dictated this poem from 3:00–3:06.

(I read the poem to her at her request. [...]

Tell him that when he is writing a poem, or wants to, he does not stop each time he picks up a pen and says “I can’t do it.”

[...] The particular poem or idea is the only thing in the world for me at that point. The highly personal involvement, the work and play involved in helping the idea “out,” all make the poem mine.

[...] When I’m caught up in inspiration, writing a poem, then I’m “turned on,” excited, filled with a sense of urgency, and discovery. [...]

[...] The best I could do would be to hit certain high points, perhaps in isolated poems or essays, and they would lack the overall unity, continuity, and organization that Seth has here provided automatically.

[...] Yet this book was not written “by itself,” in the same way that some poems seem to be. [...]

[...] Later I started a poem on the idea, but couldn’t follow it through. [...]

[...] I stood at the window and dashed out this poem — far too emotionally unrestrained to be aesthetically a good one but an excellent example of my feelings at the time.

I wrote four more poems of varying merit about that one event and behind the whole affair was defiant recognition of the value of any consciousness, whatever its form. [...]

[...] I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

A moment later the line from his poem came to him, and he made the proper connection. [...] The meaning of the light will become even clearer through Ruburt’s dreams,³ the intuitive continuation of the poem, and physical example.

Ruburt has been working on a book of poems called The Dialogues, and in it recently he wrote of the double worlds. [...]

[...] The last line in the poem he had completed just before dinner spoke of a light that would illuminate both worlds, one of the soul and one of the flesh. [...]

[...] On August 25, for example, on the day she delivered the sixth session for Seth on his new theme, Jane wrote the following untitled poem. [...] Within its deceptive simplicity her poem carries profound meaning; I haven’t seen that meaning expressed any better elsewhere. If she were to sum up the results of her life’s work so far in a few lines, this poem would do the job the best of all:

7. At first some of these excerpts might seem quite diverse in content from one another, but with Jane’s poem in mind I intuitively chose each one for inclusion here. I’d wanted to show the first two items for several years, and surely the reader can divine how they’re related to the poem and to Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality. [...]

See Note 7, in which I used Jane’s poem as a focus around which to offer certain pieces. [...]

[...] It is explosive yet filled with order; it becomes so filled with itself that it explodes in the same way that a flower bursts; the same principle is acting in a hurricane or a flood or a murder or the creation of a poem, or the formation of a dream; in the birth and death of individuals and nations. [...]

[...] There is a line from a poem of his, written years ago, in a period of stress, “If I can’t move one finger, how can the whole soul rise?" from his dance floor poem.

[...] Tell him to leave his body alone with his conscious mind in the same way that he leaves a poem alone with his conscious mind when it is forming— to think of his body as a poem. [...]

POEM BY JANE

(At lunch today I read the latest group of poems Jane has prepared for her book of poetry for Prentice-Hall.¹

[...] She’d been letting If We Live Again grow for some time as she selected poems for it from the many she had written, and kept writing.

[...] It wasn’t until after the session ended that Jane realized that the “steeple shape,” and the “many people” data to follow, had reminded her of a childhood poem she hadn’t thought of in years. After the session she recited the little poem to me; it is done with hand gestures accompanying, the fingers of both hands interlocking in various positions. This is the poem: “Here is the church, here is the steeple. [...]

Ruburt once wrote a poem about a nail on a window sill. [...]

1. Seth’s evocative material on dream images reminded me of an equally evocative poem about the dreaming self that Jane wrote in 1965, a year and a half or so after the sessions began. I’ve always wanted to see the poem published; I think it very rich in both subject matter and visual content.

[...] People who are not writers or artists, or poets or musicians, often suddenly find themselves almost transformed for a brief period of time — suddenly struck by a poem or a song or a snatch of music, or by a sketch — that seems to come from nowhere, that seems to emerge outside of the context of usual thought patterns, and that brings with it an understanding, a joy, a compassion, or an artistic bent that seemingly did not exist a moment earlier. Where did the song or poem or music come from? [...]

(I’d asked her if she could remember trying to write a poem about out-of-body travel when we lived at 458 West Water, in Elmira. [...]