“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I do not really waken however but continue dreaming. I’m downtown in the same town, with this group again. One girl asks me if Chuck stayed til nine last night and I say yes. Then one girl, not of the group, is crying. I say something about poetry and she says, well you’d better talk fast because I’ve just about decided to stop writing poetry. She has light brown hair, rather dark circles under her eyes and is somewhat younger than I. I say that you can’t just decide consciously to give up writing poetry, you’d write it anyhow, though you could subconsciously make such a decision and never know about it at all. Then rather dramatically but beautifully I tell her that: “Poetry is your characteristic method of expression, your way of translating the data into physical reality and that even its rhythm is the rhythm of your heartbeat.” Tell her that she can’t give it up.

I run ahead of the other girl, and around her, really hunting her down, yelling again dramatically and accusingly: “I ask myself, where are all my friends who were going to write no matter what, to work no matter what happened. Where are they all and now I work alone?" I almost chanted this, and more that I’ve forgotten. (I don’t think she wanted to hear and that I was making her listen on purpose, for her own good.) She ran, cringing, to hide. Friends gathered about her. One said, she’s in bad shape, or badly off, words to that effect. You’ve made things worse. But I said, “No, you can’t save a part of her (and sacrifice part) you have to save the poetry too.” And she did seem better. Friends comforted her. I said to some of them, “Do you know how to work the pendulum?" As I said this I knew that they did before they answered, yes. “Then check it out," I said and they agreed.

[...] Now, not writing poetry was also a symptom of inner disease, not so readily recognized as such. While the intuitional abilities first appeared in poetry, and while the poetry in one way was a channel into other areas, the poetry was not meant to be shut off because new areas were opened.

Ruburt’s poetry this evening did represent a breakthrough of sorts, both in the ideas presented and in the poetry-writing itself. [...]

Sitting down at the desk to write poetry, the act and intention automatically reminds Ruburt of all the times that he has written poetry before, and primes the pump, so to speak. [...]

Poetry was her first, childhood love, and it remained a powerful creative factor throughout her life. Indeed, in some of her earliest poetry we found concepts that Seth was to elaborate upon many years later. [...]

“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. That is, poetry brings out life’s hidden nuances. [...]

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

[...] In preparation, I reread my own records and poetry. The poetry itself provides a clear record of subjective thoughts and emotions. And it was through reading this old poetry that I found clues that showed me the points of continuity between my life before my psychic initiation and after it.

[...] When you see the type of poetry that I was writing then, you will understand immediately why the ideas in “Idea Construction” were such a revelation to me. [...]

In other words, my poetry finally revealed to me my state of mind before “Idea Construction” and Seth. [...]

(For example, she spent Monday and Tuesday reading poetry she’d written before the sessions began [in 1963], wondering why she didn’t have the impulse to work on Heroics instead. [...] That old poetry dealt with such impediments. [...]

[...] She’s become especially conscious of impulses while working on her new book, Heroics, for, strangely, she’s found herself confronting a series of seemingly contradictory impulses to do other things, such as paint, or reread her old poetry.

Ruburt has been reading old poetry of his own, and he was appalled to find such beliefs in rather brutal, concentrated form. [...]

The poetry was not seen as threatening to the disciplined self. [...] In other words, for the personality to use its abilities fully that challenge would have had to be faced in every instance but the poetry.

[...] Poetry is the exception, for here the necessary integration happened early in his career.

[...] The conflict would have arisen however in whatever field the personality chose, except for the poetry. [...]

[...] of NY, in which they stated that they liked her book of poetry, The Fence, very much, but could not publish it due to their restricted list of poetry, having abandoned for the time being their projected series of paperback poetry books. [...]

[...] He was utterly and completely surprised upon learning that Macmillan had nearly accepted his book of poetry. He never expected any financial rewards from poetry, and it occurred to him that in his recent neglect of it he may have been cheating himself in more ways than one.

[...] And that is that there is also a quite valid inner sense of guilt here, in that he has neglected his poetry.

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

It is a great help then for Ruburt to write his poetry. [...]

[...] The overconscientious portion always trusted the spontaneous self as far as poetry was concerned, but distrusted spontaneity otherwise.

[...] It’s poetry; I’m presenting it line by line as Jane told me to divide it after the session.

[...] A lot of his stuff is poetry, it always has been.” [...]

[...] After we’d checked the lineage of the poetry, Jane did a few movements, although she knew it was getting to be time to turn on her left side. [...]

In the past, again, poetry was an important method of communication, but the “rationally” tuned mind suspects it. [...] People like poetry as a rule in your society only when it is dealing with conventional subjects, or directly with nature, so that in a way, now, the intuitions are used “to a rational end.”

[...] Why didn’t it sell—did readers avoid it because it was Jane’s own book, or poetry, or both? [...]

[...] And the language is that of poetry. [...]

6. Now I feel I should be working at Aspects instead of poetry... I put up with that conflict and do poetry anyhow now and then; sloppy thinking in here and feel Tam won’t really go for poetry.

1. I still feel guilty doing creative stuff like poetry in work time when it might not sell. How about part of day working on whatever book I’m doing and part on poetry?

[...] A note: Ruburt is heading toward something important with his latest poetry, and as always it leads toward a change of beliefs.

(She identified with writing poetry very early in life. [...] Had trouble sharing poetry with most boyfriends; smarter to play dumb, she discovered. Marie had always encouraged her poetry, and the two women shared it for a number of years. [...]

[...] The creative part of her poetry had always been trying to go beyond where the church wanted it to go. [...]

[...] Jane remembered no reaction from her mother when her poetry came into conflict with the church, or when Father Rakin burned her books. [...]

[...] Yet she’d found this deep yearning snatched away with the advent of her psychic abilities—goodbye to all of those accepted reviews, the critical success, even the money, that would go along with the conventional acceptable public image of the successful writer of good quality poetry and/or fiction. I said that most “successful?” poetry and fiction might not penetrate very deeply into the human condition, compared with the understanding her own psychic gifts offered, but it would have been safe and accepted by her peers. [...]

[...] Publishers don’t put disclaimers on novels or poetry, I said. [...]

[...] As a child, couched in the Catholic Church, his poetry was a method of natural expression, a creative art, and also the vehicle through which he examined himself, the world as he knew it, and the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church.

[...] His poetry was accepted and praised artistically, when the ideas agreed with dogma.

[...] When the poetry was thus criticized, Ruburt was afraid the support would be withdrawn. [...]

[...] He is afraid of being attacked, or he is afraid of the work being attacked, for that kind of reason, as his poetry was.

Poetry came the closest, and yet the form of that art still could not carry the full weight of the knowledge he knew was available. [...] (Pause.) Poetry could not however express in a consistent way those intricate patterns so that they could be clearly understood.

[...] He could have read his old poetry over 50 times in the past two years, without realizing what he has finally realized now.

(Recently we have been moving all of Jane’s old poetry, novel, short-story, psychic, and other manuscripts and notes, dating back to her grade-school work, out of the upstairs storeroom into our roomy front-room closet. [...]

[...] It also showed me that even Jane’s poetry was suspect, where I’d been under the impression that the poetry was the one aspect of her creative abilities that was essentially free, or uncontaminated by fears or doubts. For years I’d thought that if Jane had done only poetry, she’d have had minimal troubles, if any.)

[...] There was a conflict between creative work and the church even when only poetry was involved. [...]

[...] Now that can be said of your painting and of Ruburt’s poetry. Ruburt writes poetry by himself, but left alone, enjoys reading it later to others. (Pause.) In a strange fashion he does not feel a responsibility to write poetry—he doesn’t use the ability because he thinks that he should. In fact, sometimes he writes poetry when he thinks that he should not be doing so, but instead doing something more responsible. [...]

[...] Poetry and painting were both functional in ways that I will describe in our next book (humorously, elaborately casual), and “esthetic.” But poetry and painting have always involved primarily man’s attempt to understand himself and his world. The original functions of art—meaning poetry and painting here specifically—have been largely forgotten. [...]

The poetry provided a direct expression of his ideas, and a protective coating as well. [...] At the same time, poetry was and is creative play, and it sprang from the depths of his being. You do not have to try and make poetry practical.

[...] He expressed these theories and feelings through poetry, which was itself an unconventional activity.

[...] He got poetry book okay and will read it at once! [...]