“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I mentioned once that I found sculpture to be a more imprisoning form than say painting, music or a poem, and here I will mention my reasonings. [...]

[...] The statue actually imprisons vitality more than a painting or musical composition or poem, because it is bound to you by so many ties. [...]

1. Seth’s material here about dream solutions reminded me of a few lines just about all that were saved — from a poem Jane wrote when she was 17 years old:

[...] The 15 three-ring binders containing her poems, all neatly typed, for example; her essays and journals; other blocks of unpublished Seth material, one of which I mentioned in the Introduction; an unfinished autobiography that perhaps I could put into publishable shape; likewise, passages from an unfinished fourth Oversoul Seven novel, in which Jane dealt with Seven’s childhood; a book of her paintings, with commentary; several early novels that I still believe merit publishing. [...]

(“The mountains have fallen fathoms into the sea, and still I am I,” wrote Jane in a poem when she’d been quite young.

[...] On the way to Jane’s room, I stopped in Surgical 1 to give Georgia the unicorn we’d bought for her yesterday, and the poem Jane had written, which I’d transcribed onto the card we’d also bought. [...]

A flower cannot write a poem about itself. [...]

[...]

(I was so angry that I did the whole thing over again. Lepanto is a four-page poem. [...]

(As a check I suggested later that Jane try reading a different poem, one not read by Father Trainor, to see if she could summon this powerful new voice at will. [...]

Ruburt, at the age of I believe seventeen, began a poem with the line, and if he will forgive me I will quote: “The end overshadows the beginning,” end of quote. [...]

Ruburt in the child’s perceptive poem could not let go this idea, and we must speak as he did then, in terms of beginning and end. [...]

One of those steps in Jane’s self-directed search for understanding is referred to in Note 5 for Session 681 (in Volume 1), which contains three lines from her poem, More Than Men. She wrote it in 1954, when she was 25 years old. [...] Now I want to offer that poem in full.

13. In retrospect we can see how the mystical Jane has always tried to intuitively penetrate the nature of reality through her art; I’ve illustrated that learning process by presenting selections from her early poetry at apropos times throughout the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality. I also gave some background information on Jane’s nature (with a poem) in Appendix 1 for Volume 1.

[...] Jane remembered looking down into a puddle and composing a poem. [...]

[...] She didn’t want to hear my notes for the session, or the poem she’d dictated yesterday. [...]

[...] Just two years later, she wrote the following poem.

[...] I’ve looked everywhere …” But her friends in school asked her to write love poems for their “crushes” of the moment.

Jane knows she wrote the following poem early in 1964, but isn’t sure whether she did so before or after delivering the 18th session for Seth. As far as I’m concerned, at least, it hardly matters which came first; I like the poem as much as I do the session.

(“Seth, can you give us a poem a few lines long?”)

[...] The Harriet poem: for that you see he believes he must pay. [...]

[...] The High-Low book of poetry as contrasted to perhaps the idiot poems will explain what I mean.

[...] Again, bodily efforts are as magical, as creative, certainly, as the writing of a book or a poem (intently) — but Ruburt in the past trusted his creative abilities as if they were something he had to guard from his physical self.

[...] She dictated the following poem from 2:15–2:28 p.m.)

(“Can Jane’s poems be likened to experiences or conclusions on her part of past events, lives, or dreams?”)

I have described those early sessions elsewhere, but here I’m including, instead, a poem that is a dramatic, intuitive statement about my feelings at the time. Actually, several episodes are condensed into one in the poem. [...] Almost from the beginning, however, I did anticipate what the board was going to “say,” and the poem is as valid as any strictly factual statement I could make about those sessions — if not more so.