Jane Roberts Book 3

The mixture of Sun and the Ball of Advanced Thoughts is in my room. Apr. 2010

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BOOKS BY JANE ROBERTS
How to Develop Your ESP Power • 1966
The Seth Material • 1970
Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul • 1972
The Education of Oversoul Seven • 1973
The Nature of Personal Reality (A SETH BOOK) • 1974
Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect
Psychology 1975
Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time • 1975 Psychic
Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book • 1976 The "Unknown"
Reality (A SETH BOOK, TWO VOLUMES) • 1977-1979
The World View of Paul Cezanne: A Psychic
Interpretation • 1977 The After Death Journal of an
American Philosopher:
The World View of William James • 1978 The Further
Education of Oversoul Seven • 1979 Emir's Education in the Proper
Use of Magical Powers • 1979 The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human
Expression (A SETH
BOOK) • 1979
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events (A SETH BOOK) •
1981
The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto • 1981
If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love • 1982
Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time • 1984

A SETH BOOK
DREAMS, "EVOLUTION", AND VALUE FULFILLMENT
VOLUME I
Jane Roberts

Introductory Essays and Notes by
Robert F. Butts
PRENTICE HALL PRESS • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1986 by Jane Roberts All
rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any
form.
Published by Prentice Hall Press
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Gulf + Western Building
One Gulf + Western Plaza
New York, NY 10023
PRENTICE HALL PRESS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, Jane, 1929-1984 Dreams, "evolution," and
value fulfillment.
Includes index.
1. Spirit writings. 2. Reincarnation. I. Title.
BF1301.R589 1986 133.9'3 86-507 ISBN 0-13-
219452-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is dedicated to my husband, Robert F. Butts, for his love and devotion.

Contents
Quotations from Seth 9
A Poem and Commentary by Jane Roberts 11
Introductory Essays by Robert F. Butts 13
Preface by Seth 95
Chapter 1 Before the Beginning 119
Chapter 2 In the Beginning 137
Chapter 3 Sleepwalkers. The World in Early Trance.
The Awakening of the Species 166
Chapter 4 The Ancient Dreamers 192
Chapter 5 The "Garden of Eden." Man "Loses"
His Dream Body and Gains a "Soul" 224
Chapter 6 Genetic Heritage and Reincarnational

(A note by R.F.B.: The following quotations are from sessions Jane delivered for her trance personality, Seth, just before and during the time she worked with him on Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment. One is from a private session, two are from "nonbook" regular sessions, and one is from Dreams itself.)
"Science has unfortunately bound up the minds of its own even most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles. All energy contains consciousness.
That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world."

"I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life's conditions, when of course they do not need any such justification."
—FROM SESSION 896, JANUARY 16, 1980
". . . basically, consciousness has nothing to do with size. If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell"

FROM SESSION 917, MAY 21, 1980, IN CHAPTER 8 OF DREAMS
"It is a gift, a boon, an exquisite pleasure, to become physically alive on your functioning planet, couched securely within your dusk and dawn, your existence supported by the seasons and by an overall operation of spontaneous order."
FROM SESSION 929, NOVEMBER 26, 1980

(Jane experienced many painful physical and psychological delays while producing Dreams. Finally, she had only six sessions to go for the book when she came through with this material for herself:)
"On Friday, October 23, 1981, I received the following message from Seth: 'Attend to what is directly before you. You have no responsibility to save the world or find the solutions to all problems—but to attend to your particular personal corner of the universe. As each person does that, the world saves itself.'
"The same day I wrote:
Dawn is breaking. Why should I lie in bed worrying about my body or the world? Before time was recorded dawn has followed dusk and all the creatures of the earth have been couched in the loving context of their times. "After writing the above poem I felt a sense of faith—and realized that like many I'd become afraid of faith itself. It was a fear hidden in my deepest aspects. . . ."
Introductory Essays by Robert F. Butts
August 12, 1982. Originally I'd planned to write the standard kind of introduction for Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment. However, as I became involved in describing the complicated, emotionally charged series of events surrounding the hospitalization earlier this year of my wife, Jane Roberts, the material automatically began organizing
itself into a series of dated essays. I was more than happy to follow this intuition from my creative self, for it answered many questions I'd started to consciously worry about. We could have presented Dreams as is, or at least have avoided
mentioning certain less-than-advantageous circumstances surrounding its production by Jane and by Seth, the "energy personality essence" she speaks for while in a trance or dissociated state. The facts are, though, that Jane's already impaired physical condition grew steadily worse while she was working on the book. Shortly after finishing it, she went
into the hospital. 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.) I worked on the essays in succession, just as they're given here, although I found myself adding to the earlier ones as I moved into the later ones. In terms of length alone, it soon became Jane Roberts obviously impossible to write all of the material for any piece on the
date given. Even by going back over them, however, I couldn't discuss everything I wanted to: The essays could have easily grown into a book of their own. This weaving things together to make them "fit" is only natural for one of my temperament, but I didn't alter any of my original copy—that I'd have refused to do—and I kept intact those first spontaneous descriptions of the events attendant to Jane's physical difficulties, as well as our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them. I did not look at Seth-Jane's Dreams itself while writing the essays, in order to avoid having them overly influenced by work in the book. Instead, we want all of this preliminary material to show how we live daily—regardless of how well we may or may not do —with a generalized knowledge of, and belief in, the Seth material. Seth, then, has finished his work on Dreams. I wrote the original version of the notes for each book session as he delivered it through Jane, and also began collecting other notes and reference material that might be used. Since I've completed the essays, all I have to do now is "refine" the session notes (and addenda) as I type the finished manuscript. Jane will help as much as she can. We expect to have the book ready for our editors, Tarn Mossman and Lynne Lumsden, by the end of the year. Jane appreciates that the dates I'm always giving merely furnish a convenient framework for our material, but she's hardly enamored of such precise methodology; she understands that it's my way of doing things, realizes it's very useful, and goes on from there. I use a similar system in presenting all of the published Seth material. It has the great attribute of allowing for quick reference timewise (if not always by subject matter) to any of the more than 1,500 regular, private or deleted, and "ESP class" sessions Jane has given over the past 19 years—until July 1982, that is, when I began work on these passages. 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. Those situations might have been too devastating for us otherwise, too emotionally threatening, too charged for us to present them with at least the
minimum amount of objectivity required by the written word. Many of the events and feelings evoked such deep implications of trial and challenge for Jane and me that we were often left with strong feelings of unreality: This can't be happening to us. At our ages (52 and 62, Jane and I, respectively), why have we created lives with such nightmarish
connotations? Why do I have to leave my dear wife alone in the hospital each night, so that I feel like crying for her when
I go to bed by myself in the hill house? Why can't we be left alone to live lives of peace and creativity? And how many millions and millions of times through the ages have other human beings on this planet felt the same way—and will yet? Why are our lives ending like this, when we feel that simply getting through each day is an accomplishment? That basic impetus toward survival came to take precedence over everything else. Indeed, for several weeks following the initiation of the challenges I relate in the essays, supposedly creative activities like writing books and painting pictures often faded into insignificance by comparison. And for me, Jane's condition came to stand for everything we don't know in our particular joint, chosen, probable earthly reality. Yet, Jane and I were being creative with it all—the whole time —and moving several stages closer to understanding All That Is in the process. If we were often badly frightened, we also felt surges of grim elation (when we allowed them to surface) that we were survivors.

We'd chosen the entire experience, which is still continuing, of course. "You make your own reality," Seth has told us innumerable times. We agree—and that is where Jane and I diverge most sharply from the conventional establishment belief that events happen to people, instead of being created by them.

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 quickly agreed that we'd been setting up the illness syndrome for years, yet the deep emotional shocks accompanying its physical developments seemed to come at us like attacking dark birds zooming in from another
probable reality. We learned. 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. The essays contain many insights into the meanings the whole
experience with illness has had for us, and will continue to have for many years. 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."

ESSAY 1
Thursday, April 1, 1982
"Let my soul find shelter elsewhere."
That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. Sumari is a "language" she can speak or sing while in trance, and which she can translate into English if and when she wants to. She recorded her brief song in a sad, low-pitched, quavering voice that was like none I'd heard her use before. Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the
events in our lives that preceded—and then followed—the hospital experience that affected us so much. Indeed, I didn't learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she'd returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it
on March 30, amid others in her writing room. She hadn't labeled it, and I began to play it out of curiosity. The song's mournful tones swam heavily in the room. It reminded me at once of a dirge or an elegy, and I felt chills as I began to intuitively understand just how meaningful it was, even without any translation at all. "Let my soul find shelter elsewhere," Jane said, by way of a quick translation when I played the tape for her a few minutes later. It was midafternoon on a cold day. She sat bundled up in her chair in the living room, her head down as she listened. I asked her for more on the song's interpretation, but she just repeated that line. She roused herself enough to stubbornly maintain that she'd give me more later. I knew at once that the tape's contents were so revealing of her feelings about her illness, so disturbing and frightening, that she couldn't bring herself to explore those deep emotions at that time. I also knew that my wife feared the effect of the message upon me—for what could the phrase she'd already given me mean, except that her soul had at least considered the possibility of leaving her physical body, perhaps to find shelter in a nonphysical realm? I accepted her reactions, and could only wait in some frustration as I began work on other parts of this essay.
As the days passed Jane kept putting me off about doing the translation, until finally I grew resentful and despairing at her refusal to cooperate. I decided to write around that one great line as best I could. For by then I knew that she had no intention of producing an English version: Some childlike and naive, yet deeply stubborn portion of her psyche, some "perverse area," as Seth, her trance personality, jokingly characterized it long ago, had simply taken over and decided not to do any more on that subject. For its own reasons it didn't want to, and that was it. I'd seen Jane operate in that fashion before, and I knew she'd have her way. Lest I give an inaccurate picture of my wife, however, let me add that she combines instances of that seeming intransigence with a profound intuitive innocence before nature (and thus All That Is), and with a great literal acceptance of nature's manifestations and of her own being and creations within that framework.
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. It's a role she's chosen for many reasons. Mysticism is still overwhelmingly regarded as a profoundly religious expression, and one that's hardly practical, but in my opinion neither of those situations applies to Jane. Her "mystical way" is reinforced by a strongly secretive characteristic that's usually belied by her seemingly outgoing character and behavior. It took me a long time to realize this. I also had to learn that her literal cast of mind grows directly out of her mysticism, and that because it does, she can be quite impulsive. There's nothing halfway about Jane. She's intensely loyal. She's a very perceptive person with many abilities, a fine intelligence, and an excellent critical sense. Whatever reservations she shows—her conscious inhibition of impulses, for example—are learned devices that are literally protective in nature. I've certainly found her particular combination of attributes to be unique, and I don't think she'd be able to express the Seth material as she does without them. Throughout these essays
I hope to add many insights into her character. For now, though, I present what I have to work with from the saddest, most mournful Sumari song she's ever created and sung. The tape goes into our files, although I'd love to know what she said on the rest of it. . . . In the meantime, two days after I discovered the tape, I asked Jane, "Do you want to have a session tonight?" At first she didn't know. The question followed the little talk we'd had after supper. My back hurt somewhat.
I'd finally decided that the ache wasn't because I'd been lifting her physically —all 82 pounds of her— but because of the medical bills we'd received today. (That had been my somewhat amused speculation to begin writh.) We've gotten a Hurry—a small blizzard—of bills from doctors during the last few days. Jane has been home from the hospital since last Sunday, March 28. She spent 31 days there, being treated for a severely underactive thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), protruding eyes and double vision, an almost total hearing loss, a slight anemia, and budding bedsores, or decubitus
ulcers. Several of the ulcers had been incipient for a number of months, although neither of us had realized what those circles of reddening flesh meant as they slowly blossomed on the "pressure points" of her buttocks, coccyx, and right shoulder blade. Decubitus ulcers: one of the first terms we'd added to our rapidly growing medical vocabulary—and
one of the more stubborn afflictions for a human being to get rid of once they've become established. Even now not all of Jane's decubiti have fully healed, although several of them have closed up nicely. I should note, by the way, that her bedsores weren't infected when she went into the hospital, but were less than a week later. How come?
"It's staph," several of the nurses told us. A sign warning of infection was put on the door of 3B9, Jane's room, and
stayed there until she went home. "If the infection in that ulcer on your coccyx reaches the bone, it means at least a six-week stay in the hospital," exclaimed Jane's principal doctor, Rita Mandali (not her real name). Twice-daily treatments with hydrogen peroxide and a sulfadiazine cream were started. And I began to read up on how many kinds of staphylococcus bacteria alone there are, and indeed how common infections are in hospitals, since by their very nature those institutions are far from being the cleanest in town. . . . Jane's hearing is much improved after treatment with decongestants and a pair of minor operations in which tiny drainage tubes were inserted through her eardrums—the procedure is called surery—to relieve internal blockage. Jane's thyroid gland, Dr. Mandali finally told her, has simply ceased functioning, so the doctor has begun a program of cautiously rejuvenating my wife's endocrine system, and thus all of her bodily processes, with a synthetic thyroid hormone in pill form (a low 50 micrograms to start). Jane is to take these pills for the rest of her life. At least that's the current prognosis. Her double vision is not as severe and is supposed to keep improving as the hormone takes effect. Dr. Mandali has prescribed drops to keep Jane's eyes lubricated, and a
liquid salicylate medication (as a substitute for aspirin) to control joint pain and inflammation. Both of these products are taken four times a day. The increased glandular activity is also expected to have some beneficial effects upon Jane's arthritis, and possibly upon her anemia (a condition that often accompanies arthritis). I asked that she be tested for
food allergies, since I'd read that reactions to various foods and additives can trigger arthritis, but Dr. Mandali said that "if Jane is allergic she (Jane) would know it"—a position I came to most thoroughly disagree with. But usually, I thought, the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it. Such is the state of the art of medicine in this case, unfortunately. Because of her much reduced thyroid activity, Jane often dozes or even sleeps in her chair. She'd very gradually started doing this before
entering the hospital, but any physical causes behind her behavior had been unsuspected by us then. I only saw that she could use the rest, since she obviously didn't feel well generally—but I also thought she was waiting for one of her
characteristic surges of creative energy before digging into her next book (of which she always has several going). Our agreement was that in the meantime she was to start checking the sessions and my notes for Dreams; then I was to type the final manuscript. Jane never reached her goal, however. Instead she napped or drifted—even as she does now—
while intermittently reading and rereading our material for Dreams without ever doing anything with it. She hadn't dozed quite as much in the hospital, for there she'd been roused by much more constant stimuli. And now, we just have to wait
an unknown number of weeks or months for the thyroid treatment to rejuvenate her vitality. At the moment it seems that Jane uses her available energy for the main task at hand. If she's just eaten, for example, her body focuses its resources upon digestion, with perhaps conscious lapses resulting. During other longer periods, say, those resources may direct themselves toward healing or dreaming—or possibly both.After some hesitation following my question about having a session this evening, Jane decided she wanted to contribute introductory material for Dreams. This was to be a new experience for us. Because of the arthritis she was having trouble even holding a pen, so she intended to dictate her material as though she were writing it herself in longhand. I was to take it down for her. This wasn't to be Seth speaking.
For Jane's own work, however, I note times, occasional pauses, and any other information in italics, just as I do for Seth's dictation. (7:10 P.M. Thursday, April 1, 1982.
Once she began dictation, Jane's pace was good. In fact, I had to write very rapidly, for I didn't want to ask her to slow down during this initial experiment.)
Seth uses the term "value fulfillment," as in the title of this book, to imply life's greater values and characteristics—that is, we are alive not only to continue, to insure life's existence, but to add to the very quality of life itself. We do not just receive the torch of life and pass it on as one Olympic runner does to another, but we each add to that living torch or flame a power, a meaning, a quality that is uniquely our own. We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. Whenever that flame shows signs of dimming, of losing rather than gaining potential energy and desire, then danger signals appear everywhere. They show up as wars and social disorders on national scales, and as household crises, as illnesses (pause), as calamities on personal levels as well. In Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment Seth outlines the great cosmic and private energies that in our terms once brought into existence the reality of the universe and the birth of those private, cohesive realities in which our own individual daily lives are couched. 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. This has happened in many people's lives— and so recently the same kind of warning recently appeared in my own life.
As I write this Introduction I am recovering from a group of illnesses, recuperating from a month's stay in the hospital, and now I'm trying to see where my personal situation fits into Seth's larger views. That is, the individual is not just a side issue in what people usually call the evolutionary process—but he or she is the entire issue, without which there would be no species, no survival, no exquisite web of genetic cooperation to produce living creatures of any kind whatsoever.
("Well, I need a cigarette," Jane abruptly said.
"You did terrifically, hon," I exclaimed, patting her on a knee. "Terrific."
"Yeah, I knew I got it," she replied. Then we sat quietly side by side at the round card table we'd placed at one end of our buttered old couch in the living room. In a far corner a sitcom rerun played on the large-screen television set. I'd turned off the sound before the session began. The whole room was bathed in a friendly, subdued yellow light. A rather strong northerly wind periodically rattled the house's metal blinds. The whole creative intimacy of our hill house was one that we'd enjoyed many times; we desperately wanted to return to that same ambience many more times. "Well, I don't know—maybe that's all I can do tonight," Jane finally said, with a bit of an embarrassed grin. "It's hard for me to get
into the next part...)
In our other books I'd mentioned my physical symptoms now and then. By the time Seth finished dictating Dreams last month (on February 8), however, my physical condition had deteriorated. Two weeks later I could hardly get out of my chair onto the couch or the bed. After answering approximately 50 letters one weekend, the next weekend I could barely hold a pen to write my name. Soon afterward my hearing began to fade, then suddenly became blocked. A few days
later I wound up in the emergency room of one of our local hospitals —and there, all too quickly I became familiar with the medical profession's battery of testing paraphernalia. I was placed in a CAT scanner, my bare backside pressed painfully against a cold metal table, my head encircled by the strange doughnut, or globe, while bright white lights and numbers, it seemed, flashed everywhere. They only X-rayed my head. (Jane meant, of course, a CT or computerized tomography
scanner, a modern X-ray machine that shows the interior of the body in a series of brilliant cross-sectional images.)
(With a laugh) Later that same bare backside, thin and bony, was pressed against another metal table, while this time electrodes were attached to every available area of my head so that an electroencephalogram could be taken. No instructions were given to me except to close my eyes as the test progressed. (Pause.) Some kind of white gum, or glue, had been rubbed into my scalp through my hair to improve the electrical contacts, and when the test was finished the attendant simply grabbed one area of the equipment and pulled the entire mess off my head in one motion—which felt like my entire scalp was coming off. The obvious unconcern on the part of that middle-aged female attendant made me furious. "Value fulfillment?" I thought. "What the hell am I letting myself in for? And how have the events of my life come to such a turn?" This was, of course, as anyone familiar with hospitals knows, only the beginning. There were numberless blood tests. I also had to be lifted onto and off the bed, onto and off the portable commode. My 82 pounds of flesh were hauled, dragged, pulled, and stretched by good-natured but often impatient strangers—nurses and orderlies and aides and the most private of my physical processes became a matter of public record. What a shocker!
"See, I never know how much to put in these intros, "Jane said. "So many different kinds of people read the books."" Just do it your own way," I said. "The hell with it. There's nothing else you can do."
I remember when I had my first bowel movement at the hospital. Eyes closed to hold back tears of humiliation, I felt my arms lifted by an orderly (long pause), my thin belly and ribs straining in the brightly lit room, my backside lifted and supported by two other strange arms, while a third person— I don't want to sound too vulgar... ("Forget it," I said. "We'll fix it if necessary.")
—wiped away the results of the three strong doses of prune juice I'd been given. Yet there was, I knew, a fellowship even in those processes—one that I had perhaps too long ignored: the quality of fellowship, as a species or a family or a community comes together to help one of its own kind. And as I was to see, even for all of the pessimistic suggestions of medical science itself, in the very middle of crisis there was a certain indisputable sense of cooperation— a "vulgar" physical optimism, and a kind of humor that I had long forgotten existed.
In this book, Seth does discuss to some degree the nature of certain illnesses as they apply to individual life and genetic survival. And there I lay in the hospital for a full month, with physical survival uppermost in my mind— hardly a coincidence. They told me that my thyroid gland was very underactive, and that I had arthritis. They Xrayed my hands but not my knees. One of the blood tests showed that I was slightly anemic. But other tests and X-rays revealed that I had
sound lungs—in spite of my smoking—a good heart and stomach and other organs. I laughed. I thought Jane was tiring. She might have added that she also laughed because neither did she have a brain tumor, cancer, vasculitis (an inflammation of the blood vessels), or any of several other diseases the doctors thought might be present. She felt she'd beaten a number of negative suggestions from medical personnel in connection with all of those afflictions. I liked practically all of the doctors and nurses and orderlies, and they liked me. Most of them didn't know or care "who I was." Very few were familiar with my work (although a few local fans— strangers—eventually found their way to my hospital room). I found I could hold my own in that environment that at first had seemed so alien. I learned to joke even as my backside swung perilously above the commode, while I hoped that its aim was true in the hands of the nurses and orderlies—and again I felt that long-forgotten camaraderie with people, and a growth within myself apart from my work, or what I did. I had a right to be on earth because I'd been born here like every other physical creature, and on that level alone I was part of a great framework of physical energy and cooperation.
"Well, that's all for now," Jane said after a long pause. "I sure am surprised I did that much. I didn't know I could do it—
especially that way. . . . I'd never have tried it if you hadn't suggested it."
Jane hadn't dictated this material while in a trance or a dissociated state, as she does when producing her Seth material. She hadn't felt particularly inspired, nor at all sure how to proceed. It was just that she's always used longhand or a typewriter for her own work, she said, and never dictated it, as many writers do these days.
Just the same, her creative abilities had immediately come to her aid.
This is a good place to explain that while Jane was in the hospital neither of us ever made any attempt to "convert" the people there—doctors, nurses, technicians, say—to a belief in the Seth material. 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. (Well, I should add with a touch of a smile, at least we were more willing to learn in the beginning!)
Jane and I didn't know whether the doctors we did business with even knew what a trance state was. I envisioned some hilarious episodes during which Seth, speaking through Jane, would try to explain to gatherings of medical people just who he was and what he believed. Next, he'd go into what Jane and I believed, and why. Then he'd add some very pungent (sharp) remarks as to what those in his audiences believed, and why. . .
Joking aside, though, after her month in the hospital Jane and I ended up with a collection of medical experiences that were mixed at best— positive and negative—and most expensive indeed.

ESSAY 2
Monday, April 5, 1982
Our next "Jane session" took place four days later, on the date shown above. Once again we sat at the card table in the living room. And once again Jane wavered at times between waking and dozing. When she did begin dictation, though, her pace was good:
"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.
Yet, I read all of those dire newspaper stories predicting disaster, and (oh yes, dear readers) I watched the daily tragic news, events dramatized in living color on our television screen. But more than that, I've seen in my own life the steady
accumulation of physical symptoms. 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? There was no doubt that we'd been reading ourselves "wrong." There was no doubt as far as I was concerned that every one of our standard explanations for life (pause) were relatively useless now, regardless of how much they might have helped or hindered us in the past.
It began to strike me that even my own physical incapacities were indeed creative ventures that appeared in my experience as bad, or limiting, or even tragic. Perhaps they were instead efforts on the part of my own explorations of value fulfillment to reorganize my life's vast energies. But instead of facing up to a considerable change in life-style, I panicked and felt myself to be almost assaulted, forced into a life that offered less and less physical freedom. So again, how did that experience fit into Seth's "Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment"?
As far as I can see, I've been living with two sets of "facts" for some years. The old established explanations had faltered, and finally seemed almost incomprehensible, while the new explanations of Seth seemed beyond my reach, at least in certain areas—areas that were vital to physical and psychic peace. The same processes appeared in my husband Rob's life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man's greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears."
"Oh, that's all," Jane suddenly said. Her delivery this evening had been as fast as that of last time, yet more subdued. Her
voiced had carried the same tremor. She was tired, and I was far from being at my best as I fought off a half-repressed cough—an affliction that seldom troubles me.) Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane's first week home from the
hospital. We'd found it to be an exceedingly difficult one for a number of reasons. "The toughest week of our twenty-
seven years together," I told a neighbor last night.
To see my wonderful, lovely wife so reduced to her present near helpless state was almost more than I could bear. Jane herself was displaying a stoicism (I'm afraid to write "acceptance") regarding her condition that I'd have found unendurable were I the one experiencing it. I reacted very badly at times, I'm afraid, alternating profound moods of despair with those of great tenderness, love, and compassion. I wanted to cry and could not. With a more painful heart I yearned for my wife to walk to me, hips innocently and joyfully swaying, as she used to do years ago, when she'd meet me every day as I left the printing company where I worked as a commercial artist. That had been shortly after we married, in 1954. 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. Not that I wanted Jane to be magically transformed into a 25-year-old again—just that I ached to see a resurgence of that uninhibited, unplanned joy of motion for its own sake. For now I understood that freedom of motion was at least one true reflection of an individual's creative potential.
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. We'd scheduled just a two-hour visit by a registered nurse five afternoons a week for Jane's physical therapy, and to change the dressings on her decubiti. Neither of us wanted live-in help on the premises 24 hours a day. 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. Jane struggled to regain strength in her legs. Without being aware of it, I'd begun to lose weight after she was admitted to the hospital, and by now my loss had reached the point where others began to notice it. Deliberately I began to eat more. I became extremely busy after my wife came home, making what seemed like endless calls and trips about getting prescriptions filled, about trying out various kinds of beds and mattresses and chairs and hospital gowns, about insurance, about a commode, about having a speaker phone hooked up to our regular phone so that Jane wouldn't have to hold the standard bulky handset to her ear. We even had a small remote-controlled television set installed in our bedroom so that she could watch it, say, when she was restless during the night. When I began sleeping on the couch in the living room, where it was quieter and darker, we bought a pair of wireless intercoms so that Jane could call me from her bed at any time. We also made some rather expensive mistakes, buying certain equipment that proved useless to us. And amid all of this frenetic activity our painting and writing —those activities we'd always regarded as the creative hearts of our lives, the very reasons we'd chosen to live on earth this time around—had receded into a far distance, so that they'd become like dimly remembered dreams, or perhaps actions practiced in probable lives by "more fortunate" versions of ourselves. We've had no Seth sessions yet, either regular or private. Jane's energy still isn't up to where it should be, although the synthetic hormone she's taking is helping her considerably. (Dr. Mandali told us that the hormone dosage has to be increased very slowly, over a period
of months, in order to avoid strain upon the heart and the endocrine system.)
ESSAY 3
Friday, April 16, 1982
Our days and nights passed in such a kaleidoscope of activity, broken by such uneven periods of sleep, that we hardly noticed whether they were hot or cold, clear or rainy. The grass began to change color from brown to a pale yellow-green. Jane often dozed in her chair in the daytime, but woke up during the nights to watch old movies on television. During her first weeks home, I seldom slept more than two hours at a time: It seemed that I was always getting up to check the
dressings on her decubiti, to adjust her pillows, to help make her more comfortable on the motor-driven, pulsating air mattress we'd finally settled upon as the best recommended support available. I'd give her a sip of something to drink, and massage her legs as she lay on her back with her knees drawn up. (She can't straighten out her legs.) I'd sit with her while she had "a few puffs" on a cigarette. The nighttime had a sublime sense of timelessness that I'd always admired. It surrounded our bedroom—but even as bleary as I often was, I became acutely aware of how that serenity could be jarringly compromised by the television set, showing programs that contained their own times of day and seasons.
Jane tried to write with her impaired right hand, frustrated again and again because she couldn't hold a pen well enough to put down the ideas stirring in her mind. At times she used her recorder in an effort to compensate for her lack of writing ability, but this left us with the prospect of finding the time to transcribe the tapes—and so far we haven't done so.
(Much of that material is so personal that at this time we don't want others involved with it, by the way.)
We finally held our first "new" Seth session last Monday evening, on April 12. It was short but, as I expected it would be, excellent. We were pleased to get it for, as I told Jane, if ever we're to understand all of the events in our lives that led to the hospital experience, we must call upon every ability at our service. And even though this is a personal session, still I think it contains clues that apply to all of us. Jane went into trance as easily as ever, but her Seth voice contained the same underlying tremor I've noticed on a number of occasions since she's returned home.
Remember that in the following excerpts Seth—who claims to be discarnate—calls Jane by her male "entity name," Ruburt, and thus "he" and "him." For all of your complaining (Seth told us with some humor), you understand in rather good measure the decisions and actions that motivate your lives, so that Ruburt (Jane) is more than usually aware of the manipulations that psychologically and physically lie just beneath the material usually carried by what is ordinarily called the conscious mind. Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus (inadequacy). I will help you still further understand those manipulations, for many people—most people—carry on the same kind of procedures while making important decisions as to whether or not they will continue life at any given time. But they hide the issues from themselves far more than Ruburt did.
Give us a moment. . . The entire issue had been going on for some time, and the argument—the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. Life decisions are often made in just such a fashion. With Ruburt they carried a psychic and physical logic and economy, being obvious at so many different levels of actuality. In such a way buried issues were forced into the light, feared weaknesses and inadequacies were actively played out where they could be properly addressed, assorted, and assessed. To whatever degree possible, given your time requirements, I will try to
explain such matters. To such a degree, of course, the affair was, then, therapeutic. Ruburt is now far more willing to make certain changes in his life than he was earlier, and he sees himself more as one of a living congregation of creatures—less isolated than before, stripped down from the superperfect (subconscious) model, and therefore no more under the compulsion to live up to such a psychological bondage. (All delivered with considerable emphasis.) He (Ruburt) need not try to be the perfect self, then, the superimage—and, in fact to some extent, he found himself the supplicative (praying, asking self), knocking upon creaturehood's earthly door, as any creature who found himself wounded through misadventure might ask aid from another. He found a mixed world, one hardly black or white, one with some considerable give-and-take, in which under even the most regrettable of circumstances there was room for some action, some improvement, for some . . . creative response. The rules of the game have therefore been automatically altered. The issues are clearer, dramatically etched (eat away with acid, LM).
The arthritis situation is as I gave it (in a number of private sessions), but you are still faced with the medical interpretation of that situation, so that it is up to Ruburt to set it aside. He is returning to activity at his creative, naturally therapeutic pace, no longer afraid that he is going too fast —or will—but shown only too clearly that activity and motion represent the only safe, sane, and creative response [to life's challenges]. We do not want long drawn-out discussions of why and what exactly happened, simply to understand the dynamics of the activity. Ruburt can work with the self-image he has now. It is imperfect, but it is pliable and willing to change. There will be more. This is to give you a starter—and as always my heartiest regards to you both. ("Thank you very much, Seth. Good night.")
Jane's pace had generally been okay, considering the circumstances. "I felt like when I got slow there a couple of times that it didn't have anything to do with dozing off," she said, referring to a few longer pauses. "They were just normal things. . . ." I told her she'd done well. "But I really got worried tonight, when I started drifting like that before the session," she added.
We were very pleased with the session. It contains a number of important clues. The arthritis diagnosis, Jane said, was the only one the medical profession could offer, given its insights arid viewpoints —but after all those years would she be able "to set it aside"? Seth has insisted all along that she doesn't have arthritis per se. Instead, according to him, Jane adopted her physical immobility as a form of protection against going too far, too fast, with her unique abilities. Yet she also used her "symptoms" to intensify her focus upon those abilities, and to reinforce the strongly secretive aspects of both of our natures. I must add, however, that these three statements represent great simplifications of very complex psychological phenomena. Equally important is Seth's suggestion that Jane no longer needs "to try to be the perfect self," even on an unconscious basis. And, frankly, I want a good amount of additional material—from Jane and from Seth—on her progress in resolving her deliberations on the merits of continuing physical life. Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception. It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds. . . . I was frightened by her resolve, and by my own acquiescent participation in such a plan. And why, I wondered, did most of us, most of the time, buy our new experience and knowledge at such high prices?

Friday, April 16, 1982.
Seth-fane came through with that little session five days ago. One might say that this morning Jane continued it in her own session, exploring especially Seth's opening material. At first she tried to do it as best she could through writing.
Painfully, holding her pen awkwardly, she spent over an hour recording the first four paragraphs—even then, after checking our records, I added to her work material about dates and sequences.) So, one thing I know: I'm a far different person now as I write this Introduction than I was when Seth dictated the book. And as he spoke of the beginnings of the world, I began to play with the idea of quietly ending my own private sphere of existence. Not through a violent suicide, but through a half-calculated general retreat. Few overt hints of this appear in Rob's notes for Dreams. For one thing, the process of withdrawal was slow at the start. For another, when Seth was more than three-quarters of the way through Dreams he began devoting a series of private sessions to an in-depth discussion of "the magical approach"—material that was calculated to help me personally, and others like me, change our approach to experience and thus experience itself. Rob's detailed notes about my physical condition, then, appear in those pages. All of that work—and more—
accounts for the long delay in the completion of Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment. Actually, with the exception of one session held in November 1980, I let my work on the book go for over 13 months, from early June 1980 to mid-July 1981. We might have inserted some of this introductory material into that large gap in Dreams, since very important portions of it were acquired during that time, but we didn't want to interrupt the sessions for the book with different subject matter. We decided to outline our story here instead, and to carry it through the hospital experience, since that was its logical outcome. Rob also wants this material presented as a unit so that it can serve as a foundation for future
books we're already discussing, and I agree with his decision.
Finally I began writing down Jane's words as I'd done before. Very unusual, by the way—her coming through with
dictation from whatever source this early in the day. Indeed, Seth's material on the magical approach was so
fascinating that by the time he finished Dreams I'd already put together large portions of it in a separate book, even if much of it was personal. Not only that, but those "magical" sessions had naturally developed into another series, this time-on a portion of the personality Seth called "the sinful self"— mine as well as that of others—and those sessions had in turn led me to produce many pages of material directly from my own sinful self. That great personal revelation took place in June 1981. Ironically, then, in the midst of my own half-conscious withdrawal I'd been giving birth to not only Seth's Dreams, but several other intriguing long-range concepts. And even if all of those sessions had been born out of my own psychic and psychological challenges and dilemmas, I knew they were excellent and deserved publication.
I could feel Rob hoping that my own efforts would help me. In a hundred ways he tried his best to help me on his own. Seth resumed work on Dreams during that July, but each day I seemed to work less and less. Summer turned into fall, then winter, and I hardly noticed. I began to doze in my chair as I sat at my desk. On occasion I was consciously-aware of thinking how easy it might be on certain levels to let my desires drop one by one—there seemed to be few left in any
case—and to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death. That is, I thought it could all happen so easily and naturally and painlessly that there would be no one point where you could say, "Now she lives and now she doesn't."
Maybe I'd produced all I was meant to. Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. Why try to fan it into life again, particularly- if its initial joy had forever vanished? Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. So I was to some extent only half alarmed to hear from some strange inner existence my own voice slow down. Tremors appeared in it, as if the vowels and symbols had endless gaps—uneven edges—and some part of me was escaping like smoke even between my words.
"Let me relax for a minute," Jane said. Her pace had been fast. Then more slowly:
My hearing began to fail, at first gradually. Let people talk around me, I thought: I no longer cared. Then with bewildering impact I found myself one day almost entirely deaf. Here was no gentle lulling silence, for the absence of sound frightened
me beyond anything I could remember. (Long pause.) Was Rob in the room? If I couldn't see him I couldn't tell. Did he stand protectively just behind my chair, ready to help me in my maneuvers into bed, or was he in the kitchen, rooms away? There were no sounds of footsteps upon the carpeted floors, no tell tale hint of activity. The experience interrupted my retreat. I remember somehow equating all the silence about me with a forbidding white wall. And in parentheses.
(I don't know why I felt that way, but I did.) I couldn't die deaf (Jane said with a laugh at 11:45). I think I had imagined that
everything would shut down gradually. I certainly hadn't planned on one sense suddenly turning off. The next few days, in mid-February 1982, found me determined to clear up the hearing problem—and on one level at least, it was that determination that led me finally to the hospital's emergency room. We had no family doctor to call upon, but through the invaluable help of a dear friend who was also a nurse, we set up an appointment with a doctor at the hospital.
We stopped for lunch. Jane had dictated her material just as she had on April 1 and 5, without going into trance. And I told her I was almost certain that when I went back to finishing the notes for Dreams itself, I'd be adding much personal material to them. She didn't object, although I'm sure she would have done so— and strenuously—in earlier years.)
We didn't return to "work," however, until we'd enjoyed a covered-dish supper that a loving neighbor had prepared for us. By then our visiting nurse had come and gone. I'd run quick errands to the drugstore and the supermarket,
and written two letters to correspondents explaining that we had no time for visitors. There was more than a little irony and humor connected with my efforts here, though, for no sooner had I sealed the second letter than there was
a knock on the front door of the hill house. An unexpected visitor stood there: a young woman lawyer who had flown to Elmira from San Francisco to see Jane. Although Jane was hardly at her best, she discussed her caller's personal
problems with her for an hour. I took a nap as soon as the lady left. This evening, on April 16, Jane suggested that we sit at our livingroom table while I read her morning's dictation to her. But instead: "Well, I guess I'll do a Seth thing tonight," she announed, rather to my surprise, "but it won't be long at all. ..." This is the second time she's spoken for Seth since leaving the hospital. When she went into trance at 7:39 her Seth voice had a distinct tremor—one decidedly more pronounced than on April 12—and a hard-to-define faraway quality. She spoke with many long pauses. I think that in the
following excerpts Seth rather neatly encapsulates her past beliefs, her present condition, and how far she has yet to go in meeting her challenges. Not that I'm the innocent bystander in all of this, of course. I'm deeply involved. Just as he's done at least a couple of thousand times before, Seth opened the session with a certain famous word:
"Now: the same process involving the thyroid gland has happened several times in his (Ruburt's) life, and in each of those cases it has repaired itself. If earlier, however, Ruburt had the erroneous idea that he was going too fast—or would or could—and had to restrain himself and exert caution, now he received the medical prognosis, the "physical proof" that such was not the case, and in fact that the opposite was true: He was too slow. If our words could not convince him, or his own understanding grasp the truth, then you had the "truth" uttered with all of the medical profession's authority. And if once a doctor had told him years ago how excellent was his hearing, the medical profession now told him that his slowness (his thyroid deficiency) had helped impair his hearing to an alarming degree. Moreover, here is the medication necessary—the thyroid supplement—that will right that balance. And so it will. If Ruburt once found himself imagining that he must be strong and perfect enough to help solve everyone else's problems, now he found himself relatively helpless and "undefended"—that is, his physical condition put him in such a situation. The superperfect, impractical self-image simply fell away. It could not survive such a situation. So contrary to its own beliefs, and helpless or not, Ruburt was holding his own. . . .There was a certain comradeship existing between himself and others [in the hospital]. Desires and impulses became more immediate, clearer-cut, easier to identify. The discomforts of a physical nature led to instant responses. . . . His weaknesses were out in the open, dramatically presented, and from that point, unless he chose death he could only go forward—for suddenly he felt that there was after all some room to move, that achievements were possible, where before all accomplishments seemed beside the point in the face of his expected superhuman activity. He will, then, continue to improve, because he has allowed himself some room for motion, for change of value fulfillment. Trust the body's rhythms as these changes occur, however. Going out in the yard (as Jane did this afternoon in a wheelchair, accompanied by her nurse) was an excellent case in point, important on practical and symbolic levels. In a manner of speaking, the sinful self created the superhuman self-image that demanded so much, and it encased Ruburt's body as if in concrete. Well, that image cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience, leaving Ruburt with his more native, far more realistic image of himself. It is one he can work with. Do, when you can, look over my "magical approach" material. Ruburt kept turning down his thermostat, so to speak. Now his desires and intents have set it upon a healthy, reasonable setting, and the inner processes are automatically activated to bring about the normal quickening of his body, as before his intent led to the body's automatic slowness. Knough for this evening. I bid you a fond good evening— and know that you have taken, both of you, important new strides. ("Good night, Seth," I said.)
Jane's Seth voice had grown a little stronger as she progressed with the session. We were very encouraged by two key points Seth had mentioned: that her thyroid gland had repaired itself before—such an event happening now would free her of dependence upon medication—and that her sinful self's superhuman image had "cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience." Those two developments could leave her body free to heal itself. [In the first essay I wrote that according to her doctor Jane's thyroid gland has ceased functioning, and that she has to take a substitute hormone daily for the rest of her life.
But the doctor hadn't expressed any idea at all that a thyroid gland could regenerate itself.
"I wonder what you'll be doing six months from now, if Seth's right?" I asked.
"The body finally became so desperate to free itself from that rigid sinful-self superhuman image that it took itself into the hospital for a month—even if it did almost kill itself in order to get there. . . "Jane concurred. And right away she described several occasions when she thought her thyroid gland had rather seriously misbehaved. I remembered two of them.
After the session I began to wonder what Jane's "sinful self" would have to say now, in comparison to the material she received from it in June 1981. During that fervent bout of activity her sinful self had explained and defended its actions most eloquently throughout some closely handwritten pages. Both of us had been appalled at the revelations coming through Jane's pen, even if we did grudgingly admit that we understood, intellectually at least, many of the points that self made. I'd grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane's psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better, than she did, their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I'd also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16:
"Many of Ruburt's beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard. . . ."
It's impossible to present here all of Jane's own material on her sinful self—much as I'd like to—but shortly I do want to give portions of the first few pages to show readers how experiences from one's very early years can sometimes have the most profound effects in later life. As will be seen, that material obviously raises as many questions as it answers, but right now we can do little more than touch upon the whole affair. We have years of work ahead of us as we search for understanding.
Certainly Jane chose all of her challenges in this life, just as I did, and as we believe each person does, but a major concomitant of focusing upon certain activities involves how one copes with them (often in close cooperation with others) as the years pass. What new and original depths of feeling and idea are uncovered, layer by layer, what insights, what rebellions, and, yes, what acceptances. . . . I could write many windy pages about the mysteries of life, I suppose, and how each of us does the best we can, although often we may not understand what we're doing; but what I really want to do is simply note that in her case, fortunately, and even if she may think she's failed in certain major areas of life, Jane has achieved some remarkable insights into her own situation (as I have into mine, being her marriage
partner). She's managed to do this with the help of various portions of her own personality, the Seth material, and me. Our hope is that her case can help illuminate others.
There are reasons—creative reasons— why she can't walk now, or write in longhand. We insist upon knowing what those reasons are. Some of them were obviously engendered by and within Jane's so-called sinful self. What challenges she and I have to meet! Once again, let me quote Seth from that private session Jane held just a year ago, on April 16, 1981: "Your kind of consciousness, relatively speaking, involves some intrinsic difficulties along with spectacular potentials. You are learning how to form reality from your own beliefs, while having at the same time the freedom to choose those beliefs—to chose your mental state in a way that the animals, for example, do not. In that larger picture there are no errors, for each action, pleasant or not, will in its fashion be redeemed (repossessed), both in relationship to itself and . . . to a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive."
Fine. We agree with Seth's overall view, and that a sublime mystery is implied—but we also want to achieve as much as we can of that redemption now, and on conscious physical and psychological levels. One small way in which I wanted to begin that quest was for me to teach Jane to write—print, actually—with her left hand, which functions much better now than her right one does. I thought this might be relatively easy for her to do, since she's often voiced her suspicion
that she's one of those born "lefties" who at a very early age were forced to begin writing with their right hand. She has yet to do anything about my suggestion. (I spoke from my own related experience, since as a native righthander I taught myself to print with my left hand just to see if I could do it. Now I always do crossword puzzles that way.)
At the end of May and early in June 1981 we published two books involving years of effort: "Seth: Jane's The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events" and Jane's "The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto". I was positive that those volumes
contained much excellent work. I was also positive that with their publication Jane's symptoms—especially her walking difficulties—became considerably worse. On the surface at least, it was as though some powerful portion of her psyche were exacting a grim compensation for the books' appearance in the marketplace. Perhaps, I thought, that portion was creating a physical disability that allowed Jane to publish forbidden material while protectively isolating herself —and me—from rejection by the physical world. Both of us became terribly upset. Our joint lifework teethered upon the edge of a physical disaster. It could hardly have been accidental, then, that beginning on June 17, 1981, our deep need led to Jane's spontaneous production of her own sinful-self material. The way had been illuminated by Seth himself in his private sessions, with his discussions of her sinful self and related challenges. Those sessions, the publication of the two books, Jane's personal sinful-self material and her worsening physical situation, all combined to serve as a complex trigger. Here are those promised, very revealing passages. I presented their beginning in the notes for Session 931, in Chapter 9 of Dreams. I repeat that material here but add considerably more to it. Again, my few insertions are bracketed.

I resent the designation unjustly given to me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought—apparently too rigidly—to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence
—yours, and mine as well. Our explorations involved no secondhand evidence handed down by others, but the direct personal encounter of our consciousness and being with the vast elements of the unknown—a meeting of the self" (human and vulnerable) with the psychological realms of ... eternities; giant realms of mind that our nature felt attracted to . . . and [was] uniquely equipped to perceive. I believed in the soul's survival first of all, and inspired the "creative self" to step out as freely as possible... So I maintain that I am being unfairly attacked (perhaps that is too strong a word) for personally accepting in my own understanding a philosophy to which ten millions and more have also succumbed, and to which the "wisest" of the species have given their loyalty and trust. Yet even in our [Jane's] childhood years I yearned to free us from such doctrines, to search for alternate explanations, to go where no man or woman had gone before, and to venture outside the boundaries of all official beliefs. And to me this was no play but the main challenge—to discover while within one life all life's meaning; to acquire in one life's vulnerable swiftness evidence of eternity's breadth and depth, to sniff out its extended unknown dimensions. So if in the pursuit of such goals I overdid my cautions and overreacted, it certainly was not out of malice, but in a well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self —to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of man's belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend. Easy enough to discard this or that symbol of evil, but suppose all such symbols hid some deep truth, and cast some restraining base of force that in my ignorance I still did not perceive? For by this time in our experience, yours and mine, the creative self was rambunctiously (disobidiently) rushing forward, despite all the cautionary statements of many ancient and modern documents, and our books were being read by millions. So the belief in man's sinful nature persisted in my mind, a constant reminder of man's ignorance of his own nature. How could I be sure that our sight wasn't also distorted; that our "sin" was in not accepting sin as a value? Perhaps sin itself contained some value that escaped beyond our calculations, still undiscovered. So in a fashion [Jane's] physical symptoms became a psychological disclaimer, so that in some court of larger values we could not be "sued" for leading others astray from entrenched beliefs that we were still discarding, while not having any completed structure that would allow easy access or safe passage from one "life raft" to the new one that we were trying to provide. . . . But—it now becomes evident—I was myself tinged not by-sin in a metaphysical sense (as I thought I might be), but with a belief in sin (itself) that I had not dismissed. Therefore the disclaimer was necessary to protect myself and others from any fatal flaw in our work—a flaw that sin's blindness made invisible..."

And so on. It all was—and is—great material, and more accurate and penetrating than my own ideas as to why some portion of Jane's psyche might feel a need for protection from the world, or from another part of herself. While profoundly upsetting both of us, the revelations of her sinful self also seemed to provide a magical psychological key: the yearned-
for understanding that would finally unlock Jane's bent physical body. But it didn't. Nothing did —not Seth, with all of his great material on the magical approach, not the publication of the new books, not even Jane's own work. The challenge of our learning enough to initiate her recovery was still with us during that summer of 1981. And as for books, early in August I returned to our publisher, Prentice-Hall, the page proofs Jane had corrected for her book of poetry:
"If We Live Again" or "Public Magic and Private Love".
Ordinarily that event would have delighted us, since it meant that before the year was out she'd have another work published. Instead, we despaired over her physical condition as the weeks passed. Just how stubborn could those core beliefs held by her sinful self be? Finally, we were left hoping that the sinful self's very exposure through its own material would eventually bring about some physical improvement. That didn't happen either. I painted in the mornings, searching for a peace of mind that I couldn't obtain in any other way. Jane held a few widely scattered sessions for Dreams, and a number of private ones as fall came, then winter. Those sessions represented largely futile activity, I thought, yet I gladly admitted that each one of them was as unique and creative as ever, no matter what its subject. Perversely, beyond taking it down and typing it, I hardly looked at the Seth material for days at a time. Finally, early in December 1981 I told Jane I
was on the verge of refusing to sit with her for any sessions at all, regular or private, for I'd become deeply afraid that the more sessions she held the worse she'd get. Again she refused to go into the hospital. At this time, Prentice-Hall sent us the first published copies of "If We Live Again", but as proud as Jane and I are of that book, its appearance didn't help her. At our small, annual Christmas Eve party we gave autographed copies of the book to close friends—the best presents we could offer. After the holidays, though, we saw few friends and no strangers. The winter turned into one that seemed to be the longest and coldest in years, although while heavy storms raged all around us, our immediate area of New York State received surprisingly little snow (a fact we were very grateful for!). As Jane had dictated to me in her own session for April 1—the first one presented in these essays—during those early weeks of 1982 her walking, writing, and hearing began to
deteriorate markedly. In late February she was hospitalized. . . .

ESSAY 4
Saturday, April 17, 1982
After supper I told Jane I was going to work on the essays for Dreams. Already this morning I'd typed from my notes last night's very encouraging private Seth session: "—and know that you have taken, both of you, important new strides." Jane said she'd like to do some more dictation of her own, so I agreed to take down that instead. Once again, however, she shied away from translating any more of that dirgelike Sumari song she'd sung to herself, and recorded, shortly before going into the hospital, I still had only that one great line she's interpreted for me in English: "Let my soul find shelter elsewhere." I now read to her the last two pages of material Seth had given us last night. Jane was nodding in her chair as I finished, and I thought she wouldn't be doing any work this evening after all. Yet she roused herself: "I've got the first sentence, I guess." I lit her cigarette for her. Her voice was free of tremor and her rate of delivery was a little
slow.) There is no doubt that I was caught between life's contrasts, and only too aware of the endless questions that came to mind. On the one hand there was the Seth material itself, and Seth's performance in his books. His ideas had somehow led me to the point where the very dimensions of experience should change. As he presented them, his concepts dealt with the spontaneous, rambunctious powers with which nature was endowed. Seth insisted that those powers, followed at least in principle, would raise man's estate (and woman's too, LM) and fill it with a brilliance and joy in which the old problems of the species would largely disappear. Certainly our lives and the lives of others have been strongly influenced by the Seth material, changed for the better. Certainly our comprehensions have deepened as a result —yet in the face of that great promise, what was I doing barely able to leave my chair? And if spontaneous order was such a vital ingredient in the workings of the universe, then what was I doing trying to shut it down in my own daily life?
In the meantime, Rob and I often thought that this very book would never be completed. I might decide that I'd given enough years and energy to the Seth pursuit. Without making any conscious decision, I might simply cease having sessions. I did continue with the sessions, of course. The book is finished. I realize more and more that life's experience is played out in a framework that stretches between life's contrasts. We live in a world slung between our dearest hopes and greatest fears, while seldom encountering either in their pure form.
(Jane spoke with much emphasis here) on cue, through an open front window a quickening breeze stirred the long glass wind chimes hanging just inside; their pealing harmony filled the living room. The chimes had been sent to us as a gift by fans we've never met.) Value fulfillment is the largest issue here, both with Seth's book and my own experience, and if I really understood what Seth was saying in this book, I would not have needed to undergo such an uncomfortable drama in my daily life. Our vitality wants to express itself. The whole world of nature is an irrepressible, expressible area of expansion. Old ideas of the survival of the fittest, conventional evolutionary processes, gods and goddesses, cannot hope to explain the "mystery of the universe"—but when we use our own abilities gladly and freely, we come so close to being what we are that sometimes we come close to being what the universe is. Then even our most unfortunate escapades, our most sorrowful ventures, are not deadended, but serve as doorways into a deeper comprehension and a more meaningful relationship with the universe of which we are such a vital part.
("End of introduction," Jane abruptly said. "That doesn't mean that when you get it all typed up I won't want to add to it. I just want to make sure that my own experience keeps coming back to the book, 'cause that's what it's for. You could end up with a brief epilogue, according to what happens." "I don't know," I said. "That's too far away to tell." "Wait a minute,
while I see if there's anything else...)

ESSAY 5
Sunday, April 18, 1982
(Lost night Jane had pronounced her work finished on the introductory material for Dreams. I hadn't said so, but I'd suspected that she had more to say. Then as we went to bed she brought up two additional subjects to discuss, for those who would wonder: why we hadn't more actively sought medical help in the past for her physical condition; and the many private, or deleted, sessions Seth himself has given for her over the years. A third point came up this morning, one we've talked about often lately. It concerned the other "Seths" who are revealing themselves around the country these days. Later tonight I want to offer a little more about this overall development—but people speak for their Seths entirely without Jane's permission. Jane is most concerned that she and I protect the integrity of the Seth material in its unique and original form. In fact, all of those topics were so much on Jane's mind that for the second time in three days she went to "work" right after breakfast. In a firmer voice, then, and following a quick look at the Sunday-morning paper:)
Seth gave so many sessions that were devoted to my own physical condition that I finally became embarrassed and confused. The sessions were obviously terrific—why couldn't I put them to more practical use? I have no idea, of course, what physical state I'd be in if the Seth phenomenon hadn't appeared in my life (in late 1963), or if I hadn't had those sessions to rely upon. And even in the most private-type sessions Seth always wound his material into more public areas, so that we have reams of unpublished (and very controversial) material dealing with the connections between one's illness and other members of the family, community relationships, and with the very belief systems that underlie all of human activity. The kinds of beliefs we have about people bring about the kinds of illnesses we encounter. That is certainly one of Seth's clearest messages. The individual is always in a state of change. To name and dignify a group of symptoms only brings them further into prominence, and offers them another framework for permanency.
(Seth couldn't lead my life for me, of course. He couldn't lead other people's lives for them, either—yet through the years I began to feel a greater and greater sense of responsibility for people with physical problems who wrote requiring Seth's aid, or mine. Their needs—and my own—seemed to blot out the great hope that Seth could and did offer: the infusion of understanding and comprehension that could clear away the old belief patterns that held the individual in bounds. Since the later 1960s, when my own troubles began, I stubbornly resisted medical assistance. If I had broken a leg I would have gone to a doctor to get it set. I felt that I could handle my particular kind of difficulty alone. The symptoms were obvious enough: stiffness, slowing down of motion, and general lack of mobility. I could keep track easily enough, I thought, of my own progress as I worked directly with my body, without drugs to confuse the issue, and with no one else between me and the reality I had so cunningly created. How else could I really learn anything? The more middlemen that I entertained between my physical condition and my personal beliefs, the more confused I thought I'd be. I'm not sure where I drew the line. If I'd felt I was suffering a heart attack, for example, I knew I would rush to the hospital, but this was a chronic condition. The diagnosis—which I mentioned in my first session (on April 1)—gave a pinpointed, specific cause: a severely underactive thyroid gland, a situation that in no way contradicts Seth's own larger interpretation of my physical
state. I still must have needed the doctors to tell me so. Seth was right: I was going too slow—not too fast, as I had feared. I had calmed myself down too far, disciplined myself overmuch, until my only hope was to change my course at once.
Doctors had terrified me as a child, when my mother was already bedridden with arthritis, and when I was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland—an affliction that could lead, so my mother told me, to insanity and death. If the medical profession had had anything to do with casting that medical spell, then apparently it could be quite effective in removing it. By last year, as my symptoms worsened, I began to feel that life's frustrations outweighed its pleasures. Other
annoying events were occurring in our private lives. The company that published my books, Prentice-Hall, was changing its structure and policy. My longtime friend and editor there, Tarn Mossman, was considering leaving to work for another publishing firm. And—very troublesome to me—came the repeated news that various people were "speaking for Seth" publicly, and charging hefty-enough fees. I felt that my work was being contaminated, and more, I was annoyed and disappointed by those readers who could apparently be so taken in by those other Seths. As he has said so many times, Seth speaks only through me, to protect the integrity of the material. And it is indeed that contract between him and me that always assures you of the authenticity of Seth's work. In any case, all of those issues weighed upon my mind. Now let's see. . . . Okay. I hope sometime to tell the entire story of my physical and creative challenges, which as of now of course is unfinished.
Much of this present manuscript, Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, deals with the development of the individual as it is primarily concerned with the development of the universe: the two are one. In man's desire to make creative adjustments, it often seems that instead he adds unfortunate blemishes to life's vitality. Yet in the long run even these become, finally, constructive manipulations whose purposes, perhaps, we did not understand at the time.
(9:49 A.M. "Well, I guess that's it,"Jane said. "This stuff goes with last night's work."
"Actually," she continued much more emphatically now, as we discussed her rather mild comments about the other Seths, "I'm deeply outraged that some people who considered themselves 'followers' of mine or Seth can so easily fool themselves when they claim to be speaking for Seth—be so blind to their own motives, or not recognize the fact that they're taking advantage of people. They're also using my work to validate their own. . . .")
Concerning Jane's understandable desire to protect her work, long ago she published some very clear statements about that. In Chapter Nine of The Seth Material (1970) she wrote: "Several people have told me that Seth communicated with them through automatic writing, but Seth denies any such contacts, saying that his communications will be limited to his work with me, in order that the integrity of the Seth Material be preserved." And in her introduction to Seth Speaks (1972), she quoted Seth from the 510th session for January 19, 1970: "While my communications will come exclusively through
Ruburt (Jane) at all times, to protect the integrity of the material, I will invite the reader to become aware of me as a personality. . . ." After all, if he dues come through others—or can if he wants to— why hasn't Seth himself simply said so, and repeatedly, in the books as we've published them over the years? We'd have respected his statements on that aspect of his abilities and intents as much as we did —and do—on any other. To have attempted to censor Seth since 1963,
say, to "keep him to ourselves" on that particular subject, would have long ago turned into an impossibly complicated and dishonest task: Jane and I would have become involved in a constant distortion of his material as we rewrote the sessions. Such a procedure could have turned into a creative tragedy for us and for our readers. Even in "God of Jane", which was published in 1981, Jane presented some relatively late material from Seth to show that he doesn't independently communicate with others. The idea that he'd done so can be inspiring, however.
In Chapter 20 of her book, see Session 876 for August 27, 1979. After explaining how a couple of women (among
others) had recently claimed that he had been in contact with them, Seth stated: "Now, I did not communicate with those women—but their belief in me helped each of them use certain abilities."
This whole miniature tempest is almost enough to make one wonder: how come those other people made their "Seths" known after Jane began to speak for her Seth, and to publish the Jane-Seth material? Being inspired to use one's own abilities is a perfectly understandable development that we can be very happy about. But to claim to speak for Jane's
Seth per se, as a means of expression, is quite another thing. . . .

ESSAY 6
Tuesday, April 20, 1982
(Our original idea was to insert the session Jane gave this morning in one of the earlier essays. This would have been a very mechanical approach. More, it would have involved altering dates, and changing or eliminating some of the copy to make the rest of it fit —all things I dislike doing. After Jane came through with her dictation I told myself I'd know what to do with it, and awoke the next morning with the clear understanding that her session should be presented just as is, and when we received it. Jane said okay. The subjects discussed are deeply charged for us, and the physical and psychological aspects of some of them could be devastating if we allowed them to be. Presenting the session in a more isolated manner here, then, may give the reader a clearer idea of how we felt during Jane's early days in the hospital [and later too, for that matter]. This course also lets the session serve as an automatic bridge to some of the material in the earlier essays.
So last night, less than two days after she'd held her last session, I asked Jane for some material about the central theme of her days in the hospital, both from her own viewpoint and that of the doctors who probed, examined, and discussed her and her problems. Some of them talked about her right in front of her as though she weren't there—and, Jane said, with her hearing still much impaired at that time, she almost felt as though she wasn't there. For the third time in five days she began dictating her own material right after breakfast. Once again from the card table in the living room.
It seemed to me that once medical science got hold of you it wanted to justify its existence, to exercise its wonders for those fortunate or unfortunate enough to be considered "proper candidates" for its full ministrations. Several of the brightest young rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons had my future all mapped out for me, or so it appeared, as
they discussed my case. When they spoke to Rob and me I tried to listen, but my hearing was still so poor that it was nearly impossible to make out one full sentence at a time. All the doctors seemed to agree that I had a kind of burned-out case of rheumatoid arthritis, with little active inflammation. But one doctor soberly told me that I'd never walk again, or even put my weight upon my feet again, unless I underwent a series of joint-replacement operations—if, he cautioned, I proved to be a "proper candidate." Being a proper candidate meant that I would turn my life over to medical science in the hospital for at least a year: a year spent in therapy, surgical procedures, and more therapy, until I ended up having at least four separate operations. My knee joints and hip joints could thus be replaced. My condition had certain drawbacks, however: the two sides of my body were uneven, so I could end up with four bright new metal and plastic joints and still not be able to walk properly. I might need a cane, or a walker. Medical science would be willing to try, however. Out of the goodness of its heart, all of its scientific procedures would be put at my disposal. True, the amount of money required for such surgical possibilities was staggering, but insurance of one kind or another could be found to carry the cost. (We didn't have nearly enough money, but could qualify for adequate insurance by fulfilling the terms of an 11-month
waiting period.) But regardless of cost, one orthopedist saw me staying right in the hospital—now that I was there—until the entire procedure was finished. Particularly if, again, I proved to be a proper candidate. Being a proper candidate meant getting rid of those bedsores, for one thing, as well as taking extensive physical therapy. As I listened to the doctor talk, poor hearing or no, I could almost feel medical science starting up all of its gears, ready to go to work on my behalf —and I wasn't ready to make any such decision right then. I wanted to see how my body would react to the synthetic thyroid hormone and to therapy first. I wished to tell I could run, I thought, for boy, I'd have run right out of there, fast!
The particular group of young doctors I saw, the specialists, were probably the fanciest-looking dandies that Elmira has known. They were superlative-looking young men, dressed in the latest of fashions, and even in the hospital it was apparent that they were properly clothed in the finest of social mores as well. They were in their collective way like magicians, producing wonders out of the clear air, stunning you with their charming smiles and manners, trying to win you over to some strange cause. In this case it was the operation cause. It was the only way to go: what a crime to accept less than full, complete motion at my age. One doctorn told me that my body's mobility would be bound to change for the better as my thyroid gland . . .
(After a long pause in midsentence Jane began to doze. Her head dipped down. Her body began to slowly lean against the right arm of her chair in what has become a characteristic pose, for both her thyroid activity, and therefore her energy, are still below par even though she's been out of the hospital for 24 days now. By 9:17 she was asleep. Watching her tilt more and more, I wondered whether she truly had the psychic and physical reserves to heal herself— whether anybody would under the circumstances. Perhaps her challenges were too much for her. What were her limits, how much more could she take after some 17 years of ever-increasing struggle, whether or not those challenges had been chosen—some of them far in advance—for whatever reasons?
"Now that was just on the operation thing—"
"Did you know you were asleep?"
"Not until I woke up," she said with a half-guilty grin. "Now there's some stuff I want written down, but you won't approve because it's not for the intro—"
"/ don't give a damn," I said. "If you don't want it in the book, okay. We can still get it, can't we?"
"That's all of the stuff on the Introduction, then . . . ." And now Jane dictated the equivalent of three typewritten pages of "other hospital material" that she knew she'd eventually want to use somewhere. Actually, I came to realize, Jane was so terrified by the thought of those operations that mentally she shunted aside all such prospects. Only when she was home did she begin to fathom the possible depths of the physical reality she'd created for herself, with my help. To coin a
phrase, she was "truly, deeply shocked." The doctors wanted to literally cut the major joints out of her body! To replace them with metal and plastic joints inserted into the bone ends and cemented in place. Jane cried. Her voice shook.
"But in spite of everything, over all those years I never felt sick until I went into the hospital," she wailed. The glowing
reports we heard and read about successful joint-replacement operations meant little to her. "Sure, for one joint, or two, maybe," I said, then shut up, not wanting to add my own fears to her fears. But four of those operations? And why stop there? If they fixed her knees and hips, what about her shoulders? She couldn't raise her arms level with them. "Oh,
they'd operate on the shoulders, too," a doctor told me in front of Jane, without inflection, as though we were discussing an inanimate mechanism that needed rebuilding. Six operations, then. But what about my wife's elbows, and her fingers? Somebody at the hospital—I forget who—told us that joint replacements for the fingers and/or knuckles usually weren't all that successful: The bones in the hands were pretty small and delicate. But it could well be argued that Jane needed to be able to write with a pen or pencil, to express her basic creativity in that particular elementary fashion, even more than
she needed to walk. (It would be great if she could at least use a typewriter!) So there could be eight operations, or ten, or ? What might happen to the body, I wondered, even if its psychic tenant were willing to endure any or all of those "surgical procedures"? I answered my own question by remembering accounts I had on file, explaining how people of various ages had withstood numerous, incredible operations, sometimes over a period of years. But I was horrified to think that my dear wife might become involved in a similar reality, with or without my unwitting compliance. I knew that she was far from making any decisions about surgery, but I recoiled from pushing any such suggestions upon her, no matter how fine it would be to see her on her feet. Joint-replacement operations were irreversible procedures, and I also had on file material about how they sometimes failed. Short of outright failure, however, some of the articles I've collected
contain the information that a conventional artificial joint replacement —for a knee, say—usually lasts only from four to seven years before loosening. A most discouraging prospect! What does one do when the insert begins to wobble? None of the doctors we'd talked to had mentioned such a possibility. (One can always claim that being able to walk for even four years is a lot better than not walking at all!) Jane and I also read that through experiments with animals medical designers are working to perfect an artificial knee joint with porous surfaces, to promote better bonding of bone to metal; it could last 15 years or more.
Someday, I told Jane, and regardless of whether or not we ever choose to take advantage of any of them, we'll be questioning orthopedic surgeons very closely about what "surgical procedures" are available.
As I wrote in the first essay, "the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it." Even if Jane had all of those operations—even if she ended up able to walk alter a fashion—she'd still have arthritis. She was suffused with it. Our beliefs said so. So did her body, as everyone could see.
"Your joints are destroyed," Dr. Mandali told Jane, after getting the opinion of the young out-of-town rheumatologist she'd asked to examine my wife. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life inside, in a wheelchair? That's a pretty limited existence you're talking about there. . . ." And Jane, trying to protect herself from the negative suggestions that had been administered to her like psychic hammerblows, ever since she'd entered the hospital, could only weakly demur on the subject of operations.
Let me quickly add that all of the doctors who examined her advanced their suggestions while trying to be helpful, and in the name of "truth" as they saw it—with individual variations, of course. To us, however, in all but one case their general unconscious biases were negative. The exception was the youngish doctor Jane had referred to at the very end of her last session. As it happened, he was the one who'd had her admitted to the hospital to begin with. He'd offered Jane
encouragement as she is, and she had felt an immediate psychic rapport with him. But he was a neurologist, and we saw less and less of him as it was determined that his special skills wouldn't be of continuing help in Jane's situation. In the overwhelming medical view, then, as Jane said, the operations were the only way for her to go. . . .

ESSAY 7
Friday, May 7, 1982
In this essay I'll touch upon a number of subjects. Some of them have already been mentioned. During our work on these pieces Jane and I have automatically been led back to earlier material again and again, but each time we've tried to plunge deeper into the topic under discussion, to uncover new layers of meaning and insight. (Doing this always reminds us of additional points to cover, of course!) Putting it all together is an extremely challenging endeavor as I try to summarize our
years of committment to the Seth material—for inevitably we end up dealing with ideas lying outside society's generally accepted frameworks of belief.
Forty-one days have now passed since Jane left the hospital, and this passage of "time" alone has given us more perspective on the whole affair of her illness, and on our beliefs, intents, and desires. Among the subjects not discussed so far are Seth's (and our own) ideas on reincarnation, counterparts, probable realities, and Frameworks 1 and 2. Jane briefly referred to Seth's "magical approach" material in her dictation last month (see her own session of April 16, 1982, in Essay No. 3 on that date)—thus prefacing the long quotations from her "sinful self." So as counterpoint to her writings on the sinful self, I'll be presenting two excerpts to hint at what Seth does mean by his magical approach. Aside from any books that he may produce himself (and on whatever subjects), I've already made plans to put together a short volume
featuring Seth's discussions on the magical approach to reality. A year earlier Jane had begun a much more ambitious project involving this material, as she mentioned on April 16, but she laid it aside for reasons already covered. My version will mainly feature the dozen or so sessions Seth gave in August-September 1980, and the poetry Jane was inspired to write because of them. She may also contribute an introduction to the book, showing how Seth's and her own sinful-self
information are related to the magical approach. If, as Jane dictated in her session for April 17, "We live in a world slung between our dearest hopes and greatest fears," then surely it can be said that she's chosen to delve into at least some of her "greatest fears." Her present impaired condition is certainly generating powerful physical and psychic conflicts and challenges, and it's my personal assessment that she's dealing with these in her own unique way. That way is different from anybody else's way. I think that if parts of her psyche "fear those fears," other parts do not—or that at least they chose to confront them, and actually began doing so many years ago. Otherwise Jane's "symptoms" couldn't exist on any level. Nor am I implying ideas of predestination. The chances here for exploration are very extensive, of course. And I still implicitly believe the quotation Seth gave on April 16, 1981, over a year ago now: "In that larger picture there are no errors, for each action, pleasant or not, will in its fashion be redeemed, both in relation to itself and ... to a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive." I'm certainly not writing here about the idea of redemption in the ordinary religious sense, although I think it's perfectly possible that in some other frameworks, larger than our taken-for-granted physical and psychological one, the idea of redemption —of understanding and embracing—may be involved in a "religious" sense, as part of an intuitive grasp of All That Is.
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. To me, redemption means a continuous search or journey, then, involving whatever events and interchanges we choose to create, for whatever purposes, along the way—and truly, I think, some of those purposes will involve things "the conscious mind may not be able presently to
perceive." 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."
Jane and I live our physical lives on mundane levels, though, as everyone else does, so it's inevitable that we often find ourselves meeting our daily challenges within those frameworks. We practice one big difference, however—for we hold within ourselves Seth's ideas on a host of subjects. It seems that we can feel his concepts—intermingled with our own questions, ideas, and accomplishments—constantly turning within a kind of special excitement and revelatory insight. This is true for us even when things aren't going well, when we feel "dumb" or blocked about whatever we may be trying to do. At such times I'm apt to think about ideas of reincarnation and counterparts. Right here I'm dealing with just two of Seth's larger concepts. But without dwelling upon them too heavily, I may consider the notion of my larger, nonphysical "whole self" or "entity" being made up of a number of other psychically related physical selves projected into time. For Seth, basically there is no time, only a great "spacious present" that's a manifestation of a sublime, indescribable All That Is. Our gross physical senses, and indeed our very bodies, insist upon interpreting the spacious present in linear terms, however— through the inevitable processes of birth, aging, and death—so to help us get his point here Seth advances his ideas of reincarnational selves and counterpart selves in ways we can understand sensually. He tells us that our reincarnational selves explore the past, present, and future—but basically all at once, since time as he defines it is simultaneous. I've written before that as physical creatures we're always going to find the contradictory notion of "simultaneous time" hard to comprehend, intellectually at least.
Before proceeding I want to make clear just what I mean by "reincarnational selves" (while confining this discussion to "past" lives for the moment). For it's also contradictory to say, for example, that "I was a serf (a worker, a slave) in the 12th-century Germanic state of Bavaria." As Seth and I both noted in Volume 2 of "Unknown Reality", each of us has our focus of identity now—not in some other portion of the spacious present, just as each reincarnational self has his or her own historical focus of identity. How could it be otherwise? Could one return to that 12th-century life, even as an observer, what would the traveler find? An individual—and one not about to surrender his or her identity to anyone, or have it thought of simply as a manifestation of some "future" self! I think that when they blithely talk about having lived other lives people forget that those living before were—are—fully independent creatures, even if they are psychically related to others. The traveler could hardly move in on one of his or her own personalities!
Interesting question: How would our 20th-century individual react when told by a visitor from the year 2355 (for example) that he or she represented one of our futurian's "past" lives? The serf will invariably be looking at his time through a different focus than his future self could ever do. And think of the added challenges of feeling and perception where sexual changes between present and past incarnations are involved! Eroticism—and yes, outright sexual curiosity and arousal over reversed genitalia, for instance—must enter in sometimes, although in print at least these specifics of sex in connection with reincarnation seem to be a taboo subject. By contrast, there's plenty of material in the reincarnational
literature on the generalized patterns of sexual behavior, from promiscuity to repression.
(I wonder whether a long-term past-life sexual fantasy could be connected to a real sexual problem or challenge in a present—or future—life.)
But would our time traveler ever want to give up his or her present mental and physical focus to enter completely into an earlier personality? I think not, in the overwhelming majority of cases—and perhaps never—for in those terms it would mean surrendering a portion of the whole self or entity that had, through a projection into our scheme of "present" time, attained a certain consciousness and physical form of a unique degree. Yet, on second thought I wouldn't dare rule out
completely such bizarre developments. Perhaps transfers like that can and do take place within the vast arena of probable realities (which I'll also be discussing in this essay). If so, then, they would be strange only from our limited viewpoints.
Further, Jane and I believe that what really happens during a "pastlife regression" under hypnosis is that the subject (aside from any responses given to the hypnotist's own witting or unwitting suggestions) very cosily views his or her previous lives from the comfort and safety of a present existence. This would be the case even when the subject is
very unhappy with present challenges, and is trying to assign their origin to events in one or more former existences.
All well and good to announce that one was a serf (a slave) some 900 years ago—but one is much more likely to be either tuning into minute signals surrounding the actual physical and mental reality of the serf (poor fellow), or to be picking up on elements of that individual's personality as they're associated with the serf's whole self or entity. Either possibility makes it much safer—and much more entertaining—to proclaim one's serfdom. There's so much I could discuss here that the lack of time and space is very frustrating. I can only hint at what I consider to be important points. The books and magazines dealing with reincarnation —and the tapes, too, these days—swarm with tales of journeys to past lives, and some of those accounts are most spectacular. Yet, even given ancient concepts like that of Seth's spacious present, the participants in such adventures usually quite happily ignore the conclusion that reincarnation should also operate from the opposite direction—the future—just as well! As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can't people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they're regressed to their past lives? Indeed. Our rather copious mail brings us questions like that very rarely. (The key word there, I think, is "successfully.")
Back in 1974 Seth responded to my own musings on the subject by commenting: "You are afraid to consider future lives because then you have to face the death that must be met first, in your terms." (See Appendix 12 for Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality.)
Seth referred to the conventional, culturally instilled fear of death that most of us carry, of course. Surely one's death to come is a much more personal and penetrating prospect—a much more frightening one—
than "facing" any past-life deaths one may encounter: those deaths have already happened! But it certainly seems that in those terms present challenges could be illuminated through exploring "future" lives as well as those of the past. I referred to a "successful" progression because reaching into the future is evidently much more difficult. By its very nature a future life cannot be proven—records checked, and so forth. Anything goes. Jane and I have read of many systems designed to regress the individual to past lives. Often such "trips" are mediated by hypnosis. It can even happen spontaneously, and I had a most exhilarating glimpse of a past life of my own that way. (See Session 721 in Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality.) However, neither of us have had such an outright encounter with a future self—that we know of. I'd say that under hypnosis the urge to fantasize the future lives must be a tempting one; but what's the explanation for achieving little more than a formless future state while "under," no matter how hard one tries? The failure to get there, to turn time around, could be taken as a sign of resistance on the part of the present self. (Or even a past self or selves, but that's too complicated a subject to go into here.) And how about reaching a future life through the dream state, perhaps abetted by hypnosis or self-suggestion before sleep? Our own
results have been ambiguous at best, in contrast with the "ordinary" precognitive dreams Jane and I have had, which we can document through our written records. Future-life dream recall may be thoroughly disguised so as to not alarm the guardian, conscious present self. I've often speculated that clues to oncoming lives must exist within the hundreds of dreams I've recorded. Accounts of projecting into distant future lives seem rare. Perhaps the conscious self deeply hesitates at swimming in such uncharted pools of consciousness, even though present and future relationships are assumed. My main point is that I also feel, without having asked Seth, that the farther one travels ahead in time the greater the play of probable realities and probable lives he or she encounters. To venture into such a skein ( loose wool thread) requires that one constantly picks and chooses among them—for each move, each thought, even, can launch the traveler into a different probability. In some cases there will be a great fear of becoming lost among all of those realities. (What if one doesn't want a probable reality they choose? But that must happen all of the time!) The uncertainty perceived here by the conscious self, however, can act as a great restraint toward knowing a future life or lives—just as much as might the fear of tuning into one's physical death ahead of time in this life. Hook up those two factors with the quite natural concern that at least some events in any life to come will inevitably be unpleasant, or worse, and we have at least three powerful restraints, or psychic blocks, inhibiting awareness of future lives. There would be others. Everything considered, we may just not want to know about future lives most of the time. I'll digress a moment to note that it's quite obvious that when
conducted by skilled therapists past-life regression has proven to be of great benefit to certain individuals. Whether or not reincarnation has been proven objectively, the belief structures surrounding that concept, or even the idea of it, have served very well as a forum within which certain present-life challenges have been worked out, through the therapists' use of hypnosis, allegory, association, symbolism, and other very respectable methods. How richly creative we are: each of our presents is part of the future from the standpoint of the past; each of our presents is also part of the past from the standpoint of the future. I think it quite humorous (and ironic) that whether or not they realize it, those who engage in past-life regressions play with the notion of future selves all of the time—for from the standpoint of any "past" lives
they reach their present lives obviously represent future existences. In a way, and in those terms, this also applies in Jane's case when she contacts Seth, even on the "psychological bridge" those two have constructed between them: When Seth tells us that his last physical life was in Denmark in the 1600s, then Jane and I represent future physical selves of his. I put it this way because Seth himself has commented that the three of us are "offshoots of the same entity." (This time, see Appendix 18 for Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality.) Yet we are all of us different now: "Ruburt (Jane) is not myself now, in his present life. He is nevertheless an extension and materialization of the Seth that I was at one time." All of this is most simplified. One ought to be very careful about assigning past and future status to various portions of a self, for ultimately, as one moves further into the spacious present, such constructions as the past, present, and future begin to melt away. And, as in Seth's case and Jane's case, probabilities and choices come much more prominently into play. However, Jane and I don't particularly think that in our present lives we've been that greatly influenced by any successes, failures, or illnesses chosen from other lives except in the broadest of terms: general bodily and personality characteristics and abilities, say.
I freely note, and with some humor, that this can be somewhat of a jointly contradictory attitude for us. Perhaps we're too stubborn about agreeing wholeheartedly that such possibilities exist, or perhaps we're just too enamored of our "present" physical lives, even with all of our challenges, to want to fully concur with Seth. 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.
Consciously, however, Jane has never been overly enthusiastic about the idea of reincarnation to begin with. I've noted in other books that she seldom talks about it. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and more than passionately embraced that faith. Yet she was early subjected to the church's rigid opposition to the whole idea of reincarnation because, strangely enough, even in her very youthful poetry she dealt with the forbidden subject (although not by name). Jane does believe that long ago she left behind the church's dogmas on reincarnation. She doesn't want to use the concept as a crutch; her caution stems from other beliefs, on which I'll quote her shortly.
(As for myself, while growing up I knew nothing of reincarnation beyond its name.) But we'll be the first ones to agree that in certain Seth sessions, and in her very evocative poetry, Jane has encouraged her intuitive and creative selves to seriously discuss reincarnation. This is very evident in her second and latest book of poetry "If We Live Again" or "Public Magic and Private Love", which was published in December of last year (1981). From the beginning of Section 3 of "I Am Alive Again":
"/ am alive again, remembering a thousand seasons,
arranging and rearranging Aprils and Septembers in my mind's transparent vase
and placing it on the shelf of my attention— a miniature still life."
It can be seen from even this tiny quotation that Jane's poetry reflects that same mystical, intuitive innocence before nature (and thus, ultimately, All That Is) that I tried to describe in the first essay. It could well be that her psyche has derived from her whole self, or entity, the "facts" of reality a lot better than either of us consciously knows them.
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. However, I'm not at all sure how many others feel that way. 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.
I also know that in a couple of chapters for Dreams itself Seth referred to the genetic factors involving reincarnation. 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. I keep wondering about the results of an individual's choosing not to
call upon any of his or her bank of reincarnational lives, though, whether from the past or the future. This approach would very nicely eliminate having to deal with one's "karma" this time around—should there really be a system of consciousness embodying that ancient concept. Think of the fun a person could have who decided at an early
age—or even before physical birth—to experience a life unencumbered by other psychic relationships; wherein it had little or nothing to "work out." What freedoms might lie ahead—and yes, what challenges, too!
Buddhism and Hinduism would banish the very thought: "How dare one even think of escaping, or just simply ignoring, his or her "fate or destiny" (to put it loosely)! Yet our mass reality obviously is large enough to allow me room to generate such fanatical thoughts. . . . All of this reminds me that lately the media have carried a number of stories detailing how medical science is not only trying hard to approach cures for scourges like cancer (in cancer's case, possibly through the exploration and understanding of the role played in the cell nucleus by altered normal cells called oncogenes), but is already claiming to have narrowed down its search to specific genes that affect imponderables
like behavior—depression, for example. Not only that, sociobiologists are advancing their very controversial ideas that much of human behavior has an ultimate genetic basis, which in turn influences cultural change, and so on. Well, one may ask, if a so-called negative quality like depression has a genetic foundation, what about the genetics for a positive attribute like joy—or, even, something like reincarnation? (I haven't come across anything in the media yet about either one of those.) If reincarnational and genetic systems are intermixed, then it could be said that even a person's decision to ignore his or her reincarnational heritage was in itself genetically based—and it could be fun to explore the contradictory ramifications of such a state. What other wonders might our cells contain? While amusing myself I'm simplifying to a great
degree: If traces of one's "successive" lives are genetically embedded, sorting them out would be an enormous task.
It would be impossible at this time, I'm certain, for a researcher to find any evidence that reincarnational heritages are coded for among the approximately 100,000 genes lined up on the 46 chromosomes we carry in the nucleus of each of our cells. We say that a certain gene contains the instructions for the manufacture of a certain protein the body uses in the construction or function of an eye, for instance, and that in expressing that code the gene passes on characteristics inherited from physical ancestors—but is that endowment influenced or directed in any fashion by reincarnational attributes as well? Might those factors be just as potent as those inherited from a grandfather, say? The genes in each cell have their individual jobs to do in furnishing the quivering templates for the manufacture (via the nucleic acids DNA and
messenger RNA) of all of our bodily proteins. But if we think of our genetic endowment as first being a system of consciousness as our reincarnational history is, we can see how the two nonphysical systems could be intermixed, as Seth put it, with one influencing the other. Conceivably, each of us could be a mixed bag of ancestral and reincarnational heritages, then— more "mongrelized" than we may care to admit. Interesting. . . . What we choose to do with those possibilities that we present ourselves with at each temporal birth may be another matter entirely. And nowhere in this part of my discussion, in order to keep it within manageable bounds in this essay, have I mentioned the inherent
ramifications involving genetics and reincarnation and probable realities.
"I think that a too-specific 'reading' of reincarnational material leads us to forget time's simultaneous nature and promotes a 'nitty-gritty' attitude," Jane wrote for me as I was working on these passages. "We may want to know the place and the time of a past self, for example— and the very concentration upon the 'past' simply deepens our commitment to time.
The search for detail leads us further away from the larger sensed dimensions in which those facts must lie.
"I feel that Rob and I have lived our lives together many times, for example, and in many relationships. But I don't want to spend a lot of 'time' learning about those lives. I 'know' we change and replenish those other existences.
"When I write poetry I can often feel that translife focus, and catch the 'real facts.' " We're not against reincarnation, then, only careful about our beliefs concerning it.
Within the context of my discussion, reincarnation is Seth's historical version of his counterpart concept, which is that each of us is physically connected with certain other males and females who are living at the same time we are, and who are exploring physical life from a variety of viewpoints in ways that no one physical self could possibly match. This means that each reincarnational self has its own cluster of counterpart selves within its own time period, and that all are interconnected on nonphysical levels, joining together like magical gears meshing in constantly changing patterns across time and reality. And once one understands ideas of reincarnation and counterparts in these terms, it becomes difficult to think of one without the other, so inevitable do they appear to be. (Obviously, some counterpart selves can meet physically, as reincarnational selves cannot. Under circumstances and in ways explained in Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality, again, Jane and I think we've encountered a few of our counterpart selves. Just for fun, try to imagine the complicated relationships that can obtain within only a family of five, say, when each member exists within his or her much larger family of reincarnational and counterpart selves.
Let the mathematicians among our readers calculate the number of possible psychic interchanges alone that can arise
65
in the "past, present, and future" involving the reincarnational and counterpart selves of these five people!)
Now what kinds of "redemption" (saving, freedom) can be found amid the interchanges among any combination of reincarnational and/or counterpart lives, for instance? Some, certainly, and no doubt the reader can think of at least a few creative interpretations of redemptive qualities, but I'd rather let the question search for its own approximate answers as
I continue work upon this essay. Jane and I do feel sure, however, that the experiences of our current lifetimes have so many psychic and physical ramifications (offshoots) that their numbers are literally beyond our grasp—and that many of those developments are certain to be quite "alien" to us here in our own everyday realities. (All of this applies to everyone, of course.) I don't really think we can conceive of anything to be truly "alien," though, so I use the word here only to lead into the next of Seth's larger concepts that I want to mention: that of probable realities, or probabilities, as Jane and I usually say. Not only does Seth stress the constant psychic motion of reincarnational and counterpart selves upon this earth we know—but he also tells us that each of those selves can move into other or parallel realities.
I quote him from Session 681 in Volume 1 of "Unknown" Reality:
"All probable worlds exist now. All probable variations on the most minute aspect in any reality exist now. You weave in and out of probabilities constantly, picking and choosing as you go along. The cells within your body do the same thing. So if Jane undergoes illness in this reality, in another she does not— but in between those extremes she also explores all stages of her illness in a series of probable universes, flashing among them in "no time at all," basically. . . . In some of those realitites I accompany her in various relationships. In others / am the one who becomes ill! In some I don't even physically coexist with her. But as Seth has said, since I live with her in this probable reality from which I write, then my existence is always at least probable within any of her realities. The same applies to me from Jane's standpoint. And although Seth hasn't said so yet (that I remember), I also think that within the spontaneous plan of probable realities each of us—anyone, that is—explores all aspects of sexuality and parenthood at the same time. Within the idea of probable realities, then, there are in number 66 able opportunities for redemption to take place, between or among creatures—or even between or among ideas—and in all manner of ways. In how many ways? Seth remarked a long time ago that we humans can at least approach the notion of infinity by considering the ramifications inherent within probabilities.
For my own amusement, in recent years I've often tried to objectify that statement by equating the possible number of probable realities with the current scientific estimate of the number of atoms in the universe: 1079, or a 1 followed by 79 zeroes. But even if that rather simple number is inconceivable to us it still won't do, of course, for it represents only a limit of measurement inside the "physical" universe we think we know. Within the limitless realms of consciousness, 1079 is still but a doorway to vastly greater imaginative quantities and qualities of either numbers or probable realities. Fascinating! There are multitudinous possibilities for a redemption—or equalization or love or forgiveness, say—to take place amid such a dazzling array of probable realities. As far as our understanding can go, such a redemptive quality can be psychic, physical, both, or simply based on explorations of feeling and accomplishment we have yet to know. Then beyond those human-oriented parameters must lie a host of probable realities involving changes in psychic and physical form: nonhuman aspects of ourselves that in ordinary terms we'd have great difficulty relating to. This discussion could be carried further into such realms, but instead I'll note that even here I don't conceive of anything that would prohibit at least some exchanges between certain of those far probable realities and our own mundane universe. It all depends upon where you want to stop in your thinking, upon what you can conceive of. . .
We've presented lengthy quotations from Seth on his Framework 1 and Framework 2 material both in his Mass Events and in Jane's God of Jane. His discussions on the subject are an excellent example of how a very creative idea, capable of helping many people, can arise from an attempt to deal with a personal situation—for on September 17, 1977,
Seth introduced his Frameworks 1 and 2 concept in a private session designed to help Jane contend with her physical symptoms. For Seth, Framework 1 is simply a term representing the everyday, linear, conscious "working reality" we take for granted, the one in which "time" and events automatically unfold in moment after undeniable moment. It's the milieu in which most of us unthinkingly live out our physical lives. Beyond Framework 1, however, exists Framework 2, and it represents the great timeless or simultaneous spacious present that's so dearly a manifestation of All That Is. All of our dreams, plans, thoughts, actions, and choices live in Framework 2; all flow from Framework 2 into Framework 1 according to our beliefs.
As Seth told us in that introductory session, over four and a half years ago, Jane's "body itself has nothing wrong with it except the application of beliefs. . . . Even if you think the body does have something wrong with it, then the necessary adjustments would be made in another kind of time [in Framework 2] that in Framework 1 would take no time at all—or, the amount of time you thought required." For emphasis I myself underlined that last phrase, because it's easy to miss how very important it really is: Our individual concept of the amount of time necessary to accomplish an action like a healing
will govern its progress. Then, a bit later, Seth made a statement that I've thought most ironic ever since: "In terms of creativity, however, Ruburt (Jane) has long been operating in Framework 2, and this session should help him make certain correlations so that he can automatically begin to use such methods in regard to his physical conditon."
There followed many sessions, both regular and private (or deleted, as we sometimes call them), in which Seth discussed Frameworks 1 and 2. As can happen when we're consciously too close to a deep-seated situation, some little time passed before Jane and I realized the obvious: It wasn't that we were unable to tune into Framework 2, say, for help in effecting a healing for her in the joint reality we'd created in Framework 1—but that in physical reality we were drawing from Framework 2 exactly what we wanted to, even if often on unconscious or unwitting levels. Again, a matter of choices, and hard truths to face. As I've tried to show in these essays, we didn't suspend our efforts to reach into that larger framework. In a variety of ways we kept trying to do just that through the screens of our emotions and intellects. In those terms,
communication between frameworks is unstoppable, really: I think that if one could halt the interchanges, physical death would result. For us, the learning processes were there for the changing anytime we decided that a physical illness was
"wrong." But it would be wrong only when we decided that we didn't need it anymore. I should note that Seth has briefly—very briefly—referred to the existence of Frameworks 3 and 4. He says, I believe, that initially his encounters with Jane take place in a Framework 3 environment. It's my own guess that Framework 4 might involve our communication—
through the first three frameworks—with some of those nonhuman probable realities I mentioned not long ago. But if the interactions between or among frameworks exist for everybody, in our terms, then as far as I'm concerned they exist for each thing as well—and I do mean the so-called "inanimate." (This isn't the place to go into it, but Seth maintains that for many reasons we arbitrarily decide what's living and nonliving.) Each reincarnational self, each counterpart self and probable self has its complement of frameworks. So does the most minute living or nonliving entity and the most gigantic. So, "probably," do most of the far-out probable realities one can imagine—for I won't go so far as to deny that some probable realities may exist without such framework structures. Strange onedimensional "flatlands" indeed! But in each case where those framework interactions operate, they help each creation, each presence, each essence or vital principle fulfill "a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive." In ways I can't even begin to describe here, all frameworks must ultimately be joined within the ineffable context of All That Is.
Early in this essay (which I began on May 7, 1982), I mentioned the series of sessions Seth gave in 1980 on his magical approach to reality, and the different approaches Jane and I took toward doing books on the subject. We were becoming so harried by her worsening physical symptoms when that material started to come through that she gave up working on Dreams and concentrated on those private sessions instead. For many months she considered doing a book on the magical approach (with my encouragement), and collected much information of her own for it. In other words, she viewed the book as helping herself as much as anyone else. Then when Seth and Jane both came through with material on her sinful self (see Essay No. 3 for April 16, 1982), those data took precedence over everything else. That was to be expected, of course, for by then our concentration was directed almost wholly into the area of symptoms. Jane didn't return to
work on Dreams until July 1981, when the two blocks of sinful-self
material had run their courses. By then, she'd held only one session for
Dreams in the last 13 months.
Her focus on her book about the magical approach never jelled
enough for her to carry it through, even though she continued
experimenting with it. Our own general psychological unease certainly
contributed to that failure, but Jane's writing became bogged down in
details about dates, quotations from old sessions, and elaborate studies
built upon our dream accounts and other psychic and daily records, for
example. Not her way of working, really, even though all of those
ingredients were— and are—excellent.
Before presenting the promised excerpts on the magical approach, I
want to note that Seth is simply saying that from Framework 2 (and
possibly from other frameworks) we draw whatever information we
want in whatever way we choose to focus upon it: positively,
negatively, magically, literally, skeptically, and so forth. As he told us in
a private session way back on February 26, 1972: "You get what you
concentrate upon. There is no other main rule." Every reincarnational
and counterpart and probable self, located in whatever neatly packaged
compartment of time—past, present, or future—can utilize the magical
approach as a matter of choice, then. That simple declaration of use
involves a world of understanding and experience, however, and one
that Jane and 1 have found extremely difficult to initiate in the way we
consciously think we want to—although according to their letters, at
least, many of our readers are able to work with various portions of the
Seth material with little or no trouble at all.
Seth, from the private session for August 17, 1980—the third one in
his series on the magical approach:
"The magical approach takes it for granted, in the simplest terms,
that the life of any individual will fulfill itself, will develop and mature,
that the environment and the individual are uniquely suited and work
together. This sounds very simple. In verbal terms, however, those are
the beliefs (if you will) of each c-e-1-1 (spelled). They are imprinted in
each chromosome, in each
70 Jane Roberts
atom. They provide a built-in faith that pervades each living creature,
each snail, each hair on your head. Those ingrained beliefs are of
course biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and
development.
"Each cell believes in a better tomorrow (quietly, with amusement). I
am, I admit, personifying our cell here, but the statement has a firm
truth. Furthermore, each cell contains within itself a belief and an
understanding of its own inevitability. It knows it lives beyond its
death, in other words. . . ."
And: "The magical approach takes it for granted that the human
being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the
animals do, whether or not those purposes are understood. The magical
approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a
fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow. The magical
approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within
each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally. Overall, that
approach operates in your world. If it did not, there would be no world.
If the worst was bound to happen, as the scientists certainly think, even
evolution in their terms would have been impossible, of course —a nice
point to put in somewhere (all intently, but also with considerable
humor).
"You needed this background, for I want to build up the atmosphere
in which this magical approach can be comprehended."
In the first essay I described how Dr. Mandali had told Jane that her
thyroid gland had "simply ceased functioning," and how the doctor had
started to cautiously rejuvenate my wife's endocrine system with 50
micrograms daily of a synthetic thyroid hormone. Jane is supposed to
take these pills in some still-to-be-determined strength for the rest of
her life (although in his session for April 16 Seth had explained that her
thyroid gland "has repaired itself" on several occasions; see the essay
for the same date.)
After nine weeks, however, Jane and I are more than ready for an
increase in the strength of the pills, for she obviously needs the boost.
I've mentioned several times her dozing or falling asleep outright in her
chair. Dr. Mandali agrees that the low thyroid activity is directly related
to these episodes. Yet there's
-
Dreams, "Evolution,'' and Value Fulfillment 71
more involved with the dozing—effects I haven't gone into yet, and can
only briefly refer to here. We haven't discussed these with her doctor,
either—clear signs of the secretive aspects of our own natures—but
Jane believes she's had a number of part-hallucinatory, part-psychic
experiences as a result of the thyroid-medication situation.
"I've had several new experiences with altered states of consciousness,"
she wrote in labored script, "and these are quite different
than anything I've done before. For this reason they are difficult to
classify. . . ." Also, she's indulged in long conversations with me—and
on occasion with certain friends—when we apparently were present in
out-of-body states. Related here are actions she thought she was
participating in with me, say, yet when she "woke up," she discovered
we hadn't done any of those things. She's referred often to "gaps in my
consciousness" while dozing. "I don't know what I was doing in my
chair," she said at 11:05 A.M. yesterday; she'd fallen asleep after telling
me she had to use the commode. "I don't like the way the thyroid
business is making me feel. ... I feel like I'm in your way, or in life's
way. . . ." She had certainly been depressed on that occasion, and I'd
tried to cheer her up.
In addition, Jane has described some unique versions of out-of-body
episodes that have grown out of the thyroid-medication connection.
These haven't been like the typical experience, wherein she'd feel her
psyche rising out of a physical organism that was securely anchored by
gravity to her chair to the floor, for example. Instead, she had felt her
body in the chair lift most convincingly toward the ceiling. . . .
Sometimes those events became curious indeed—for in her chair Jane
Hipped over and approached the ceiling of our bedroom feet first.
Below her, then, was an upside-down television screen, and a pair of
windows with the cafe curtains at the top instead of the bottom. Not
only that, but with her double vision Jane sometimes saw two television
screens and four windows! She hasn't seen her own body sitting below
her yet, though, as can happen in the out-of-body state, and she hasn't
seen or talked with any deceased individuals.
At this time Jane doesn't know just how, or to what extent,
hallucination was involved in any of these episodes, if at all; sometimes
the dream state definitely was. But the experiences
72 Jane Roberts
I've mentioned here, plus others, have uncovered some surprising new
dimensions of her abilities, and later she wants to thoroughly
investigate and write about them.

ESSAY 8
Sunday, May 23, 1982
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.")
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.
What are human beings, anyhow? 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.
(Including their own consciousnesses? I can't help wondering!)
Portions of the latest scientific literature I have on hand, particularly
that produced by physicists, contain references that not long ago would
have been branded as metaphysical, or even worse.
But I note with some amusement that science absorbs such heresies
by weaving them into and developing them out of current establishment
thinking—concepts, say, like the many-worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics. Put very simplisti-cally, this "quantum approach"
allows for the theme that each of us inhabits but one of innumerable
probable or parallel worlds.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 73
Even the theory of evolution is invoked, for those other worlds are said
to evolve in parallel with the one we inhabit. Yet there is no answer
within quantum mechanics as to how or why one's personal identity
chooses to follow a certain probable pathway, and consciousness per se
is not considered. (Some physicists, however, have implied that
subatomic particles—photons—communicate with each other as they
take their separate but "sympathetic" paths.) Pardon my irony here, but
Seth has always dealt with the ramifications of consciousness and
maintained also that we do not inhabit just one probable world, but
constantly move among them by choice—and by the microsecond, if
one chooses.
(I'll add that both Seth and quantum theory predict the spontaneous
creation of particles of matter out of or in "empty" space —events that,
it seems to me, go against some of the laws of conservation. One of
these states that matter cannot be created from nothing. Seth says this
spontaneous creation happens all of the time through the actions of
consciousness. In the theoretical quantum world, however, certain
conditions are needed: superheavy nuclei amid strong electrical fields,
and so forth.)
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. We feel no sense of corroboration.
As I wrote to a fan just last week: "No matter what he or she may think
of it personally, no reputable scientist is going to publicly espouse a
belief in the Seth material. Certainly not career-wise. Not for a long
time yet, in our opinion, and for many reasons."
Some day, for our own amusement—but hardly with the idea of
convincing others, let alone influential scientists—I'll ask Seth to
comment upon whatever connections may exist between his ideas and
those embedded in quantum mechanics. I'm sure he's quite entertained
by the whole situation—yet also compassionate toward the human
strivings involved. He's never mentioned the
74 Jane Roberts
concept, nor have we asked him to. I think that Jane has little (if any)
interest in whether any connections might exist between the Seth
material and the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. Any
discussion of this in our books is strictly my own doing, my own
speculation: I think it fun to play creatively with a theory that is, after
all, there for anyone to consider, from whatever standpoint. And I
maintain that the theory of quantum mechanics does contain strong
paranormal aspects, whether or not science admits this.
I also think that if asked Seth would point out that since the concept
of quantum mechanics is based upon the idea that everything we
"know'"—matter, energy, our sensual information —is made up of
quanta, or the interactions of insubstantial fields that in turn, and quite
paradoxically, produce very active subatomic packets or particles, then
quantum mechanics is at least analogous with his statements that
basically the universe is composed of consciousness itself. But I think
that the continuum of consciousness, or All That Is, contains not only
the phenomena of quantum mechanics, but also Seth's nonphysical EE
(electromagnetic energy) units, and his CU's (or units of
consciousness). In those terms, then, quantum mechanics is a theory
that doesn't penetrate deeply enough into basic reality, even if physicists
these days are basing their unified field theories upon quantum
thinking. (These theories are themselves quite incomplete, since at this
time they incorporate only three of the four basic interactions in nature:
electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. So far,
gravitation remains outside all attempts at integration.)
To me, consciousness or All That Is is an omnipresent, really
indescribable awareness that to us human beings has no limits, "one"
containing not only the attributes of time and space and of all feeling,
thought, and objectivity, but numberless other properties,
manifestations, and probabilities that lie outside our very limited
interior and exterior perceptions. In terms of physics, then, reality is
still unknowable.
Even if she's to remain in something like her present impaired state,
Jane said as I wrote the above paragraph, still it seems we're better off
for having the Seth material than not: "I'd sure as hell rather take my
chances with it than without!." she exclaimed, if somewhat ruefully.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 75
Six days ago, on Mav 18, and to our great relief, Dr. Mandali finally
stepped up the strength of the thyroid hormone pills she is prescribing
for my wife—from 50 to 70 micrograms daily. "But the benefits are
still weeks away," she told Jane. 1 ne increase followed the positive
results of a blood test the doctor had ordered a few days previously: A
hospital technician had come to our hill house to draw blood from Jane
—performing a "phlebotomy service." Now Jane must have such a test
before each increase in her thyroid medication.
In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal
questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has
described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer,
were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper
New York State, in 1928. They were divorced in 1931, when Jane was
two years old. (Jane didn't see her father again—he came from a broken
home himself—until she was 21.) By the time Jane was three years old,
her mother was having serious problems with rheumatoid arthritis.
Indeed, the daughter has only one conscious memory of seeing her
mother on her feet. All we have are a few photographs Del took of
Marie not long after their marriage. They show a beautiful woman
wearing a bathing suit, standing on a beach in Florida.
Some of our other books contain more information on how-Jane
grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and
embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted
over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these
were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out
of "work" when town officials would shut down the "houses," try to
clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman
who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter
through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She
would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and
pretending she'd committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time
in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he
was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn't
seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn't
urge her to do so, either. For my part, I'd always felt distinctly uneasy in
Marie's presence on the few occasions we met.
None of the doctors we talked to would say outright that rheu76
Jane Roberts
matoid arthritis is inherited—only that "it seems to run in families," and
that more women than men develop it. Even today we saw a wellknown
specialist say the same thing on a national television program.
Yet except for her mother's case there's no history of arthritis in Jane's
family, outside of a "routine" trace of rheumatism in a couple of
grandparents. The curious question arises: Why, then, did first Marie
and then Jane begin showing their symptoms? (As closely as we can
determine, Marie was about 26 years old at their onset. Jane was 35;
she'll be 53 tomorrow.)
My own belief, which I've held for some 15 years, is that in Jane's
case at least the young girl's psychological conditioning was far more
important—far more damaging, in those terms—than any physical
tendency to inherit. I think that Marie's domineering rage at the world
(chosen by her, never forget) deeply penetrated Jane's developing
psyche, and—again in those terms— caused her to set up repressive,
protective inner barriers that could be activated and transformed into
physical signs at any time, under certain circumstances. Out of many
possibilities, the daughter's conditioning was psychically chosen and
accepted, and ihrough that focus she meant to interact with the mother's
behavior. This, to me, is an example of the way a course of probable
activity can be agreed upon by all involved.
I even think there's good medical evidence these days for my view of
Jane's "symptoms," as we've called them for many years. In recent years
rheumatoid arthritis has been found to be an amazingly complicated
disease involving a great number of the body's immune factors. In the
progression of rheumatoid arthritis one's own immunologic system
turns on the body and damages it. A very simplified explanation is that
in a process repeated over and over, a variety of defender cells called
phagocytic monocytes turn into macrophages, or scavenger cells that, in
turn, release enzymes which consume healthy joint tissue. The resulting
debris attracts more monocytes, and so on. An inflammatory
accumulation of cellular detritus finally destroys the joint's cartilage and
eats away bone.
This isn't all, however, for experiments have now shown that the
brain/mind connection can influence immunity, through stressful
conditioning cither enhancing its effects or subduing them. Until a very
few years ago it was medical dogma that the
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 77
immune system was entirely independent of any "outside" influence.
But recently certain brain chemicals were discovered paired off with
cellular chemical "receptors" in the immune system, and researchers
expect to find many more of these associations. In physical terms, then,
I think it quite possible that in Jane's case long-term stress, beginning in
her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system.
Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter's
birth had caused the mother's illness. Well before she was 10 years old
Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis, an inflammation of
the large intestine/bowel that is often associated with emotional stress.
By her early teens she had an overactive thyroid gland. Marie—and
others—told her that she would burn herself out and die before she was
20 years old. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses
(which she seldom wore). Finally in her mid-30s there came the
beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane's immune system greatly
increased its attack upon her body.
(I believe that current medical thinking about the immune system and
arthritis will be much enlarged upon by the time this book is published,
though I haven't given that much thought to just what new information
may be acquired. However, I do think I'm accurate concerning the
connections between Jane's early psychological conditioning and her
present challenges.)
A moment ago, 1 referred to the way all involved with my wife could
agree upon a course of probable activity. There are as many possibilities
—and probabilities—as one can think of. I can hardly begin to list them
all here. In Framework 2, for example, Marie, pregnant with Jane,
could have decided with her daughter-to-be upon certain sequences of
action to be pursued during their lives. Or in Framework 2 the two of
them could have cooperated upon such a decision before Marie's birth,
even. If reincarnation is to be considered, their disturbed relationship
this time might reflect past connections of a different yet analogous
nature, and may also have important effects upon any future ones.
Additionally, Jane could have chosen the present relationship to
eventually help her temper her reception of and reaction to the Seth
material, making her extra-cautious; this, even though she'd seen to it
ahead of time that she would be born with that certain combination of
fortitude and innocence neces78
Jane Roberts
sary for her to press on with her chosen abilities. She could have made
a pact ahead of time to "borrow" certain strong mystical qualities from
her maternal grandfather, who was part French Canadian and part
Canadian Indian (specific tribe unknown by us), and with whom she
strongly identified as a child. And Jane's resolve, her will that,
according to Seth, "is amazingly strong" (in Volume 2 of "Unknown"
Reality, see the 713th session for October 21, 1974), may buttress the
understanding and determination of one or more of her counterparts in
this life; she may meet (or have met) such an individual; another may
live across an ocean, say, with no meeting ever to take place in physical
terms.
In all of this I've barely hinted at the complicated relationships
involving other family members from the past, present, and future. The
mathematical combinations possible are vast. And what's my role in all
of this, for heaven's sake (to make a pun)? Or that of members of my
own family? What part do I play, and have yet to play, in Jane's
redemption—as well as my own—and on what level or levels? When
did the two of us make our own pacts in Framework 2 (or other
frameworks), and how will they work out in Framework 1? But it's
even possible that all together Marie, Jane, her grandfather, and I set up
the original situation before the physical births of any of us—and in
some probable reality (if not in this one) we did do just that! Words
become terribly inadequate tools to express what I feel and am trying to
write here, for I want to record at once every combination of
relationships I can conceive of. . . .
Whatever the initial course of action agreed to in just this probable
reality by everyone involved, from whatever point in the "past," in
Framework 1 the participants have subjected it to an almost infinite
variety of choices and modifications through the years: but always—
always—within nature's great structure, and accompanied by the utter
freedom of each person concerned to accept, reject, abort, or change the
whole affair from their individual perspective at any moment. . . .
To return to just Jane and Marie, then, I think that their long-range
cyclical behavior and interaction, no matter how painful it may seem on
the surface, represented deep challenges set up by mother and daughter
for certain overall purposes that they wanted to experience, separately
and jointly. Not only would the
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 79
two women be emotionally tested and enriched across physical and
psychological time, but so would their entities or whole selves.
One of their common creations within the same time scheme was
rheumatoid arthritis, of course, for Jane began to show her version of it
some eight years before Marie died. That mutual illness obviously
became a deeply charged subject for both of them. However, with that
fine stubbornness I mentioned in the first essay, Jane never told Marie
of her own affliction; since the two no longer saw each other,
consciously Marie never knew. Both of us think she did know
psychically, though. I even think that mother and daughter shared the
same case of arthritis— there weren't two separate instances of it.
"Oh, why did you have to put that in!" Jane cried in anguish as she
read that last sentence. It happened to mark the end of my day's work,
which I'd showed to her after supper. "It's a fantastic idea, but—"
"Well, I know it's a good idea," 1 said. "I think people do it all the
time. Something like it must happen in epidemics, too. But I didn't
mean to hurt you—don't pay any attention to it."
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 all seems very
complicated, certainly, but as I manipulate in everyday life I don't
consciously dwell upon all of the ramifications I've mentioned in these
essays. Instead I try to hold them in the back of my mind as parts of a
greater whole. So, 1 believe, does Jane.
Granted that our species' best human understanding of "the mystery
of life" and of the universe is exceedingly inadequate,
80 Jane Roberts
still Jane and I do not think that nature is totally objective, indifferently
cruel, or simply uncaring, as science would have us believe. (We also
have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its "survival of
the fittest" dogmas, but this isn't the place to go into those subjects.) Far
more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that
this "nature" we've helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is,
and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action
has meaning and is truly redeemed. We are not dwarfed. How could we
be? For if, as I wrote earlier, Jane and I agree with the ancient idea that
"all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole," we also
think that in some fashion the whole is enclosed within each of its parts.
Science calls the idea holon-omy, but Seth has been saying the same
thing for years without ever mentioning the word. Jane didn't even
know it.
I've written these passages knowing, of course, that many of Seth's
points and our own are at best theories, if very intriguing ones. Some
may contend that they're not even theories, but only hypotheses—
tentatively inferred explanations requiring much further
experimentation and examination. Worse still (I write with some
humor), they may "only" be ideas. Whatever their status, Jane and I
take heart from the letters sent us by many thousands of readers, who
have time and again explained how they put the Seth material to use in
very positive physical and mental ways. (Except for a few early
instances when we inadvertently lost some of our correspondence,
we've saved all of it. The cartons are piling up in a cellar storeroom. We
hope that eventually our "fan mail" will serve as the foundation for a
study concerning the ways in which society reacts to new ideas,
through the viewpoints, say, of science, philosophy and psychology,
religion, the "occult," skepticism, generalized deep curiosity, and
mental illness. Very abusive responses are also involved, as well as
surprising near-illiterate ones.)
Because of its very nature, however, and even though it comprises
enough "evidence" in favor of a generalized principle that explains the
workings of certain phenomena, a theory inevitably contains errors,
since it's based upon incomplete data to begin with. It's therefore
vulnerable to later theories through which investigators attempt to
reduce or eliminate those errors. A continuous refining of detail takes
place in the search for a final
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 81
truth that can become "fact." (I also note that that truth being sought
may end up as so abstract a quality that it loses its emotional and
intellectual meanings for us, and moves out of our generalized
perception. I'm noting, then, that we can analyze something right out of
our own reality by ultimately declaring it to be impossible—when
actually it, and other versions of it, continue to exist in related probable
realities.)
Considering the views of Seth, Jane, and me, reincarnational and
counterpart existences and their ramifications may enter in as portions
of such a refining process as we attempt to search out the dimensions of
consciousness. This may be true whether or not we believe in past and
future lives, and/or counterparts, yet I can see no way such postulated
manifestations can be "proven" at this time.
I think the beliefs the three of us hold are very creative ones; we
accept them on that basis; they are as good "proofs" as we can currently
get, and offer their own answers by sparking us into new ways of trying
to make sense out of our reality. Science and philosophy will not agree
with any of this, I know—at least for the most part, for I've read that
there's never an idea so wild that it can't find a home in the mind of
some scientist or philosopher. Jane and I aren't so naive as to think that
we can offer any hard proofs for what we believe, and certainly Seth
doesn't worry about it. Not even when I play around with his ideas
relative to quantum theory can such proof be found—yet I let Jane's
"amazingly strong" will be the measuring and observing device that
automatically causes "waves" of knowing or consciousness—in
Framework 2, for example—to coalesce into the "particles" that make
up the physical forms she perceives as her reality in Framework 1,
either psychically from a distance or right here.

ESSAY 9
Monday, May 31, 1982
Just over nine weeks have passed now since I brought my wife home
from the hospital. And just last week (after another routine blood test)
Jane's doctor again raised the dosage of the
82 Jane Roberts
synthetic thyroid hormone she's taking, this time from 75 to 100
micrograms per day.
In the first essay I referred to Jane's unique combination of
stubbornness, innocence, and mysticism, and in that respect nothing has
changed. In spite of her horror at the medical practices and suggestions
she's encountered, and in spite of her dismay at the physical damage the
arthritis has caused in her temporal body, Jane will give up nothing until
she—and/or her whole self—get out of the entire illness syndrome
exactly what she wants to get. She has an incredible stubborn patience
with physical life. This quality has sustained her throughout all of her
challenges as well as her successes, and I think it must have been
particularly important during her early frightening years with her
mother, Marie. Her determination even shows somehow in photographs
taken when she was of preschool age. Jane learned to refuse to strike
back at the invalid Marie's rage and sarcasm, to inhibit her spontaneity
and impulses, and so habits of repression entered in. Yet she was—and
is—free of guile and sophistication.
She learned of the concept of sin through her intense early
involvement with the Roman Catholic church. It's easy to see how, in
Jane's case at least, the church's teachings about sin began to grow as
the innocent child started protecting her spontaneous natural mysticism
—that prime attribute she'd chosen for exploration in this life. I don't
think of her "sinful self" could have risen to such prominence without
feeding upon those repressions, clamping down more and more within
the psyche as the years passed, continuing its misguided but "wellmeaning
attempt to protect the creative self . . . to keep a hand of
caution on its course lest the centuries of men's belief in sin carried a
true weight that I shared but could not comprehend." And so, of couse,
the sinful self's own overreactions, although carried out without
"malice," became themselves a portion of Jane's long-range learning
challenges this time.
Until she became so ill that she was practically forced to go into the
hospital, I'd always felt that my wife's single-minded yet literal focus of
intent was capable of lasting however long it took to reach a particular
goal—whether for five minutes or fifty years. Her illness led me to
question that premise, but now it's back in place. Jane may not be
always conscious of what she wants as she confronts her own
projections in physical reality,
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 83
but strong portions of her psyche are (and I think this applies to
everyone).
When in the earlier days of our marriage I used to tell her that she
had her "symptoms" regardless of what I thought or wanted, she would
deny it. Yet I thought she did, and so I was driven to grope for larger
understandings. 1 had to learn that if I shared a marriage in which my
wife had developed a chronic illness, then certain portions of me had
also participated in that joint creation. Eventually nothing made sense
to me otherwise. I believe implicitly now that each one of us does
create our own reality. "Interactions with others do occur, of course,"
Seth told us long ago, "yet there are none that you do not accept or
draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions." (In Chapter 1 of
The Nature of Personal Reality, see the 613th session, for September
11, 1972.) And Jane and I are still exploring, still searching—together
—for the factors within those larger frameworks of existence which
make qualities like illness possible and understandable.
Throughout these essays I've been unable to go very far into most of
the subjects Jane and I wanted to discuss, to do much more than
approximate in words a welter of feelings and actions. There's much that
I haven't even mentioned, so to that extent this record is quite
incomplete. And regardless of whether our space and time are limited
here, still it seems impossible to really penetrate to the deeper core of
any subject or belief. Perhaps if Jane and I could do that, a great
metamorphosis would take place: The closer we moved through
probabilities toward All That Is, the more the tensions associated with
the subject in question would transform themselves into profoundly
joyous answers and challenges.
I've hardly mentioned our dreams. As related to Jane's physical
symptoms, they have remained largely unconscious phenomena: We
knew all along that we were often having "symptom dreams," but didn't
recall them consistently enough to be able to do much conscious work
with them. That's still the case. Obviously, we made our choices in that
respect long ago: As far as the deeply charged subject of Jane's illness
was concerned, we decided to keep most of our dream work on
intuitive and unconscious levels. We took from Framework 2, then,
exactly what we wanted to.
but that simple statement also means that our dream work
84 Jane Roberts
relative to Jane's challenges has often been powerfully abetted by Seth
in many of the 347 completely private and 159 partially private
sessions he's given us since November 1965. Much of the fascinating
and informative material in which Seth discussed various aspects of
Jane's symptoms is generalized enough for publication, and could help
others, but because of its very intense personal connotations it's a
project we haven't started yet. (Not that I haven't presented excerpts
from a few of those sessions in other Seth books.)
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? How am I involved in any
of these, and how are Jane's and my families—and reaching how many
generations back in ordinary time? To what extent does Jane's physical
infirmity mushroom into other probable realities through the dream
state? 1 think that Jane herself can deal with many such questions;
possibly tuning into them on her own, should she decide to, or through
the mediation of her "psychic library." A book could automatically
develop out of the investigation—even, I joked with Jane, a "worldview"
book.
As Jane wrote in Chapter 1 of The World View of Paul Cezanne: A
Psychic Interpretation (1977): "Seth maintains that each of us forms a
psychic world view, composed of our own ideas, feelings, and beliefs,
as we encounter our private corner of reality." The world view of every
creature that has ever lived continues to exist, and can be turned into
under certain conditions. So can the psychic patterns of those now
living, and even of those not yet born. Yet none of this means that
contact will be made directly with the creator of the world view in
question—only the bank of experiences originated through that
individual's unique version of reality. And since world views are far
from being
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 85
static, interactions and combinations involving all time periods take
place among them constantly.
Jane's book would be called The World View of Jane Roberts, of
course. And, I thought, why not? If she could tune into the world views
of the philosopher and psychologist William James, and the artist Paul
Cezanne, why couldn't she do it for the writer and mystic Jane Roberts?
The results would be even more intimate than those in James and
Cezanne. A work like that would furnish invaluable clues concerning
her redemption, on many levels, and mine as well.
The morning after showing her this material, 1 asked Jane what she
thought about such a book. "I don't like to talk about it," she said, "but
I've been potting around with the idea—getting some thoughts about
something like that. But I'd rather not discuss it."
"Okay," I said. I was pleasantly surprised by her reaction, for her
reluctance to talk about a certain subject often was a sign that she'd end
up doing something creative with it.
Actually, of course, each second of any creature's life represents a
creative act of the keenest sort, for it signals that physical entity's
decision to continue living in physical terms. I think Jane has made
some remarkable gains since leaving the hospital. Our friends all tell
her she looks better each time they see her. She has beautiful clear skin.
(Irish skin, I joke with her, although she's really but a quarter Irish.) She
has additional freedom of movement in various joints, such as her knees
and hips, although she's far from being able to walk. She can now type
—if rather awkwardly—perhaps half a page of copy per day. "During
those frightening-enough hospital episodes I learned under combat
conditions, so to speak, how to trust my body," she wrote one day—an
apt-enough analogy, I think.
She's also done her first two colored-ink sketches, using one of the 4"
x 6" watercolor pads I'd bought for her last year. In these sketches, with
their simple but very effective patterns of line and primary colors, Jane
somehow bypasses her everyday challenges and very clearly reflects
her basically mystical view of the world. She does the same with the
little poems she's worked upon, most of which she regards as being not
only incomplete but quite inconsequential: "I wouldn't even type them
up, like you did," she commented. Yet I like lines like: "Let the dirge be
86 Jane Roberts
heard, sweeping all things before it," and: "I've developed a sense of
death, when someone takes a few steps off the known path almost
unknowing," and: "I breathed in the public: air and it became private."
Jane also sings in Sumari occasionally, and has written down a few
short songs in that "language" without translating them. I've been
careful to collect for our own records the prose, sketches, poetry, and
Sumari she's produced during this time of healing and testing.
For Jane's situation continues to be a time of testing. Writing with
her right hand is still quite difficult for her. She's made no effort to
learn to write with her better-functioning left hand, as I suggested she
do a couple of months ago, so I've dropped that idea. "But I could start
another book tomorrow," she said, "only I don't know what good it
would do. . . ."
She has a lesser degree of double vision these days, but still may
require surgery to correct imbalances in her optic muscles. An
experimental treatment that's just been announced, involving injections
into certain eye muscles of a drug derived from the toxin of botulism,
may ultimately benefit her; the procedure, which apparently has no side
effects, can eliminate the need for surgery by encouraging the
realignment of the eyes. Jane is still very much against drugs and
surgery, though—even while she's well aware of the contradictions in
her beliefs as she continues to take daily the synthetic thyroid hormone
and the liquid salicylate medication prescribed by Dr. Mandali. In his
session for April 16 (see the essay for the same date), Seth told us that
on several occasions Jane's thyroid gland has "repaired itself," but we
don't think that has fully happened yet this time. In a recent private
session (for May 10) Seth told us: "The gland is activating itself by
itself—off and on, so to speak, giving a sputtering effect. Overall, the
body is exploring the best rhythm of metabolism, and fitting itself in
with the medication."
(Which makes us wonder: Just how will Jane's body let us know
when it finally wants to divest itself entirely of the thyroid supplement?
We're telling ourselves that that little challenge will automatically work
itself out at the right time. We haven't posed the question to Seth.)
The quotation from Seth just presented will certainly lead the reader
to wonder about additional sessions we may have acDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 87
quired from him since April 16, and from Jane since April 20 (see the
essays for those dates). The answer is that we've held 13 more sessions
—4 of them given by Jane "herself," and 9 by Seth speaking through
her. The last session in that baker's dozen was delivered by Seth on
June 7. Most of the sessions are rather short, and not all of them are
strictly personal. For those that do concern us I've written lengthy
notes, often recording the minutiae of our daily lives for our own
reference.
Even if those sessions can't be quoted in these essays because of the
obvious space limitations, I can note that Jane and Seth each continued
to develop the themes already laid down in the sessions that have been
presented. 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. The material in the sessions is exhilarating, painful, enlightening,
perceptive, frustrating, and maddening by turn—and sometimes, it
seems, all of those things at once. 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.
For if the information arouses such mixed emotions in Jane and me,
surely it will do so in others too, serving as an impetus or goad to learn
more even while it highlights one's strengths and weaknesses. You
create your own reality. The anger I'd felt at Jane and myself when she
began recording her sinful-self material (see the essay for April 16) has
long since dissipated. I won't claim that residues of it may not be buried
within my psyche (and within Jane's), but it's very difficult to stay mad
when one agrees with the simple but most basic and profound idea that
you do create your own reality.
At times Jane still becomes depressed, just as she still dozes in her
chair. While at work in my own writing room I occasionally hear her
talking to herself as she sits at her card table in the living room, just
down the hall: I've learned that on such occasions, she's asleep and
often dreaming aloud, solving the psychological equations continually
arising among the levels of her
88 Jane Roberts
psyche as she pursues her chosen learning processes. I help her as
much as I can. While I spend all of this time working on these essays
for Dreams, I'm always afraid I'm leaving her alone too much. Jane
does get lonely, she says.
Of course these essays reflect our particular chosen stances in life,
both with and without the Seth material. I know that to some we're sure
to have appeared slow in putting to use much of the material, but in a
most basic respect we're way ahead in the situation: If we hadn't almost
instantaneously begun to encourage the flow of information from Seth
when Jane started to express it some 18 years ago, and to write it down,
then it wouldn't even exist—at least in its present form. So we do take
credit for doing some things right. Learning experiences can show
themselves in a vast number of ways, then, and independently of
sequential time, too; and if Jane and I don't like certain aspects of the
realities we've created, we can try to change them, together and
separately.
Already we've given up many old living patterns since Jane came
home from the hospital, and in a strange way we now have the freedom
to focus daily upon just a few main things. We've been reminded anew
—more accurately, we've taught ourselves— that physical life itself is a
wondrous medium of expression, and terrifically varied in that respect.
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).
Since I can no longer work for hours at a time on the Seth books, or
with the Seth material, I'm training myself to "put out" copy in
concentrated bursts of energy that are usually of an hour's duration, say.
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. Once again I'm becoming
aware of my dreams, and so is Jane. I haven't been able to get back to
painting since Jane left the hospital, and I've had to hire help to mow
the grass. Nor have I resumed the midnight walks I used to take over
the hilly streets of our neighborhood;
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 89
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. Jane's nurse now
visits but twice a week, which is all that's necessary (my wife's decubiti
are under control, for example).
At the request of Dr. Mandali, a few days ago Jane underwent her
routine phlebotomy, or bloodletting, here at the house. Today (on June
18), the doctor informed us by telephone that as one result of the test
we can increase Jane's thyroid hormone dosage from 100 to 125
micrograms—a most welcome development, for we hope it will add to
her daily energy. Yet there was unwelcome news, too—for the test also
showed that the level of liquid salicylate medication (the aspirin
substitute) in Jane's blood is too low. She's been taking that product four
times a day for almost 16 weeks (see the first essay). Dr. Mandali
instructed us to put Jane back on aspirin, to keep any arthritic pain and
inflammation under control: "You can take up to sixteen tablets a day."
Jane rejected that total at once, feeling it's far too high, and
announced that she'll probably go back to her old routine of eight to ten
aspirin a day. We're angry and dismayed. It's very unsettling for us to
learn that the prescribed medication isn't doing its job after all. It is, I
remarked somewhat bitterly, another sign of the frustrating, mixed
results one must learn to expect, at least in some instances, from the
imperfect practice of medicine. To treat rheumatoid arthritis with
aspirin} We'd always found that incredible. Yet it's still the best way to
go, Dr. Mandali said, even with the new anti-inflammatory,
nonsteroidal drugs that the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration) has released to the marketplace recently, for often they
produce more side effects than aspirin. And her advice is reinforced by
published material I've collected lately for our files.
It seems that once again we must learn the hard way that in Jane's
case any improvements we achieve are going to come from within
ourselves (for I'm certainly as involved in and "responsible" for her
illnesses as she is). 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 secre-tiveness and our desires to be as selfsufficient
as possible—even with Jane's very dependent situation.
Different modes of behav90
Jane Roberts
ior 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!).
So, although I think that Jane has made some "remarkable gains"
during recent weeks, I also think that basically she has yet to resolve
the entire issue of her illnesses—or even whether to continue physical
life. Seth put it beautifully a couple of months ago in the session for
April 12—the first time Jane spoke for him since leaving the hospital—
and I return to it again and again. See the essay for April 16: "The
entire issue (of Jane's living) had been going on for some time, and the
argument— the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing
its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its
own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. Life decisions are
often made in just such a fashion. With Ruburt they carried a psychic
and physical logic and economy. . . ."
Obviously, Jane's deliberations over whether to continue physical life
are much easier to appreciate when she's depressed and/ or physically
uncomfortable, and during those times I can sense the fluctuations in
her examination of her psyche. Portions of her are still quite
deliberately thinking it all over, I'm sure, although she doesn't mention
this outside the session frameworks she provides for Seth and herself.
"I probably didn't want to write any more," she dictated in her own
session for May 27. " I feared I'd lost all inspiration—that 20 years of
answers weren't enough, and that perhaps my life had no place to go if
that were the case. I plan to work with the rest of that sinful-self
material. . . ."
But she hasn't begun to do so yet.
I should add that I don't think Jane has started to "set. . . aside" the
medical interpretation regarding her "arthritis situation," as Seth
suggested she might do when he came through on April 12. (That
session is presented in the essay for April 16.) Any decision Jane makes
about altering the deeply set beliefs involved in her condition will
require the cooperation of a number of portions of her psyche,
including her sinful self, and it
.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 91
appears that at this time neither of us is ready to try achieving that kind
of overall effect. Our fear of failure undoubtedly plays a strong part
here. Ironically, Jane's sinful self is one of the main creators of and
participants in her illness syndrome, so any beneficial changes she can
bring about will first call for a major shift in the attitude of that very
stubborn portion of her psyche. It will be a triumph indeed if and when
we can create an alteration like that. And all of this presupposes that
each of us will be ready to draw "new facts" into our daily lives from
Framework 2.
At my age (63), then, I'm learning once again that I can't live Jane's
life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and
psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to.
Nor could she do that for me. On many levels that kind of psychic
interference is quite simply ignored by the individual in question, and
rightly so. Jane's determination would see to her own protection in any
case. And her innate mystical nature must fully know and accept that
the time, manner, and method of her physical death, whenever it occurs,
is as much a part of her body's life as its life is. I deeply believe that her
psyche would insist that she doesn't need any sort of basic protection by
me (or anyone else) to begin with— only understanding. I live daily
with the proposition that my wife is in the process of making profound
decisions, and that once she's made them she'll respond accordingly
both physically and mentally.
In that sense Jane's whole self or entity accepts her actions
completely, as part of the learning processes available to "it" through
her individuality—nor do I mean it does so in any passive or remote
sense at all, but in the most intimate, sensitive terms possible, and also,
probably, in ways we cannot appreciate now. At that moment of joining
with her whole self, whenever her "death" does take place, all will be
resolved with the finest creativity and understanding, for I believe that
Jane herself will certainly continue "living" as an individual.
I also believe that these kinds of challenges—involving decisions
about whether to continue physical life—have always existed for every
creature on earth (just as they have for the earth itself as a living
entity). Jane and I have no idea of how our personal story is going to
work out, but we do want to tell it.
92 Jane Roberts
Apropos of the material I've been covering in these pages, 1 want to
close this essay with quotations from two sessions that I've always
thought are among the best Seth has given. These sessions still live, and
in them he reinforces the idea that each of us does create our own
reality. Both can be found in Chapter 1 of Personal Reality.
From Session 610 for June 7, 1972: "You always know what you are
doing, even when you do not realize it. Your eye knows it sees, though
it cannot see itself except through the use of reflection. In the same way
the world as you see it is a reflection of what you are, a reflection not in
glass but in three-dimensional reality. You project your thoughts,
feelings, and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the
outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you
are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections."
And from Session 613 for September 11, 1972: "Interactions with
others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or
draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in
each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it.
In the most miraculous fashion you are given the gift of creating your
experience."

ESSAY 10
Wednesday, June 23, 1982
Finally, since I opened the first essay with a line from one of Jane's
songs in Sumari, I think it appropriate to close the last essay with
Sumari, too.
This time, though, I have the translation of a whole composition to
present. Jane spontaneously gave voice to her song yesterday afternoon
while sitting in the glass-enclosed front porch of our hill house. The
day was mild and sunny and breezy, and I'd opened all of the windows
for her. The rich green lawn sloped down to the great maple and the
sumac trees lining the road. I hadn't asked her to do a song for this last
essay; she told me afterward that she hadn't realized I was that close to
finishing it. (The whole series has taken much longer than I expected it
to, though.) I only know that Jane began to sing in very melodiDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 93
ous tones that flowed through the house. I easily heard her from my
writing room. "Oh, your singing is so clear and sweet!" her visiting
nurse had exclaimed the other day, when my wife had begun to sing
while the nurse was changing the dressings on her decubiti. And that
present clarity of voice, almost free of tremor, showed how much Jane
has improved since returning home. How different her singing is now
from that very mournful Sumari
song she'd recorded last February, a few days before going into
the hospital. "Let my soul find shelter elsewhere," she'd lamented then.
Jane didn't tape this new Sumari, though—which wc regretted—for
she wasn't able to get out of her chair to hunt for her recorder; I was too
charmed just listening to her sing to think of a tape. She wrote down the
translation as soon as she finished the song. When she read it to me I
knew at once that it would go here, for a few words she certainly sang
of the basic theme of these essays—of the sublime, immortal
consciounesses of the earth and All That Is, of that loving redemption
that consciousness always make possible somehow, somewhere, in the
eternal private world of each of us, and that each of us always seeks:
Sumari Healing Song
While you were
sleeping, all the
cupboards of the
earth were filled.
Mother Earth
sought out each
need.
While you were
weeping, your tears
fell as sweet rain
drops on small
parched hills that rise
in worlds you cannot
see, though you are
known there.
94 Jane Roberts
While you were
sleeping,
Mother F.arth
filled all the
cupboards of your
flesh
to overflowing.
Not one atom went
uncomforted
in worlds that
are yours,
but beyond your
knowing.

PRIVATE SESSION—September 13, 1979
8:40 P.M. THURSDAY
Preliminary Motes
(Seth actually began his Preface for this book, Dreams, "Evolution,"
and Value Fulfillment, with the next, 881st session, which Jane delivered
for him 12 days later [on September 25]. I chose to present this
private session first because in it Seth offers certain information about
Jane and me that I think applies to all of our work with him, through the
session and booh, and to our own separate creative lives as well. Especially
do I like to interpret his material tonight as meaning that Jane is
"a psychic or a mystic," for to me, at least, this means that in this physical
life she's chosen to penetrate as deeply as she can the depths of reality, or
consciousness.
Later in these notes I also plan to include, as a partial answer to many
who have written us on the subject, material Seth gave on animal consciousness;
this information came through just three days ago, in the
878th session for September 10. In the meantime I want to tie together
Dreams and the last Seth-Jane book, The Individual and the Nature of
Mass Events. Seth completed his work on Mass Events about a month
ago [on August 15], and a week later I began finishing my notes for it.
This will require at least several months. At the same time I'll be taking
Jane's dictation for Dreams. Along with my painting and dream
recording, both of which I do in the mornings, all of these activities come
together in just the kind of busy, creative life I greatly enjoy. As for Jane,
she couldn't be more pleased to be so involved with all she's doing.
95
96 Jane Roberts
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. Since a lot of that kind of
information was presented in Mass Events, Jane and I don't intend for
much of it in Dreams. Rather, after indicating in this Preface the
continuity between the two books, I'll discuss briefly a few other subjects
we feel deeply about. 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. Beyond that, I have little idea of how many notes of Jane's and
mine, or quotations from nonbook sessions, for example, we'll be adding
to this book.
Our lives do indeed seem to revolve around book projects and events!
First, let me update the creative activities Jane was involved in while
Seth and she were finishing Mass Events.
As of last May, when she laid it aside to begin work on her own The
God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, Jane had some 17 chapters in fairly
good shape for her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum
of Time. By now she's written 15 chapters, rough first draft, for God of
Jane, and done notes for a number of others, out of a total of perhaps
25; she knows she'll return to Seven when she's through with the much
more personal God of Jane. Since she's finished her Seth part of the
work for Mass Events, three days ago she began writing the
Introduction to that book. She's been painting, answering mail, and
writing poetry. Jane would especially like to do another book of poetry,
since, she published Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time way
back in 1975. She talks about doing this rather often, then reads through
the collections of poems she's built up over the years. She's even made a
few notes about such a venture. [Personally, I just wish I had more time
to sit quietly and reread some of her poetry.]
Right now our friend Sue Watkins, who lives better than an hour's
drive upstate, is well past the 15th chapter of Gonversations With Seth,
the book she's writing about the ESP classes Jane held from September
1967 to February 1975. Prentice-Hall will publish it. Jane hasn't seen
Gonversations yet. Next month she'll get together with Sue to go over it,
then start writing the Introduction for the book soon afterward.
Within a few days we expect to receive from Delacorte Press the first
copies of Emir's Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers.
i
Dreams. "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 97
Emir is fane's children's book—or the one for "readers of all ages," as
she puts it. At the same time, Tam Mossman, Jane's editor at Prentice-
Hall, is trying to find out whether the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks has
been published. He thinks it has. As soon as Prentice-Hall receives its
shipment of books from the Netherlands, Tam will forward the copies due
us. The German-language edition of Seth Speaks was published in
Switzerland four months ago [in May], and just three weeks ago we
received our first fan letter from that country. The author wrote in
English, and her appreciation of the work Jane and I are trying to do is
amazingly similar to certain letters we receive from readers here at home.
Even if that initial response was slow in coming [partly because of the
language barrier, we think], we were glad to get it, for it indicated a
commonality of interest in human potential, regardless of nationality.
We expect the same kind of response from those who will seek out the
Dutch Seth Speaks. We know the mail from European readers will very
gradually increase, just as it did after Jane published The Seth Material
in the United States in 1970.)
(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the
hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We're having
the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the
hill in back of the house, echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and
katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so
that Mitzi couldn't get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming
from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It
was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We'd had Mitzi spayed
three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [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 deceiving 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.
Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only
contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.
As I moved down the driveway I was thinking of what I wanted to
cover next in these notes. The night was warm, heavily overcast, and
mysterious: The streetlight down at the corner of our lot cast long shadows
up the road running past the house and into the woods. The
rhythmic, almost harsh sounds of the insects were strongly reminiscent of
98 Jane Roberts
the long camping seasons my father had treated his family to many years
ago. [I remembered holding an amazingly delicate, green-colored katydid
in my hand as a child. My father had taken my brother and me into the
woods one night, at first tracking one of the insects by its sound, until
finally he'd been able to illuminate with his flashlight the katydid as it
perched on a branch at just the right height for us.]
I'd looked for the shape of a rabbit last night, hopping across the silent
road like an upright shadow casting a shadow, as I'd seen one do the
other evening. I didn't see a rabbit, but I did hear a flight of geese
approaching from the north above the cloud cover. And that growing
cacophony, perhaps my favorite sound in all of nature, reminded me that
I'd closed out Mass Events by writing about geese. I'd also mentioned
the status of Three Mile Island, however, the nuclear energy generating
plant located some 130 airline miles south of us, in Pennsylvania. Because
of a combination of mechanical failure and human error, one of
the two reactors at TMI had come very close to a meltdown of the uranium
fuel in its core. A potentially disastrous situation had developed,
one that could have involved many thousands of people and several
thousand square miles of land. It seemed incredible now that that accident
had taken place only six months ago.
Enjoying the sounds of life in the mysterious nighttime, I intuitively
understood that not only did I want to mention in this Preface the feelings
Jane and I have about Three Mile Island as a technological and scientific
entity, embodying man's attempts to extract new forms of energy [and
yes, consciousness, in our joint opinion] from the far more basic and
profound quality Seth calls All That Is; I also knew that I wanted to
indicate how the very idea of nuclear energy, as an attribute of a national
focus, compared with the situation in the Middle Eastern country of Iran.
Iran is undergoing a revolution of a strongly religious, fundamentalist-
Islamic character. [Islam means "peace," by the way.] The force of Iran's
upheaval makes the growing Christian fundamentalist movement in the
United States seem tame indeed by comparison; therefore I want to concentrate
upon the Iranian dilemma rather than the religious conflicts in
our own country.
In Mass Events, along with TMI Seth had discussed the tragedy of
Jonestown—where in November 1978 over 900 Americans had died [by
murder or suicide] for a religious cause in faraway Guyana, South
America. Last night I realized that in these notes for Dreams / also
wanted to refer to the religious revolution in Iran while reminding the
reader of the events in Jonestown. For to me, and to Jane also, I'm sure.
i
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 99
■ft Three Mile Island and Jonestown-Iran represent powerful extremes or
directions in large-scale human behavior: certain aspects of religion and
science seemingly at opposite poles of the human psyche, as it were.
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. The barking of the geese started to
fade. 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. In Mass Events Seth spent
considerable time discussing the deeper and very similar meanings
behind both of those belief systems—or cults, as he called them—and
Jane and I hope he continues to do so in Dreams. Now it even seems to
us that in Mass Events Seth began preparing us for Dreams long before
Jane and he ever mentioned that work by name.
Iran's fundamentalist Islamic orientation is directly opposed to the
secular or worldly view of government espoused in Western lands. Horrendous
as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious
fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it
obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. Iran is
an entire country, whereas Jonestown was one fragile settlement confined
within the jungles of an alien land. Iran can "infect" other nations or
peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do
so. Nuclear power can do the same thing with a new scientific force that
can be even more devastating if not carefully "controlled" [in our terms].
To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent
the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and
literally take on lives of their own. And really, I thought, it could have
hardly been an accident on consciousness's part that as the events at tiny
Jonestown receded from world attention, the revolution in Iran began to
dramatically increase. To me the religious correlations are obvious.
After six months, then, Three Mile Island is still "a closed enigma,"
as I wrote in finishing Mass Events—only now the costs for the repair
and cleanup of its damaged reactor have been projected as being well
over $1 billion instead of the $40 million to $400 million of just a
month ago, and into many years of "time" instead of just four. TMI has
become the unfortunate symbol of our unprepared experimentation with
100 Jane Roberts
a nature that contains all sorts of surprises for us; especially when, as Seth
maintains, each of those "surprises," once created, becomes conscious in its
own way. [I do believe that this kind of thinking is totally unacceptable to most
businessmen, as well as generally to the public they serve, the irony here being
that neither businessman or scientist can explain what that fantastic nuclear
energy—or any energy, for that matter—really is. In the frontmatter, see the
first of the four quotations from Seth; the one taken from a private session
given just two months ago: "All energy contains consciousness (underlined). . .
. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world."]
I'd rather write about the nature that Jane and I live amid here at the hill
house, I suppose, but it seems that in the beginning each great secret we
uncover in our world is a "natural" one. Nuclear energy was supposed to
transform life on our planet—until we began to encounter unexpected
challenges with safety, the disposal of radioactive wastes, corrosion, cost, poor
workmanship, aging equipment, and many other obstacles. Nuclear energy's
science and technology had always been isolated from most of us. Very
gradually its ambience actually became threatening and psychologically
"unnatural." In the case of Three Mile Island, that energy, that consciousness,
balanced on the edge of running out of our mundane control.
If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically
oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very
strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature
are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to
note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious
expression long before it began recording history. This year [1979], Iran has
turned into a land in which all Western nations—but particularly the United
States—have become anathema. Iran's religious leaders actually run the
country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary
government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he
fled his country last January. [Now, looking tired and ill, he travels the world
with his expensive entourage, looking for a safe place to live after leading 25
years of savage oppression in his homeland.]
Within the context of Islamic culture, law is intrinsically religious law;
there is no real separation of state and church unless by force. Iran seethes.
Many hundreds have died in bitter internal factional disputes. Under the
clergy this year several hundred others have already been executed as Islamic
law is enforced, and thousands more are to die. Last
Dreams, "Evolution, "and Value Fulfillment 101
February some 70 Americans were taken hostage when a mob of Marxistled
Iranian fedayeen [or sacrificers] overran the United States embassy
in Iran's capital, Tehran. The captives were quickly freed by secularnegotiators
loyal to the Iranian clergy, but certainly that kind of virulent
anti-Americanism can happen again. Our citizens began a large-scale
evacuation of Iran by air, as did those of several other Western countries.
The official and unofficial call has gone out from millions of Iranian
throats to purge the country of all Western thought. . . .
The religious and scientific mass consciousnesses released in Iran and
the United States respectively reach far beyond their countries of origin,
obviously. Indeed, I think those attributes of All That Is must have long
ago formed strong portions of the psychic atmosphere that, one might say,
encircles the earth and affects all below. Those forces or consciousnesses
must also constantly replenish themselves: Iran's religious leaders devoutly
nourish their country's hatred for the United States, while here at
home no less than six separate teams or commissions have begun investigations—
on private, state, and federal levels—of what went wrong at
Three Mile Island. Many younger people [and not only in the United
States] have become very fatalistic over the possibility of nuclear accident,
or worse, war. Some even refuse to bring children into a world they
believe their elders have created for them [in those terms]. And most older
people avoid seriously considering what nuclear war would really mean
for them, out of fear closing their minds to certain aspects of that psychic
atmosphere.
Jane and I try to keep in mind Seth's ideas, as well as our own,
concerning the great challenges our species has chosen to deal with these
days, but I must admit that we often have trouble doing so. It seems to us
that even if they privately agreed with us, our world leaders would have
even more trouble implementing such thinking, for in their positions of
"power" they're quite locked into their national statuses by centuries of
custom and history. To initiate truly original and/or revolutionary forms
of beneficial governmental and mass behavior would be extraordinarily
difficult.
In my opinion these are hardly predictions, but instead very conservative
projections of already well-established phenomena: I don't for a
minute think that any country, let alone our species as a whole, will give
up on nuclear power. Nor will Iran, or the United States, or a number
of other nations, dispense with fundamentalist religion of whatever kind.
I believe that those particular aspects of scientific consciousness and
religious consciousness will be with us for a very long time, for in our
102 Jane Roberts
chosen earthly reality a larger consciousness—and, ultimately, All That Is—
has opted for much long-range exploration of those two closely related
portions of itself. In our probability we can create both very transcendent and
very painful portions of that dual exploration. I think those particular aspects
of mankind's search for answers will grow ever more powerful for a number of
years, until their very excesses finally lead to their "evolution" into forces that
are much more controlled and compassionate and understanding.
In our terms, then, it's certainly foolish for scientists to expect that the
peoples of the world are simply going to dispense with religion just because
scientists want them to, calling them 'deluded" or worse. It's just as foolish for
those who are religious, even though they outnumber the scientists by far, to
expect most scientists to embrace religion, to surrender their agnosticism or
atheism, to give up their mechanistic, reductionist views of life—their attempts
to use a series of "logical" steps to reduce the human being, say, to his or her
ever-lower components, right down to the atomic level. [God is, therefore,
unnecessary.] And this, of course, even though the scientists cannot explain
where the universe we know came from, or where "it" may be going. They can
only speculate about such massive concepts via theories like the currently
popular "big bang" origin of the universe, with all of its implied consequences,
or through the much lesser-known "inflationary model." Nor can scientists tell
us, any better than the religious-minded can, what life itself is, or where "it"
came from, or where "it" may be going.
I vividly remember that in the last chapter [7] of Mass Events Seth
remarked: "The universe is—and you can pick your own terms—a spiritual or
mental or psychological manifestation, and not, in your usual vocabulary, an
objective manifestation." [See the 855th session for May 21, 1979. I find it
amazing that Jane came through with that session only four months ago.]
The feelings Jane and I have for animals almost automatically lead us to
associate at least some of the implications of Seth's statement with another one
he'd given earlier in Mass Events. / remember it equally well, and find it
fascinating. In Chapter 5, see the 832nd session for January 29, 1979: "Nature
in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes
their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to
its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their 'civilizations' are
built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly
perceive."
I often consider those insights when observing both the wild and doDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 103
mesticated animal life, as well as the bird life, around the hill house.
Much earlier in these preliminary notes I wrote that we'd had our cat
Mitzi spayed almost three weeks ago [on August 27, to be exact], and
that her littermate, Billy, is to be neutered early next year. I mentioned
the guilt Jane and I feel because we're depriving the cats of their reproductive
roles in life, and because we don't let them run free in the
environment. I also noted that in a session on animal consciousness Jane
held just three days ago, Seth had to some extend assuaged our feelings
on such questions, and that his information will be of value to others.
The session, the 878th, was held on September 10, 1979, and it began
at 9:07 P.M. Monday—just five regular sessions after Seth had completed
his work on Mass Events, and three before he began Dreams.
Earlier that day I'd made a wadded-up paper ball for Mitzi to play with.
Using her lightning-quick reflexes, she kept knocking it around the living
room and beneath Jane's rocker as my wife went into trance, then began
to speak. Here are session excerpts:)
Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Observing the antics of your Mitzi gives me an excuse to begin the
topic of the evening: animal consciousness.
I want to begin simply by having you question some concepts taken
quite for granted—to question much (emphatically).
(Pause.) It is somewhat fashionable to see man as always nature's
despoiler, as the destructive member of nature's family, or even to
consider him apart from nature, who was given nature as his living
grounds.
It is somewhat fashionable to see man as . . . the creature who dirties
his own nest, and I am not condoning much of man's behavior in that
regard. However, there are other issues, and questions seldom asked.
You ignore the fact that [overall] the consciousness of animals has its
own purposes and intents. It is true that animals are slaughtered under
the most cruel of circumstances for human consumption—for then
(underlined) they are treated simply as foodstuff.
(Pause.) Buffaloes do not roam as they did before. There are
thousands of farm-bred animals, however [and have been], all
throughout civilization, alive for a time, well-cared-for for a time —
animals who in usual terms would not exist except for man's
"gluttonous" appetite for meat. That is the way the issue is often
104 Jane Roberts
considered. It seldom occurs to anyone that certain forms of animal
consciousness came in physical form [by choice], that certain species
are prized by man and protected, or that the consciousnesses of such
animals had anything at all to do with such an [overall] arrangement.
You cannot say that such animals came out ahead of the bargain, but
you can say that the species of man and certain species of animals
together formed an arrangement. . . that did have benefits for both. Man
is more a part of nature than he realizes, and in the greater realm of
activity he cannot take any ... actions with which the rest of nature does
not agree for its own reasons.
Remember here other material given about cellular communication,
for example, and the vast web of intercommunication that unites all
species. Of course animals can communicate with man, and of course
man can communicate with other species— with all species. Such
communication has always gone on. Man cannot afford to become
aware of such communication at this point, simply because your entire
culture is based upon the idea of the animals' "natural" subordinate
position. The men who slaughter animals cannot afford to treat those
animals as possessors of living consciousnesses.
(Long pause at 9:26.) There is, beneath it all, an important unity, a
sense of communion, as one portion of earth's living consciousness dies
to insure the continued life of all nature. That natural sacrament,
however, turns into something else entirely when the gift is so
misunderstood, and when the donor is treated so poorly. . . .
Basically [many farmers love] animals for themselves, and delight in
their ways—but by itself "delighting in animals" is not considered
particularly virile enough. In your society, if you like animals you must
not like them for themselves, but for other reasons. If you want to be
with animals then you must become a farmer, or a veterinarian, or a
cattleman, or whatever. . . .
Many animals enjoy work and purpose. They enjoy working with
man. Horses enjoyed the contributions they made to man's world. They
understood their riders far more than their riders understood them.
Many dogs enjoy being family protectors. There are deep emotional
bonds between men and many species of animals. There is emotional
response. Dolphins, for example,
i
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 105
respond emotionally to man's world. The animals on a farm are
emotionally aware of the overall psychological content of the farmer's
life and [that of each member of] his family. . . .
Consciousness is filled with content—any kind of consciousness.
[The farmer's] animals understand that in a certain fashion he is a
midwife, responsible for some of their births. Food comes from his
hands. The animals understand, on their own, that life on any terms that
are physical ends with death—that the physical properties must be
returned to the earth from which they came. . . .
(Pause at 9:45.) [Animals] do not blame [human beings] for
anything. If as a species you really found yourselves communicating
with the animals, you would have an entirely different culture, a culture
that would indeed bring about an alteration of consciousness of the
most profound nature.
You have forgotten, conveniently, how much you learned from all of
the animals, as I have mentioned in past sessions. You learned a good
deal of medicine from watching animal behavior: You learned what
plants to avoid, and which to cultivate. You learned how to rid yourself
of lice by going into the water. You learned social behavior by watching
the animals. At one time you could identify with animals, and they with
you to a remarkable degree. They have been your teachers, though they
did not choose your path. Obviously, you could not have gone your way
[as a species] had it not been for the animals.
Domesticated animals have their own reasons for choosing such a
state. It is, for example, usual enough to think that your cats (Billy and
Mitzi) should ideally run outside in the open, because in the wild that is
what cats would do.
Cats in the wild were, in those terms of time, exploring one kind of
nature. In that kind of nature, with a natural population taken care of in
the environment, there would be far fewer cats than there are now. Your
cats would not exist. Why does it seem antinatural, even slightly
perverse, for a household cat to, say, prefer fine cat food from a can,
when it seems that he should be eating mice, perhaps, or dining upon
grasshoppers? The household cat is exploring a different kind of nature,
in which he has a certain relationship to human consciousness, a
relationship that changes the reality of his particular kind of
consciousness.
Your cats are as alive in all ways inside of the house as out.
106 Jane Roberts
They understand their relationship with your human reality. They enjoy
contributing in your life as much as any wild animal enjoys being a part
of its group. Their consciousnesses lean in a new direction, feel about
the edges of concepts, sense openings of awareness of a different kind,
and form alliances of consciousness quite as natural as any other.
(10:01. Now Seth discussed a couple of other questions Jane and I
had, then ended the session at 10:27 P.M.
Inevitably, Seth's specific references to cats had reminded me of certain
other intriguing passages of his in Mass Events. I found I'd presented
them therein as excerpts from nonbook sessions in Chapter 6: See Note 2
for the 840th session. Both of the following quotations from that material
contain vast implications—and should these ideas ever become well
known, Jane and I feel, they'll be sure to arouse the deep opposition of a
number of vested interests.
From Session 837 for February 28, 1979: "There is no such things
as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In
those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take
certain focuses."
From Session 838 for March 5, 1979: "If there is no consciousness
'tailored' to be a cat's or a dog's, then there is no prepackaged, predestined,
particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either. . . .")
(Actually, it's taken me a long time—a little over thee years—to
round out these preliminary notes for the session that follows. When I
finished them, then, it was nighttime again, September 23, 1982, late,
and once again I stepped off the back porch of the hill house for some
fresh air. [Mitzi didn't watch me this time.] Much has taken place in
Jane's and my lives since 1979, as it has for everyone else, but here in
the light of the corner streetlight the scene outside our place was just as
magical and mysterious as ever. That's what we love about it. In the
warm evening the silent road still ran uphill past the house and into the
woods. The cicadas and the katydids still sounded their hypnotic rhythms,
I've heard geese often lately, moving south in noisy waves, and we've
had deer in our driveway several times. I looked for rabbits or 'coon or
deer now, but didn't see any of those creatures.
Once more, as I've done often in recent years, I expressed the hope to
myself that in another probable reality very similar to this one I opted for
the outdoor life in a much stronger way—even to living outside night
and day for most of the year. I must be doing so right now! In that
Dreams, "Evolution,'' and Value Fulfillment 107
probable life I use a tent sometimes, but I cook and sleep outside as much
as possible, except in the worst weather. What a different life! I'm still a
painter, I often think, but perhaps not a writer. I might be a Milton
Avery or a Paul Cezanne type of artist. More and more I've come to
admire—revere, even—the single-minded, childlike devotion artists like
Avery and Cezanne had for their art. Not that I want to copy Cezanne,
for instance [I couldn't even if I wanted to], but in that other reality I
too chose to live the natural life in a more naive or clear-eyed manner—
to sublimate myself before nature while at the same time hying to become
master of whatever means of expression I can achieve.
How strange a desire to have in these days of scientific and religious
turmoil, of computers and nuclear debate and space technology. It's
almost like trying to wish oneself back into an earlier, seemingly less
complicated time. That, surely, would be an illusory goal! 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.
Sometimes I simply yearn for that way of living. 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.
Even though she values the idea of independence as much as I do, the
idea of such a life doesn't appeal to Jane at all. Not that she didn't take
to camping, for instance, when I introduced her to it after we married in
1954. She grew up in a quite different physical and psychological environment,
however, and the outdoor, athletic life was not a part of that
ambience. But she more than proved her own intuitive grasp of nature,
and of my own desires, by producing for me as a Christmas present [©
1977] her excellent book, The World View of Paul Cezanne: A Psychic
Interpretation. . . .
Now here is the private session listed at the beginning of these advance
notes—the one I chose to present just before Seth's actual Preface for
Dreams. The opening notes that follow are pretty much as I wrote them
before Jane began delivering the session on Thursday evening at 8:40,
108 Jane Roberts
September 13, 1979. [That night, however, I could do no more than
barely indicate the "extra" material I've just finished giving, although
even then I knew much of what I wanted to cover.])
(Jane had been so relaxed, so physically at ease yesterday—as she has
been often lately—that we'd passed up our regularly scheduled Wednesday
night session. At the same time she's been extremely inspired and
creative recently, working on her own God of Jane and the Introduction
for Seth's Mass Events, turning out many pages of excellent material for
those works. Even though she was again very relaxed today, she was also
active writing. In fact, after supper she produced two more pages of notes
that she "picked up" from Seth on his new book Dreams, "Evolution,"
and Value Fulfillment.
We held the session in the living room, as usual. Jane yawned, then
laughed as we waited for Seth to come through. "I keep trying to change
that title, though. ..." After a prolonged juggling of titles and themes on
her own, she'd finally acquired the book's title directly from Seth some
seven weeks ago, or shortly before July 30, 1979; see the closing note for
Session 869 in Chapter 10 of Mass Events. "1 just think that 'value
fulfillment' is a strange phrase to use in a book title," Jane said. "It's too
unfamiliar—I'm afraid it'll confuse the reader. I keep thinking of something
simpler, like Dreams and Evolution: A Seth Book. And without
'Evolution' being in quotes, too. Or how about Dreams, Evolution, and
Creativity . . . ?"
I've been expecting Seth to begin Dreams at any time. From him
we've derived the idea that "value fulfillment" represents the creative
development of hard-to-define values which increase the quality of life
for any being, whether human or not—and not only in moral terms.
Jane had suggested an earlier session, although I hadn't really thought
she'd hold one at all. My only recent concern has been that she not let the
sessions go on a regular basis just because I'm working on the notes for
Mass Events.
"I think I'm about ready. ..." After she went so easily into trance,
Jane's delivery was very active and energetic—in most definite contrast
to the near-bleary-eyed state she'd been in before Seth began speaking.
This is a transformation that I've seen happen often: that familiar but
always exciting and mysterious influx of energy andlor consciousness.)
(With amusement:) Comments.
("Okay. Good evening, Seth.")
(Pause.) The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a
Dreams, "Evolution, ' and Value Fulfillment 109
writer—or rather a poet—and an artist before our sessions began. I
would like to clear up some important points.
You identified, primarily now, as a poet and an artist because those
designations, up to that time, seemed most closely to fit your abilities
and temperaments. Ruburt's1 writing set him apart. Your painting set
you apart. These were recognizable, tangible proofs of creativity. You
therefore identified with elements, characteristics, and traditions that
seemed to suit you best.
To some extent you had your own niches, recognizable by society
even if they were relatively (underlined) unusual. You did not know that
there was a deeper, older, or richer tradition —a more ancient heritage
—to which you belonged, because you found no hint of it in your
society. It seemed at different times since our sessions began that there
were disruptive conflicts. For example: Was Ruburt a writer or was he a
psychic? Were you an artist, or weren't you? What about the writing
you did—both for our books, and the writing that you sometimes plan
to do on your own?
Those kinds of conflicts can only exist in a society in which the
entire concept of creativity is segmented, in which the creative
processes are often seen as inner assembly lines leading to specific
products: a society in which the very nature of creativity itself is largely
ignored unless its "products" serve specific ends.
Ruburt was correct in his introductory notes (for Mass Events,) today
—about the poet's long-forgotten abilities, and his role. Ruburt has
been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term.
For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax
of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain as
methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.
(8:53.) Early artists hoped to understand the very nature of creativity
itself as they tried to mimic earth's forms. 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 true
artist in those terms was always primarily—in your terms again—a
psychic or a mystic.
110 Jane Roberts
His specific art (pause) was both his method of understanding his own
creativity and a way of exploring the vast creativity of the universe—
and also served as a container or showcase that displayed his
knowledge as best he could.
That is the heritage that both of you follow, and have followed
faithfully. It has an honored tradition. Also involved is, as Ruburt
correctly picked up from me, a group of accomplishments that we will
call the psychological arts. You are involved in those also.
(To me:) I want you to specifically understand that there is and can
be no conflict, for example, between your writing and painting, for in
the most basic of ways they represent different methods of exploring
the meaning and the source of creativity itself.
The sessions I give you, in usual (uncierlined) terms, are a new
extension of that creativity—but again, that extension has an ancient
heritage. (To me again:) Your own writing, of course, is art. It is also a
method of perceiving and understanding creativity. It is a method of
learning that redoubles upon itself, and you are uniquely equipped
(pause) to discover comprehensions from a standpoint that is most
unusual.
Explore, for example, your own feelings toward me: whether or not
they have changed through the years, how much I seem to be myself, or
part Jane, or part Ruburt, or part you, or part Joseph, or whatever.
Realizing that you are in the position you wanted to be [in], and
realizing that your abilities are not in conflict with each other, nor you
with them, will automatically fulfill and develop all of those abilities, in
a new kind of overall creativity that is itself beyond specifics.
Now: When Ruburt begins to trust himself, as he has, the physical
(arthritic) armor loosens. The creative abilities become even more
available, hence his new creativity, and the new' physical steps he has
taken. They all go together.
He believed in the specific nature of the creative self, so that it could
only be trusted in certain areas. He believed he needed strong mental
barriers as well as physical ones, set up against his own spontaneity. He
is beginning to understand that the spontaneous and creative aspects of
personality are the life-giving ones. They can and must be trusted. He
knows now he does not have to slow down, and that relaxation leads to
motion.
(9:09.) He did indeed pick up from me a partial list of the
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 111
subject matters to be covered in our new book—which will be called
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment.
(Pause.) The book will necessarily of course include much material
on the true nature of creativity and its uses and misuses by civilizations.
You do not have to fight to trust the thrust of your own life. That thrust
is always meant to lead you toward your own best fulfillment, in a way
that will benefit the species as well.
When you trust the thrust of your own life, you are always
supported. Tell Ruburt that.
I want you both, then, to understand that in the greater light of
creativity, understanding its true meaning, you have taken the right
course, and therefore drop from your minds any lingering ideas of
conflict and doubt. Such a stand will automatically clear up all
problems involving things like taxes, sex roles, or whatever—on both
of your parts.
You (both) are studying the nature of creativity as few others have
done or can do—and that is bound to make possible new creative
frameworks, and to offer new solutions to situations that cause
difficulty only within smaller frameworks.
Do you have questions?
("No. Jane's been doing great lately, and I'm very pleased to see that.")
He should—meaning predictive, he will. End of session.
("Thank you.")
A fond good evening.
("Good night, Seth.")
(9:16 P.M. And right at the end of the session, Jane's head flopped
down loosely as she quickly returned to the very relaxed state she'd been
in before speaking for Seth.)
NOTE. Private Session, September 13, 1979
1. Those who are familiar with the Seth material know this, so I ask
their forbearance while I reproduce for "new" readers Note 3 for
Session 679, in Volume 1 of "Unknown" Reality:
Almost always Seth refers to Jane by her male entity name,
"Ruburt"—and so "he," "his," and "him."
To sum up Seth's somewhat amused comments in the 12th session
for January 2, 1964: "Sex, regardless of all of your fleshy takes, is a
psychic phenomenon, merely certain qualities which
112 Jane Roberts
you call male and female. The qualities are real, however, and permeate
other planes as well as your own. They are opposites which are
nevertheless complementary, and which merge into one. When I say as
I have that the overall entity [or whole self] is neither male or female,
and yet refer to [some] entities by definitely male names such as
'Ruburt' and 'Joseph' [as Seth calls me], I merely mean that in the
overall essence, the [given] entity identifies itself more with the socalled
male characteristics than with the female."
SESSION 881—September 25, 1979
8:50 P.M. TUESDAY
(Saturday afternoon Jane finished typing the final version of her Introduction
for Mass Events, and yesterday morning I mailed it to Tam
Mossman at Prentice-Hall.
Today my wife was once again very much at ease for most of a day—
so much so, in fact, that she slept several times. Many beneficial muscular
changes appear to be taking place in her body. After supper I suggested
that if she had a session tonight Seth could comment upon her current
series of relaxations. At 8:30 she called me out of my writing room. Now
she was nervous, for she felt that Seth was ready to dictate his Preface for
Dreams.
/ especially liked the first sentence Seth offered for his latest book. He
promised something Jane and I could really focus upon . . . an exciting
yet thoughtful time of "work" and new information. Quietly, with many
pauses, a few of which are indicated:)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
(7 laughed. "Good evening, Seth.")
Preface: This book will be my most ambitious project thus far.
Period.
It may be said by some that any book at all is an ambitious endeavor,
when it originates from a psychological source (underlined) so far
divorced from your ordinary ideas of creativity. It is one thing, for
example, for a physical writer to produce a manuscript—and even that
kind of creativity involves vast and hidden psychological maneuvers
that never appear in the manuscript itself.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 113
As most of my readers know, I make no claims of now having a
physical personhood. (Pause.) I do claim an independent reality at
another level of existence. My status and origins seem strange only
because you have understood so little about your own origins. I am
beginning this book this evening. I have already given the title, and at
another level of consciousness Jane Roberts was able (12 days ago, for
example) to perceive some glimpses of some of the subject matter that
will be included here. So far, however, physically there is only the page
of paper upon which Robert Butts is writing down these words I speak.
Someday, in terms of time, there will be a thick book. Although the
manuscript does not yet exist in a physical book, the book itself, the
ideas and words, are in the most important fashions quite real now.
Certain qualities are implied in all kinds of creativity that are generally
overlooked, and so they are not apparent. The kind of creative
procedures we are involved in can serve to bring some of those
qualities to light, and to shed illumination upon many aspects of the
human psyche that usually remain hidden.
I speak through Ruburt—or through Jane Roberts, if you prefer.
Ruburt has his own creative abilities, and uses them well, and it is to a
large extent because of those abilities that our contact first took place
(in December 1963). Scientists like to say that if you look outward at
the universe, you look backward in time. That statement is only
partially true. When you move inward through the psyche, however,
you do begin to thrust, in your terms, "backward" toward the origins of
existence. Your creative abilities do not simply allow you to paint
pictures, to tell or write stories, to create sculpture or architecture. They
do not simply provide you with a basis for your religions, sciences, and
civilizations. They are your contact with the source of existence itself.
(Jane took a long pause in trance at 9:10.) Give us a moment. . . .
(Long pause.) They provide the power that allows you to form a belief
system to begin with.
(Pause.) Now: While you believe that consciousness somehow
emerges from dead matter, you will never understand yourselves, and
you will always be looking for the point at which life took on form. You
will always have to wonder about a kind of mechanical birth of the
universe—and it will indeed seem as if
114 Jane Roberts
your own world was made up of the spare parts that somehow fell
together in just such a fashion so that life later emerged.
You are filled with questions about when and where the various
species appeared, and how the rocks were formed, when some reptiles
grew wings, when some fish emerged from the oceans and learned to
breathe air, and you are bound to wonder what happened in the times in
between.
How many reptiles tried for wings, for example, and failed, or could
not fly—or how many millions of reptiles did it take, and how many
trials, before the first triumphant bird flew above the landscape? How
many fish died with only half-formed lungs, who were too far from the
water's edge to dip again beneath the waves? (More intently now:) Or
how many fish flopped backward to the water, finding themselves in
such an in-between stage that they could no longer live in the water nor
breathe the air?
So in those terms, how many water dwellers died before the first
mammal stood securely with fully completed lungs, breathing earth's
early air?
Scientists say now that energy and matter are one. They must take
the next full step to realize that consciousness and energy and matter
are one.
(Pause at 9:22.) Give us a moment. ... In this book, then, we will
look at the origin of the universe, the origin of the species, the origin of
life from another viewpoint. This viewpoint will, I hope, provide
another framework through which you can understand and study
physical reality, your part in it, and sense the immense creative
complexity that unites each individual with the source of consciousness
itself.
To do this, I hope to explore a more meaningful concept of evolution1
—and that concept must involve a discussion of subjective reality and
its effect upon the "evolution" of man's consciousness.
The universe did not originate from what you like to think of as an
external, objectified source. Your own physical body provides you with
sturdy corporal images, exterior presentations. Your dreams do not
suddenly appear exteriorized upon your images in place of your
features, for example. They remain hidden. Your dreams appear on the
interior screen of your mind.
I never want any of my remarks to be construed in such a
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 115
fashion that it seems I am in any way negating the fullness, validity,
and magnificence of physical existence. I do want to point out,
however, that a state you usually call dreaming is but a dim indication
of an inner reality of events (intently), an inner order of events from
which the physical world emerges. I hope to show how the nature of
dreams has helped shape man's consciousness. I hope to show that
consciousness forms the environ-ment, and not the other way around
(with many gestures).
I hope to show that all species are motivated by what I call value
fulfillment, in which each seeks to enhance the quality of life for itself
and for all other species at the same time.
This further unites all species in a cooperative venture that has
remained largely invisible because of beliefs projected outward upon
the world by both your sciences and religions, generally speaking. All
of your grandest civilizations have existed first in the world of dreams.
You might say that the universe dreamed itself into being.
(A one-minute pause at 9:40.) Give us a moment. . . . Generally
speaking, the states of waking and sleeping are the only levels of
consciousness with which you have been primarily concerned. It seems
to you that this is the result of your evolutionary progress —but there
have been civilizations upon the earth that specialized in the use of
many focuses of consciousness, as for example you are focused upon
the use of tools.
Dreams can be highly specific. They can be used to provide sources
of information. I hope to show their practical importance, both as a part
of man's "evolutionary development" and their possibilities in what you
think of as modern life. The answers are where you have least looked
for them. The universe is still being created, even as each person is in
each moment.
(9:47.) End of Preface. That should make Ruburt feel better (with
amusement), and give us a moment. Rest your fingers. . . . Will you
open that (wine)?
(After giving a little information for Jane,'2 Seth wound up the session:)
We begin again with a new book, and I am sure your own lively mind
will bring questions to the forefront that will be of interest.
A fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. Good night.")
116 Jane Roberts
(9:56 P.M. "/ could feel him around when I was doing the supper
dishes" Jane said as soon as she was out of trance. "And I could feel
him around more and more after that, but I still get cold feet when I
know he's going to start a new hook. . . . Was it good?"
I nodded a very pleased yes. "He said this one will be his most ambitious
project to date."
"Well, I don't want to think about that. If I do, then I'll start worrying
about my responsibility again and forget what Seth says about having the
sessions because they're fun. Wow—I'm really out of it. I'll be curious as
hell to read it," Jane said as she headed for the couch.
"So," I joked, "the day wasn't a total waste after all. We did get
something done." Even Jane laughed.
It's impossible, of course, for us not to have a sense of responsibility
about the sessions. I'm sure Seth knows this, but it's obvious that he wants
us to maintain a light rather than a heavy psychological touch. Sometimes
that's rather difficult to achieve, though. Recently we received an excellent,
rather lengthy paper about our work in which the writer, a psychologist,
discussed among other things the import of Seth's material, as well
as various explanations of his origin. We think about those subjects too,
but in order to have the sessions on a week-to-week basis we concentrate
upon the simple creative achievement embodied in each session itself, and
let go of the larger implications. Those implications are usually in the
background of our joint awareness, however. )
NOTES. Session 881
1. Recently, I bought two books written by "scientific creationists." The
authors strongly disagree with ideas of evolution. I've read halfway
through one of the books, and have discussed it with Jane to some
extent. After the session I suggested that she start reading it also, in
order to acquaint herself with theories radically different from the
"ordinary" scientific ones espoused by evolutionists. Very briefly: The
creationists believe that God created the universe (including the earth,
obviously) around 10,000 years ago. They maintain that all of the
earth's living forms have remained essentially unchanged since that
prime creative event; they can account for the disappearance of the
dinosaurs, for example, and the vast number of other life forms we no
longer see around us. On the other hand, evolutionary
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 117
science believes that the universe came into being between 10 billion
and 20 billion years ago; that the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years
old, and that according to the fossil record and other evidence, its living
organisms first arose and began evolving at least 3.5 billion years ago.
Science also believes, however, that the study of a "first cause"
involves not scientific but philosophical and theological questions. For
instance, why did the universe we think we know so well come into
existence at all, and what was the cause of that beginning?
I know that Jane is interested in the book in question, but also a bit
afraid of it: "I don't want to be so influenced by it—or by any other
book—that it starts coming out in the material," she's said more than
once recently. I agree, since I think that in their own ways the views
expressed by the scientific creationists are just as limited as those held
by the conventional scientific establishment. But Jane has an excellent
critical mind. I'm not concerned that anything she reads will unduly
influence her— or Seth.
2. I'm presenting the private portion of tonight's session for two reasons:
Seth comments a bit upon the creative production of the sessions, and
he shows how we can habitually impose upon our physical selves our
conscious ideas of what we "should be doing"—not paying enough
attention to our impulsive, natural, bodily messages.
"Today, Ruburt's body wanted to relax. He has been doing very
well, and he tried to approve, but since he lost work time yesterday, his
approval barely went skin deep (louder).
"When you mentioned his ink sketches he instantly wanted to play
at painting again, but felt, guiltily, that he should not. He forgot, once
again, that the creative self is aware of his entire life, and that his
impulses have a creative purpose.
"These sessions themselves involve the highest levels of creative
productivity, at many levels, so he should refresh himself painting or
doing whatever he likes, for that refreshment adds to his creativity, of
course. He will finish his book (God of Jane), and do beautifully with
it. He should follow the rhythms of his own creativity without being
overly concerned with the time. For a while, again, have him write
three hours of free writing, and paint or whatever. His book will be
provided for. You can see
118 Jane Roberts
how your own creativity is emerging in the notes for Mass Events.
Granted, you need time to write physically, but the basic creativity has
its own 'time.'
"End of session, and a fond good evening."
("Can I ask a question?")
"You may."
("What was that feeling he had today in his chest, back, and body,
like an electric pulsation?")
"Because he did not approve of his own relaxation. He put brakes
upon it."
("Okay.")

SESSION 882—September 26, 1979
9:14 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(Jane was rather relaxed tonight—again—but decided to try for the
session. She's been reading the book on scientific creationism I suggested
to her. Her feelings about it are both ambiguous and funny: "You've got
to watch those guys," she said more than once, meaning the creationists,
"or they'll lead you right where they want you to go. You've got to keep
thinking. I can only read so many pages at a time. ..." Adding to the
humor of the situation is the fact that we've had people write or say the
same thing about the Seth material. But Jane didn't mention any of those
events.
However, aside from being in outright conflict with the theory of
evolution [and the idea of an ancient universe], the beliefs of the creationists
do pose a number of questions that are quite intriguing from our
joint viewpoint. My statement doesn't mean that Jane and I endorse
creationism just because we question the doctrines of evolution. We think
that either one of those belief systems is much too inadequate to explain
reality in any sort of comprehensive way.
Jane expected Seth to work on his new book this evening. "Yeah, I've
got sentences about it in my head. I'm just waiting for him to put them
in order," she said as we sat for the session. Then, without calling his
material Chapter 1, dictation, or whatever:)
119
120 Jane Roberts
(Whispering:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Now. (Long pause, one of many.) The universe will begin yesterday.
The universe began tomorrow. Both of these statements are quite
meaningless. The tenses are wrong, and perhaps your time sense is
completely outraged. Yet the statement: "The universe began in some
distant past," is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.
In fact, the first two statements, while making no logical sense, do
indeed hint of (pause) phenomena that show time itself to be no more
than a creative construct. Time and space are in a fashion part of the
furniture of your universe.
The very experience of passing moments belongs to your psychological
rooms in the same way that clocks are attached to your
walls. Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe,
they search for it in the past. The universe is being created now
(underlined). Creation occurs in each moment, in your terms. The
illusion of time itself is being created now. It is therefore somewhat
futile to look for the origins of the universe by using a time scheme that
is in itself, at the very least, highly relative.
Your now (underlined), or present moment, is a psychological
platform. It seems that the universe began with an initial burst of
energy of some kind (the "big bang"). Evolutionists cannot account for
its cause. Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger
dimension of reality, and that he created the universe while being
himself outside of it. He set it into motion. Many individuals, following
either persuasion, believe that regardless of its source, the [universe]1
must run out of energy. Established science is quite certain that no
energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed (as
stated in the first law of thermodynamics). Science sees energy and
matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under
varying circumstances.
(9:31.) In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with
the idea of an objectively created universe. Either God "made it," or
physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an
initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that
initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 121
Instead, consciousness formed matter. As I have said before, each
atom and molecule has its own consciousness. Consciousness and
matter and energy are one, but consciousness initiates the
transformation of energy into matter. In those terms, the "beginning" of
your universe was a triumph in the expansion of consciousness, as it
learned to translate itself into physical form. The universe emerged into
actuality in the same way (underlined), but to a different degree, that
any idea emerges from what you think of as subjectivity into physical
expression.
The consciousness of each reader of this book existed before the
universe was formed—in parentheses: (in your terms)—but that
consciousness was unmanifest. Your closest approximation —and it is
an approximation only—of the state of being that existed before the
universe was formed is the dream state. (Long pause.) In that state
before the beginning, your consciousness existed free of space and
time, aware of immense probabilities. This is extremely difficult to
verbalize, yet it is very important that such an attempt be made. (Long
pause.) Your consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative
process.
I will purposely avoid using the word "God" because of the
connotations placed upon it by conventional religion. I will make an
attempt to explain the characteristics of this divine process throughout
this book. I call the process "All That Is." All That Is is so much a part
of its creations that it is almost impossible to separate the "creator from
the creations," for each creation also carries indelibly within it the
characteristics of its source.
If you have thought that the universe followed a mechanistic model,
then you would have to say that each portion of this "cosmic machine"
created itself, knowing its position in the entire "future construction."
You would have to say further that each portion came gladly out of its
own source individually, neatly tailored to its position, while at the
same time that individual source was also as intimately the source of
each other individual portion.
I am not saying that the universe is the result of some "psychological
machine," either, but that each portion of consciousness is a part of All
That Is, and that the universe falls together in a spontaneous, divine
order (intently)—and that each portion of consciousness carries within
it indelibly the knowledge of the whole.
122 Jane Roberts
The birth of the world represented a divine psychological awakening.
Each consciousness that takes a part in the physical universe dreamed
of such a physical existence, in your terms, before the earth was
formed. In greater terms than yours, it is quite true to say that the
universe is not formed yet, or that the universe has vanished. In still
vaster terms, however, the fact is that in one state or another the
universe has always existed.
Your closest approximation of the purpose of the universe can be
found in those loving emotions that you have toward the development
of your children, in your intent to have them develop their fullest
capacities.
(9:58.) Your finest aspirations can give you some dim clue as to the
great creative thrust that is behind your own smallest act, for your own
smallest act is possible only because your body has already been
provided for in the physical world. Your life is given. In each moment it
is renewed. So smoothly and effortlessly do you ride that thrust of life's
energy that you are sometimes scarcely aware of it. (Pause.) You are
not equipped with a certain amount of energy that then wears out and
dies. Instead you are, again, newly created in each moment.
That is enough for now. End of session, and a fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. Good night.")
(10:02 P.M. "That was short, but I don't care," Jane said right after
coming out of her trance state. "I thought that was what there was
tonight. I never stop when there's more, like you'd turn off a faucet."
"I assume that's Chapter 1?"
"Oh yeah, he never said. Well, tomorrow I'll paint and forget the
whole business about evolution. . . . "
But as I type this material two evenings later [on Friday], I can note
that Jane didn't paint at all. Instead she continued to work on her own
God of Jane. She also finished reading the book on creationism, and at
my request today wrote a page or so about her reactions to it. Her little
essay is given as Note 2. Then see Note 3 for my own comments about
evolution as I discussed that subject in Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality.)
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 123
NOTES. Session 882
1. Originally Jane said "world" here, where I'm sure Seth
wanted her to say "universe." Anytime I make such a change in
Seth's copy, or insert a clarifying word or phrase as though it
came from him, or might have, the alteration is in brackets [like
this]. Occasionally Jane or I may recast a sentence of Seth's, but
this isn't necessary even once per session. Our rule is that other
wise we do not change or delete any of his material without
noting it.
Insertions I make in parentheses and italics, like "(as stated in the
first law of thermodynamics)," are meant to be informative and
obviously aren't from Seth.
2. "Rob wanted me to do a paragraph or so about my reactions
to the book on scientific creationism that I've just finished read
ing," Jane wrote, "so here goes. The book follows the idea that
an objectified God made the universe (and the earth) in a perfect
condition, and that instead of evolving toward more complicated
forms, it's running down; that decay and catastrophe are break
downs of previous better conditions, but that even these will
finally be removed by the Creator after they have served their
own special purposes. The book states that the universe is
around 10,000 years old. (Seth has said more than once that in
those terms it's even older than the evolutionists believe.) The
reasons given for this young age seem reasonable enough,
though I hardly have the background knowledge to know how
good they'd sound to an evolutionary geologist, say. . . .
"Maybe between one and two thousand years after the Creation a
worldwide flood destroyed practically everything, though some
species, including man, survived. (No even approximate date for the
flood is given in the book. Noah, the 10th male in descent from Adam
—Noah and his family, and the divine command he received to build
the Ark—aren't even mentioned. But how could they be, in a book on
scientific creationism?) There was no evolution. All species were
created as they now appear. Oddly, if you postulate a god in that
fashion, a personified one, then you wonder why he couldn't—or didn't
choose to—maintain the perfection of his original creation. Why man's
sin, re124
Jane Roberts
suiting in the catastrophic flood, to which all species fell victim? The
regular theory of evolution doesn't have to contend with such questions,
of course, but in the book 1 just read no explanations for questions like
that are given—I don't even remember that they were raised.
"The creationists put down other species, as do the evolutionists,
taking it as fact that no other species is capable of conceptual thought,
where 1 think that statement is extremely dubious generally, and even
specifically in light of the work being done with dolphins, for example.
The explanation for man's use of language sounded a bit pat, too: God
just made him that way.
"I'd say that both the creation and evolution models suffer from
logical and emotional sloppiness, and that neither one presents a
reasonable view of man's origins. Both concepts seem equally
implausible when you think of them with any objectivity, and neither
can be proven, of course. They ultimately rest upon the faith of the
believer! I get a spooky feeling that I've had before, thinking that here
we are, alive and conscious, technologically accomplished, and we
really haven't the slightest idea of where the universe came from or
why we're alive, though as a species we're gifted with both intellect and
intuition. At best our established concepts seem grossly insufficient. So
Seth's version of All That Is being both within and without the universe
makes more sense to me, and I'm very curious about where he'll go
with this in his book. This morning, looking over the few-pages we
have so far, I got the idea that the title for the first chapter is going to
be: 'Before the Beginning'—so we'll see. . . .
"In a magazine on parapsychology I recently read an article
containing ideas that I think are at least a little more reasonable than
those of creationism or evolutionism: Though the writer did take
evolution for granted, he also put consciousness within matter."
I was surprised after the session tonight when Jane said that she still
wants to read the second of the two books on creationism I'd bought,
not long before she began delivering Dreams for Seth.
3. I've known Seth planned to discuss evolution—that sensitized
subject—ever since Jane tuned into the title of his new book a couple
of months ago. However, my interest in one of my favorDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 125
ite fields of inquiry lay relatively dormant until Seth confirmed the title
earlier this month (September); then I felt the impulse to jump right into
producing notes on the subject. Better wait, I told myself and Jane, until
we had an idea of how Seth is going to handle his own material on
evolution.
I had finished Appendix 12 for Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality by
August 1977. I'd devoted the piece to a study of the establishment
theory of evolution versus ideas Seth, Jane, and I have on that theme,
and noted that I'd accumulated much information from a number of
sources. I've amassed much more data by now, of course. Perhaps, I
thought when putting together the Preface for Dreams, I just wanted to
use some of our later material in the new book.
Yet most of what I wrote in Appendix 12 is still valid, to my mind,
even though I've always wanted to expand (and expound?) upon all of
it. There are a few things I'd put somewhat differently now, given the
advantage of a couple of years' hindsight, but Jane and I don't really
want to revise the material. We'd rather let it stand as is, representing
our best knowledge and feeling of that time, including the way we put
to use Seth's own information on the subject. If that "best knowledge"
was groping and imperfect, then so be it. I think it most interesting that
the theory of evolution is now challenged by those who, like Jane and I,
simply want to know whether it has a basis in scientific fact; and that
it's also come under virulent attack by those who generally believe in
fundamentalist religions. The controversy over whether evolution ever
really happened—and/or is happening—is far from resolved, whether in
scientific, religious, or lay terms.
But why, I asked Jane, haven't our best minds—at least those who
have operated throughout the centuries of our recorded history—been
able to arrive at some sort of reasonable consensus about the "origin" of
our universe (if it had one), its processes, and our human place in it? In
their many forms religion and science haven't provided satisfactory
answers, nor have agnosticism or atheism. Why have so many human
beings (an estimated 50 billion of them) had to exist along the way
before we arrived at our present point—from which point we in our
collective wisdom think we might begin to provide meaningful answers
to such questions? If true, this proposition means that for
126 Jane Roberts
all of that time, all of those people lived pretty useless lives as far as
having any real understanding of their universe goes—hardly a natural
situation, I told Jane. Life can't really be that way. The whole set of
questions must be meaningless in deeper terms.
So why do Jane and I think we're on to something with the Seth
material—that it can help if given the chance? Why haven't others—our
scientific, religious, and political leaders, or those in the fine arts, say—
come up with ideas similar to those espoused by a Seth, and why aren't
those ideas common today? Seth's kind of information must have
surfaced innumerable times, I think, and for many reasons fallen short
as broad coherent systems of thought. How would theology, or the
sociology of science, answer any or all of these questions?
SESSION 883—October 1, 1979
9:06 P.M. MONDAY
(Last Saturday night, Jane and I presided over a "class" reminiscent of
the weekly ESP classes we used to hold in our downtown apartments
before we moved to the hill home, just outside Elmira, in 1975. A large
group of former students attended from New York City, as well as some
from the local area. The evening was a great success. Since each person
knew everyone else so well, the verbal exchanges were many and often
blindingly rapid. They were also hilarious: I laughed so often and so
hard that my stomach ended up hurting. My voice was gone by the end
of the meeting [and the next day it was still very hoarse]. Seth came
through again and again, as he'd often done in class, and Jane thoroughly
enjoyed herself. We're to get transcripts of the several tapes made.
Through it all each one of us felt a penetrating nostalgia for those
vanished classes, for they'd been truly unique; I don't think it would be
possible to recapture their particular, innocent, lasting sense of excitement
and exploration. As might be expected, I appreciate Jane's accomplishments
in them much more now than I did during the nearly seven
years they were underway.
Almost three weeks ago I wrote in the Preface for Dreams that we
were waiting to receive the first published copies of Jane's Emir's Education
in the Proper Use of Magical Powers. Today the books arrived.
Eleanor Friede, Jane's editor at Delacorte Press, has done a fine
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 127
job of supervising the illustration and production of a handsome little
volume. All of us hope Emir does well in the marketplace.
This evening it was obvious that Jane really wanted to have the session,
because she told me she was ready for it early. For a change we
decided to do our thing in her writing room, or den, at the back of the
house. She started out speaking for Seth very quietly, but her delivery
soon became much more intent—then often louder and impassioned:
Jane used many more gestures than usual, staring wide-eyed at me,
leaning forward again and again in her rocker, crossing and uncrossing
her legs. She was turned on in trance, wound up, her pace considerably
faster than it's been lately.)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Dictation. The heading of the chapter—I forgot to give it to you—is:
"Before the Beginning."
Now: You cannot prove scientifically that [your] world was created
(pause) by a god who set it into motion, but remained outside of its
dominion. Nor can you prove scientifically that the creation of the
world was the result of a chance occurrence—so you will not be able to
prove what I am going to tell you either. Not in usual terms.
I hope however to present, along with my explanations, certain hints
and clues that will show you where to look for subjec-tive evidence.
Period.
You live your lives through your own subjective knowing, to begin
with, and I will try to arouse within your own consciousnesses
memories of events with which your own inner psyches were
intimately involved as the world was formed—and though these may
appear to be past events, they are even now occurring.
Before the beginning of the universe, we will postulate the existence
of an omnipotent, creative source. (Pause.) We will hope to show that
this divine subjectivity is as present in the world of your experience as
it was before the beginning of the universe. Again, I refer to this
original subjectivity as All That Is. I am making an attempt to verbalize
concepts that almost defy the edges of the intellect, unless that intellect
is thoroughly reinforced by the intuition's strength. So you will need to
use your mind and your own intuitions as you read this book.
All That Is, before the beginning contained within itself the infinite
thrust of all possible creations. All That Is possessed
128 Jane Roberts
(pause) a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings,
dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a
vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from
what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what?
The experience, the subjective universe, the "mind" of All That Is,
was so brilliant, so distinct, that All That Is almost became lost,
mentally wandering within this ever-flourishing, evergrowing interior
landscape. Each thought, feeling, dream, or mood was itself indelibly
marked with all of the attributes of this infinite subjectivity. Each
glowed and quivered with its own creativity, its own desire to create as
it had been created.
Before the beginning there existed an interior universe that had no
beginning or ending, for I am using the term "before the beginning" to
make matters easier for you to assimilate. In parentheses: (That same
infinite interior universe exists now, for example.)
(Pause at 9:31.) All That Is contained within itself the knowledge of
all existences, with their infinite probabilities, and "as soon as" All That
Is imagined those numberless circumstances, they existed in what I will
call divine fact.
All That Is knew of itself only. It was engrossed with its own
subjective experiences, even divinely astonished as its own thoughts
and imaginings attained their own vitality, and inherited the creativity
of their subjective creator. [Those thoughts and imaginings] began to
have a dialogue with their "Maker" (all very emphatically).
Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own
thoughts—and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine
astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to
respond to these "generations" of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts
and dreams related to each other also. There was no time, so all of this
"was happening" simultaneously. The order of events is being
simplified. In the meantime, then, in your terms, All That Is
spontaneously thought new thoughts and dreamed new dreams, and
became involved in new imaginings—and all of these also related to
those now-infinite generations of interweaving and interrelating
thoughts and dreams that "already" existed (with many gestures and
much emphasis).
So beside this spontaneous creation, this simultaneous
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 129
"stream" of divine rousing, All That Is began to watch the interactions
that occurred among his own subjective progeny. (Pause.) He listened,
began to respond and to answer a thought or a dream. He began to
purposefully bring about those mental conditions that were requested
by these generations of mental progeny. If he had been lonely before,
he was no longer.
Your language causes some difficulty here, so please accept the
pronoun "he" as innocuously as possible. "It" sounds too neutral for my
purpose, and I want to reserve the pronoun "she" for some later
differentiations. In basic terms, of course, All That Is is quite beyond
any designations having to do with any one species or sex. All That Is,
then, began to feel a growing sense of pressure as it1 realized that its
own ever-multiplying thoughts and dreams themselves yearned to enjoy
those greater gifts of creativity with which they were innately endowed.
It is very difficult to try to assign anything like human motivation to
All That Is. I can only say that it is possessed by "the need" to lovingly
create from its own being; to lovingly transform its own reality in such
a way that each most slight probable consciousness can come to be
(long pause); and with the need to see that any and all possible
orchestrations of consciousness have the chance to emerge, to perceive
and to love.
We will later discuss the fuller connotations of the word "love" as it
is meant here, but this chapter is a kind of outline of other material to
come.
All That Is, then, became aware of a kind of creative tumult as each
of its superlative thoughts and dreams, moods and feelings, strained at
the very edges of their beings, looking for some then-unknown,
undiscovered, as of then unthought-of release. I am saying that this
mental progeny included all of the consciousnesses that [have] ever
appeared or will appear upon your earth—all tenderly couched: the first
human being, the first insect—each with an inner knowledge of the
possibilities of its development. All That Is, loving its own progeny,
sought within itself the answer to this divine dilemma (all very intently,
with eyes wide and dark, and with numerous gestures).
(Pause at 9:57.) When that answer came, it involved previously
unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All
That Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible
progeny to see what conditions were needed for this
130 Jane Roberts
even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity.
What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner
realm? When All That Is, in your terms, put all of those conditions
together it saw, of course, in a flash, the mental creation of those
objective worlds that would be needed—and as it imagined those
worlds, in your terms, they were physically created.
[All That Is] did not separate itself from those worlds, however, for
they were created from its thoughts, and each one has divine content.
The worlds are all created by that divine content, so that while they are
on the one hand exterior, they are on the other also made of divine stuff,
and each hypothetical point in your universe (pause) is in direct contact
with All That Is in the most basic terms. The knowledge of the whole is
within all of its parts—and yet All That Is is more than its parts.
Divine subjectivity is indeed infinite. It can never be entirely
objectified. When the worlds, yours and others, were thus created, there
was indeed an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine
spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity.
The first "object" was an almost unendurable mass, though it had no
weight, and it exploded, instantaneously beginning processes that
formed the universe—but no time was involved. The process that you
might imagine took up eons occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the
initial objective materialization of the massive thought of All That Is
burst into reality. In your terms this was a physical explosion—but in
the terms of the consciousnesses involved in that breakthrough, this was
experienced as a triumphant "first" inspirational frenzy, a breakthrough
into another kind of being (most intently).
The earth then appeared as consciousness transformed itself into the
many facets of nature. The atoms and molecules were alive, aware—
they were no longer simply a part of a divine syntax, but they spoke
themselves through the very nature of their being (gesturing). They
became the living, aware vowels and syllables through which
consciousness could form matter.
But in your terms this was still largely a dream world, though it was
fully fashioned. It had, generally speaking, all of the species that you
now know. These all correlated with the multitudinous kinds of
consciousnesses that had clamored for release, and those
consciousnesses were spontaneously endowed by All That Is with those
forms that fit their requirements. You had the birth
Dreams, "Evolution,'' and Value Fulfillment 131
of individualized consciousness as you think of it into physical context.
Those consciousnesses were individualized before the beginning, but
not manifest. But individualized consciousness was not quite all that
bold. It did not attach itself completely to its earthly forms at the start,
but rested often within its "ancient" divine heritage. In your terms, it is
as if the earth and all of its creatures were partially dreaming, and not
as focused within physical reality as they are now.
(10:08.) For one thing, while individualized consciousness was
within the massive subjectivity of All That Is, it enjoyed, beside its own
uniqueness, a feeling of supporting unity, a comforting knowledge that
it was one with its source. So in the beginning of [your] world,
consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing gently at the start, but not
quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem.
You had the sleepwalkers,-' early members of your species, whose
main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they
were your true ancestors, in those terms.
Are you tired?
("I'm okay.")
For one thing, early man needed to rely upon his great inner
knowledge. Take your break.
(10:23. Seth's call for a break was abrupt. "Is one of the cats out?"
Jane asked right away, looking around. Billy, our eight-month-old tiger
cat, was sleeping on a chair near us. A couple of minutes ago he'd started
making some odd high-pitched sounds I hadn't heard him produce before.
I'd wondered if those noises might bother Jane in trance—and they had.
I didn't know where Billy's littermate Mitzi was, though. I found her
locked out on the screened-in front porch.
("I don't want to lose it,"Jane said. She went quickly back into trance.
Purring and rubbing, Mitzi began to climb all over me as I tried to take
notes. Resume at 10:30.)
All of the species began by emphasizing a great subjective
orientation that was most necessary as they learned to manipulate
within the new physical environment.
(Jane paused, eyes closed. Mitzi was still loving me up. Then:)
End of session.
(10:31 P.M. "Oh," I said in some surprise.
"I'll tell you," Jane said, "I was getting more. It was fun to do, and I
knew what was coming, but going back like that I couldn't get it."
I told Jane the session is brilliant, the best she's ever given. I told her
132 Jane Roberts
it raised many questions, but that I didn't think anyone, at any time, had dealt
better with the "origin" of our universe, our world, our history.
"I got some of it before the session—about the initial ones before the earth
was formed—you could call them nonphysical entities. But it sounds dumb
when you say it now: Physical entities couldn't hold all that much
consciousness. I didn't know it was that definite until the end of the session,
though. . . . Boy, that was a really good state," she said with satisfaction. "I
really enjoyed it. . . . "
But I had to admit that I was also surprised. Seth had come through so
rapidly and emphatically that while taking notes I'd hardly had lime to think
about questions. What's he trying to do, I asked Jane—combine something like
science's theoretical "big-bang" origin of the universe, all of those billions of
years ago, with creationism's theory of a recent spontaneous, divine creation of
that same universe"? Has our earth and all of its creatures "evolved," or not?
Could you have simultaneous evolution? [Here we go again, I speculated, back
to struggling with that contradictory notion of "simultaneous time."] How does
Seth's instantaneous "beginning processes that formed the universe"—with no
time involved— square with fossils in the earth? Isn't he saying that the
universe grew/ evolved through a series of dream states?
I told Jane that as far as I know the unimaginable explosion of the
primordial superdense state, or entity, that resulted in the formation of our
universe had been a straightforward event: Once begun, it kept going. There
hadn't been any fluctuations or on-off states balancing between the physical
and nonphysical, for example. Science currently postulates this theory as its
"standard model" for the creation of the universe}
So how do Seth's own ideas of probable universes and probable earths fit in
with his material tonight—as I'm sure they do? I quickly saw that my questions
could go on and on. Seth's book is young, I told myself. Wait. Wait. . . .
And Mitzi, her affectionate display long finished, had jumped down from my
lap and disappeared as Jane and I talked.)
NOTES. Session 883
1. Seth was/evidently experimenting here, for right away he went back
to using "it," instead of "he," when referring to All That Is. "It" may not
be entirely satisfactory either, but Jane and
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 133
I didn't question Seth about it: We prefer that designation because it
encompasses any kind of sexual orientation and/or function within All
That Is. (When Seth used "he" while talking about All That Is a couple
of times later in the session, I substituted "it" in my notes and let it go
at that.)
2. Seth first discussed the "sleepwalkers" in Volume 2 of "Un
known" Reality—see Session 708 for September 30, 1974. Here's
a much-condensed version of that he told us that night after
break ended at 9:56:
"Imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not
diseased or defective, but without the overriding ego-directed
consciousness that you have. The sleepwalkers' physical abilities
surpassed yours. They were as agile as animals, their purpose simply to
be. Their main points of consciousness were elsewhere, their primary
focuses scarcely aware of the bodies they had created. Yet they learned
'through experience,' and began to 'awaken,' to become aware of
themselves, to discover time, or to create it.
"They were not asleep to themselves, only from your viewpoint.
There were several such races of human beings. To them the real was
the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli. This is the other
side of your own experience. Such races left the physical earth much as
they found it. In what you would call the physical waking state, these
individuals slept, yet they behaved with great natural physical grace.
They did not saddle the body with negative beliefs of disease or
limitation. They did not age to the extent that you do."
In "Unknown" Reality, then, Seth's material on the sleepwalkers
heralded one of the main themes of Dreams, which he began five years
later. Dreams was unsuspected by us then, of course; so what books to
come will have their genesis in this one?
(I'll add that Jane and I have received several thousand letters since
the publication of Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality. As best I can
remember, however, not a single writer has mentioned the sleepwalkers
—one of Seth's most intriguing concepts.)
3. Theoretical physicists have charted (assuming that the bigbang
origin of the universe wras a hot event) how the first explo
sion may have "evolved" from one with a temperature well in
excess of 100,000 million degrees Kelvin into a cooler one of
134 Jane Roberts
"only" a few thousand degrees Kelvin around 500,000 years later, so
that atoms could begin to form. Jane has heard of this standard model,
of course, but knows little about its supposed details.
In ordinary terms, she knows practically nothing concerning several
other less prominent theories regarding the beginning of the universe. I
haven't discussed these with her. One of them is the "inflationary
model," which may become much better known. It incorporates many
of the features of the big-bang theory, and actually may answer certain
questions in a better scientific fashion. One of the big differences
between the two is that in the big-bang theory all of the matter in the
universe was already present, though existing in an extremely dense
state which then began to expand; the inflationary model suggests that
the universe was created out of nothing, or out of just about nothing—
meaning that through unforeseeable rhythms subatomic particles
spontaneously came into being, with sufficient energy behind them to
enable them to persist as matter. A fantastic, inflationary expansion then
began. Yet this creation of matter out of nothing, so to speak, violates at
least some of the laws of conservation—laws that are indeed among the
most basic and cherished tenets of physics.
From my reading of Seth's ideas of "in the beginning," however, I'm
sure he couldn't agree with either the big-bang or inflationary models of
the creation of the universe, even though his material may be evocative
of portions of both theories. In physics, we're asked to believe that this
"extremely dense state" which began to expand was in actuality many
billions of times smaller than a proton. (Protons are subatomic
components of the nuclei of atoms.) Matter is a form of energy. Even
so, I have trouble conceptualizing the idea that all matter in our
universe, out to the farthest-away galaxy of billions of stars, grew from
this unimaginably small and dense, unimaginably hot "original" state or
area of being. I can see how such a concept can be postulated
mathematically—but could it ever have really happened in ordinary
terms?
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 135
SESSION 884—October 3, 1979
9:13 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(The weather has been exceptionally warm this fall—warm and often
rainy or misty, but most welcome for this time of year. The trees seem way
behind schedule; we've seen the first signs of their leaves turning color
just recently. The grass has even started growing again, after lying dry
and dormant for a long period this summer.
Yesterday morning I heard geese flying south for the first time this
season, but they were invisible above a heavy overcast. This afternoon I
both heard and saw them, and called them to Jane's attention—a wide,
straggling, shifting, V-shaped flight vanishing over the valley holding
the city just below us. The geese looked very vulnerable against the
massive roll of the earth beneath them, but this was an illusion: Like
every other entity on earth, each one of those birds knew very well what
it was doing. Each was well equipped to seek out its individual value
fulfillment.
I finished typing last Monday night's session a few minutes before we
sat for this one, and Jane just had time to read it before she felt Seth
around: "Okay, I'm ready. . . .")
Now. (Smile. Then elaborately:) Let us return to our tale or origins.
We are sitting here on a specific autumn evening. I am obviously
dictating this book, speaking through Ruburt, while Joseph sits on the
couch across from a very specific coffee table, taking down my words.
This is the year 1979, and the idea of time and of dates seems to be
indelibly mixed into [everyone's] psychology. You can remember last
year, and to some extent recall the past years of your lives. It appears to
you that your present consciousness wanders backward into the past,
until finally you can remember no longer—and on a conscious level, at
least, you must take the very event of your birth under secondhanded
evidence. Few people have conscious memory of it.
For the purposes of our discussion, I must necessarily couch this
book to some degree in the framework of time. I must honor your
specifics. Otherwise you would not understand what I am trying to say.
(Pause, one of many.) Even though this book is being dictated
136 Jane Roberts
within time's tradition, therefore, I must remind you that basi cally
(underlined) that tradition is not mine—and more, basically
(underlined), it is not yours either.
I used the term "before the beginning," then, and I will speak of
earth's events in certain sequences. In the deepest of terms, however,
and in ways that quite scandalize the intellect when it tries to operate
alone, the beginning is now. That critical explosion of divine
subjectivity into objectivity is always happening, and you are being
given life "in each moment" because of the simultaneous nature of that
divine subjectivity.
(Pause.) We will nevertheless call our next chapter "In the
Beginning," laying certain events out for you in serial form. I hope that
in other portions of this book certain mental exercises will allow you to
leap over the tradition of time's framework and sense with the united
intellect and intuitions your own individual part in a spacious present
that is large enough to contain all of time's segments.

Chapter Two: "In the Beginning."
Once again, in terms of your equations, energy and consciousness
and matter are one. And in those terms—in parentheses: (the
qualifications are necessary)—consciousness is the agent that directs
the transformation of energy into form and of form into energy. All
possible visible or invisible particles that you discover or imagine—
meaning hypothesized particles—possess consciousness. They are
energized consciousness.
There are certain characteristics inherent in energy itself, quite aside
from any that you ascribe to it, since of course to date you do not
consider energy conscious.
(9:35.) Energy is above all things infinitely creative, innovative,
original. Energy is imaginative. In parentheses: (Any scientists who
might be reading this book may as well stop here.) I am not assigning
human traits to energy. Instead, your human traits are the result of
energy's characteristics—a rather important difference. Space as you
think of it is, in your terms, filled with invisible particles. They are the
unstated portion of physical reality, the unmanifest medium in which
your world exists. In that regard, however, atoms and molecules are
stated, though you cannot see them with your [unaided] eye. The
smaller particles that make them up become "smaller and smaller,"
finally disappearing from the examination of any kind of physical
instrument,
138 Jane Roberts
and these help bridge the gap between unmanifest and manifest reality.1
For the terms of this discussion of the beginning of [your] world, I
will deal with known qualities for now—the atoms and molecules. In
the beginning they imagined the myriad of forms that were physically
possible. They imagined the numberless c-e-1-l-s (spelled out) that
could arise from their own cooperative creation. Energy is boundless. It
is exuberant. It knows no limits (all intently). In those terms, the atoms
dreamed the cells into physical being—and from that new threshold of
physical activity cellular consciousness dreamed of the myriad
organizations that could emerge from this indescribable venture.
Again, in actuality all of this took place at once, yet the depth of
psychological experience contained therein can never be measured, for
it involved a kind of value fulfillment with which each consciousness is
involved. That characteristic of value fulfillment is perhaps the most
important element in the being of All That Is, and it is a part of the
heritage of all species.
Value fulfillment itself is most difficult to describe, for it combines
(pause) the nature of a loving presence—a presence with the innate
knowledge of its own divine complexity—with a creative ability of
infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest,
most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into
simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach
of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all possible
variations—and in such a way that such a development also furthers the
creative potentials of each other portion of reality (all very
emphatically).
In those terms, then, there was in the beginning an almost
unimaginable time in which energized consciousness, using its own
creative abilities, its own imagination (underlined), experimented with
triumphant rambunctiousness, trying out one form after another. In the
terms you are used to thinking of, nothing was stable. Consciousness as
you think of it turned into matter, and then into pure energy and back
again.
(Pause at 9:56.) Subjectivity still largely ruled. Like an adolescent
leaving home for the first time, individualized consciousness was also
somewhat homesick, and returned often to the family homestead—but
gradually gained confidence and left finally to form a [universe].
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 139
Now because All That Is contains within itself such omnipotent,
fertile, divine creative characteristics, all portions of its subjective
experience attained dimensions of actuality impossible to describe. The
thoughts, for example, of All that Is were not simply thoughts as you
might have, but multidimensional mental events of superlative nature.
Those events soon found that a transformation must occur (pause), if
they were to journey into objectivity—for no objectivity of itself could
contain the entire reality of subjective events that existed within divine
subjectivity. Only in that context could their relative (underlined)
perfection be maintained. Yet they had yearned before the beginning for
other experiences, and even for fulfillments of a different nature. They
sensed a kind of value fulfillment that required of them the utilization of
their own creative abilities. They yearned to create as they had been
created, and All That Is, in a kind of divine perplexity, nevertheless
realized that this had always been its own intent.
(Pause.) All That Is realized that such a separation would also allow
you (pause) to bring about a different kind of divine art, in which the
creators themselves created, and their creations created, bringing into
actuality existences that were possible precisely because there would
seem (underlined) to be a difference between the creator and the
creations. All That Is is, therefore, within each smallest portion of
consciousness.
Yet each smallest portion of consciousness can uniquely create, bring
into being, eccentric2 versions of All That Is, that in certain terms All
That Is, without that separation, could not otherwise create. The loving
support, the loving encouragement of the slightest probable
consciousness and manifestation—that is the intent of All That Is.
(Long pause.) All That Is knows that even this purpose is a portion of
a larger purpose. In terms of time, the realization of that purpose will
emerge with another momentous explosion of subjective inspiration
into objectivity, or into another form. In deeper terms, however, that
purpose is also known now, and to one extent or another the entire
universe dreams of it, as once cellular consciousness dreamed of the
organs that it might "form."
(10:15.) I want to stress that I am speaking here not so much about a
kind of spiritual evolution as I am about an expan140
Jane Roberts
sion.3 We will for now, however, confine ourselves to a discussion of
consciousness in the beginning of the world, stressing that the first
basis of physical life was largely subjective, and that the state of
dreaming not only helped shape the consciousness of your species, but
also in those terms served to provide a steady source of information to
man about his physical environment, and served as an inner web of
communication among all species.
End of dictation.
(10:19.) Give us a moment. . . . Remind me, for our next session, to
wind in a discussion of those subjective entities as they learned how to
translate themselves into physical individuals.
(Heartily:) End of dictation, end of session, a fond good evening—
("Thank you.")
—and I enjoy the cozy specific nature of your den (Jane's writing
room) in its hillside house, nestled in its physical nest, the specific
streets and small city. Particularly when we are discussing issues of
such complexity—issues seemingly so vast, and yet issues that are
themselves responsible for your perception of a specific evening.
My fondest good wishes—a fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. Good night.")
(10:23 P.M. "I don't know whether it's going to last or not," Jane said,
"but I'm enjoying this hook more than any. I get into a certain state that's
really nice. It's very rich and deep. Like I know the session wasn't too
long, but I had that sense of completion when he went back incredibly far.
It's satisfying as all shit."
I laughed. It was easy to tell that Jane was happy working on Seth's
latest. I gladly told her the session was just as good, just as inspiring, as
her last one—the 883 rd: Once again her delivery had been intent, often
impassioned, given with many gestures. She's been picking up from Seth
on Dreams quite often. Sometimes she tells me as soon as she's done this.
At other times she may forget to mention it for a while, or the session
material itself may remind her that she already knew what Seth was going
to talk about.)
NOTES. Session 884
1. In Volume 1 of "Unknown" Reality, I wrote in Note 7 for Session 681
that atoms are "processes" rather than things. The clasDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment HI
sical conception of the typical atom as being composed of a neat
nucleus of indivisible protons and neutrons circled by electrons is
largely passe, although for convenience's sake we may still describe the
atom that way. (In those terms, the one exception is the hydrogen atom,
which evidently consists of but one proton and one electron cloud, or
"smear.") For the simple purposes of this note, then, I'm leaving out
considerations involving quantum mechanics, which concept repudiates
the idea of "particles" to begin with. (And surely that notion involves
more than a little of the psychic, or "irrational." What a heretical
thought from the scientific viewpoint!) But each atom of whatever
element is an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of
forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail—one of the
more basic examples of the unending and stupendous creativity, order,
and design of nature, or consciousness, or All That Is.
Through their work with particle accelerators, or "atom smashers,"
physicists have discovered that protons and neutrons themselves are
composed of forces and particles that in turn are almost certainly
composed of forces and particles, and so on, in an ever-descending
scale of smaller and smaller entities and concepts. Over 100 subatomic
particles have been identified so far, and no one doubts now that many
more will be found. The existence of a number of still-undiscovered
specific particles has been predicted. All of which reminds me that
almost 16 years ago, in only the 19th session he'd given us (on January
27, 1964), Seth remarked:
"Your scientists can count their elements. . . . That is, they will
create more and discover more until they are ready to go out of their
minds, because they will always create [physical] 'camouflages' of the
real [nonphysical] thing. And while they create instruments to deal with
smaller and smaller particles, they will actually see smaller and smaller
particles, seemingly without end.
"As their instruments reach farther into the universe they will 'see'—
and I suggest that you put the word 'see' into quotes —they will 'see'
farther and farther, but they will automatically transform what they
apparently 'see' into the camouflage patterns with which they are
familiar. They are and they will be the prisoners of their own tools.
"Instruments calculated to measure the vibrations with which
scientists are familiar will be designed and redesigned. All sorts
142 Jane Roberts
finally of seemingly impossible phenomena will be discovered with
these instruments, until the scientists realize that something is
desperately wrong. The instruments will be planned to catch certain
camouflages, and since they will be expertly thought out they will
perform their function. I do not want to get too involved. However, by
certain means the instruments themselves will transform data from
terms that you cannot understand into terms that you can understand.
Scientists do this all the time."
Some of the "particles" the theoretical physicists have discovered—
and/or created—in their gigantic particle accelerators have unbelievably
short life-spans in our terms, vanishing, it seems, almost before they're
born. I like to think of such research from the particle's point of view,
though, a consideration I haven't seen mentioned in the few scientific
journals I read. Keep in mind that according to the Seth material the
merest particle is basically conscious in its own way. Mesons are
classes of particles produced from the collisions of protons. Did a
meson, for example, choose to participate in an atom-smashing
experiment in order to merely peek in on our gross physical reality for
much less than the billionth of a second it exists with that identity,
before it decays into electrons and photons? From its viewpoint, our
reality might be an incomprehensible to it as its reality is to us—yet the
two inevitably go together.
In its way the meson may have all of the "time" it needs, or wants. It
may look upon our world as one frozen or motionless, upon other
subatomic particles as very slow-moving indeed, or even faster than it
is. (As far as "time" goes, some particles live for far less than a
trillionth of a second.) I'm quite sure, however, that the meson, or any
short-lived particle, searches out its own kind of value fulfillment while
here with us. Probable realities, which I haven't even mentioned, must
be deeply involved also.
And of course there are all sorts of motion, some of them very
stable, if still incomprehensible to us. But whereas the meson vanishes
from our view after its exceedingly brief existence, the electron has an
"infinite" life-span. Think of the unending varieties of value fulfillment
it explores in just our world alone! Talk about motion: The average
electron orbits its atomic-nucleus about a million times each billionth of
a second (or nanosecond)!
At this point in my speculations I'm usually led back to Seth's
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 143
EE (or electromagnetic energy) units, and his CU's (or units of
consciousness). These nonphysical entities—and many others of a like
nature—are emanations of consciousness, or All That Is, and in "size"
rank far below the tiniest particles ever observed in an atom smasher.
According to Seth, each unit of consciousness "contains within itself
innately infinite properties of expansion, development and organization;
yet within itself always maintains the kernel of its own individuality. . . .
It is aware energy . . . not 'personified' but awareized." See Session 682
for Volume 1 of "Unknown" Reality.
Seth came through with that session on February 13, 1974. Now let
me close this note with an excerpt from a private session he gave on
July 3, 1978:
"The varieties of consciousness—the inner 'psychological particles,'
the equivalent, say, of the atom or molecule, or proton, neutron or quark
—those nonphysical, 'charmed,' 'strange,' forms of consciousness that
make experience go up or down (all with amusement), and around and
around—are never of course dealt with (by science).
"If physical form is made up of such multitudinous, invisible
particles, how much more highly organized must be the inner
components of consciousness, without whose perceptions matter itself
would be meaningless. The alliances of consciousness, then, are far
more vast than those of particles in any form."
2. I've always liked the way Jane uses the word "eccentric" in relation
to the abilities of any portion of consciousness to create new versions
of itself; she's added her own original interpretation of the word to the
dictionary version of "eccentric" as meaning out of the ordinary, or
odd, or unconventional.
She began to refer to the eccentricities of consciousness in October
1974, following her first conscious experience with her "psychic
library," and a subsequent transcendental experience in which she
suddenly began to see, with an astonishing clear vision, the great
"model" of each portion of the world about her —each person, each
building, each blade of grass, each bird, for example; our ordinary
world suddenly appeared quite shabby by contrast. Jane wrote that
"everyone was a classic model, yet each was also a fantastic eccentric.
... I saw that each of us is a beloved eccentric not only because we have
inner models of the
144 Jane Roberts
self, but also the freedom to deviate from them, all of which makes the
model living and creative in our time." In Psychic Politics, see chapters
2 and 3.
3. Now what, I wondered, as I typed this session from my notes, does
Seth mean here, and in the paragraph above? Sometimes it's difficult to
pinpoint just what he's saying. His material usually generates more
questions than answers, but this time he'd outdone himself. I try to
avoid reading too much into such brief passages, but I felt that if Seth
answered all of the questions I could ask based upon this session, a
book would result. Was he referring to another big-bang type of
"momentous explosion"? I doubted it. Without going into a lot of
speculative detail, such an event would imply the obliteration of our
probable physical universe as we know it. Instead, I thought, by
"another form" he may mean an explosion of ideas or knowledge in our
reality, with the tremendous objective results that would follow. Such
results would stem even from "just" a spiritual explosion. (I could also
see correlations here between Seth's ideas about the primary nature of
All That Is and the inflationary model of the universe. See Note 2 for
Session 883.)
Since it's sometimes difficult to be sure of just what Seth is saying,
in retrospect I wished that either he'd volunteered more information
about his explosion-expansion, or that I'd been quick enough to ask him
to do so. But if words are often necessarily limited and stereotyped,
they can also be quite elusive— and this is an excellent thing, for it
shows they're still alive, charged with meanings that change. Basically,
those meanings can never really be "put into words."
SESSION 885—October 24, 1979
9:20 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(Five scheduled session dates have passed since we held the 884th session
three weeks ago; we missed four of those, but did hold a private, or
deleted, session on October 10. We've been busy. Jane has been working
hard on her God of Jane. He's also written a number of poems. [Some
of them are on reincarnation, and I plan to present them when Seth gets
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 145
into that subject in Dreams] On October 7, a Sunday, Jane saw for the
first time the work Sue Watkins has done on Conversations With Seth,
the book she's writing about the ESP classes Jane used to hold. The
project is turning out to be much longer than Sue had thought it would
be, and she still has a few chapters to go. The two women spent the day
going over the manuscript, and I had a chance to read some of it also.
Later Sue laughingly admitted that she'd been nervous at first, imagining
all kinds of adverse reactions either Jane or I might have—but she's
doing a fine job. She has complete freedom to do Conversations in her
own way. The next day Jane began making notes for the introduction
she's to write for the book.
Four days after Sue's visit we received an enthusiastic letter from an
independent motion-picture producer and director in Hollywood, informing
us that he's finally succeeding in his quest for an option to the
film rights to Jane's novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven. This
event marks the latest step in a rather complicated affair that began 18
months ago. It means only that our friends in Hollywood and in the
subsidiary rights department at Prentice-Hall have agreed upon the
terms of the option; a contract has yet to be signed by all of us. We've
never asked Seth to comment upon either this project itself or anyone
involved with it—nor has he volunteered such information, even in
private sessions.
During this session hiatus I've been spending much time upon a series
of letters to the publishers of Seth Speaks in Switzerland and in the
Netherlands, as well as to those in charge at Prentice-Hall.1 Last Saturday
night we had a very interesting meeting with a psychologist from
New York City. Our visitor taped Seth's copious material, and is to send
us a transcript of it.
Today, Jane wrote three more excellent little poems, all of which I hope
to eventually see published.2 I think she grumbled the whole time she was
doing them, though, since she kept at herself because she wasn't working
on God of Jane.
Then tonight she began writing "a fun thing" about our cats, Billy
and Mitzi, who are brother and sister just 10 months old now: "In the
beginning, Billy and Mitzi weren't even kittens yet, but only bits of sky
and cloud that wanted to be pussycats. Not that anyone knew what cats
were, because God hadn't created any yet. If it hadn't been for Billy and
Mitzi, cats might not exist at all. ..." The story sprang out of the hilarious
way she's taken to addressing Mitzi in regard to that cat's gifts from
heaven; I've been telling her that the affair would make a great children's
146 Jane Roberts
book.3 In the several pages she wrote this evening Jane presented her
material quite humorously, in a manner reminiscent of, yet different from,
her second Seven novel, The Further Education of Oversoul Seven, and
her Emir.'
Jane surprised me at the last moment by asking if I wanted the session;
I'd thought she was going to pass it up because of her general discontent
with herself. Seth didn't call this one book dictation, but it certainly
applies to Dreams. And in his opening delivery he referred to the creative
freedoms that—seemingly in spite of her conscious fussing—Jane
had allowed herself today.)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
A few notes. When Ruburt forgot to worry because "he wasn't
working," his natural playful creativity bubbled to the surface, and
today he wrote poetry. Poetry, however, did not fit into his current ideas
about work, and so that excellent creativity was hardly counted at all.
In a fashion—in a fashion—the [universe] began in the same way
that Ruburt's story this evening began: with the desire to create—out of
joy, not from a sense of responsibility.
Many of the ideas in our current book will be accepted by scientists
most dubiously, though some, of course, will grasp what 1 will be
saying. It is of course very difficult for you, because (pause) the
deepest truths cannot be physically proven. (Pause.) Science is used to
asking quite specific questions, and as Ruburt wrote recently (in God of
Jane) it usually comes up with very specific answers—even if those
answers are wrong (with some humor).
"Wrong" answers can fit together, however, to present a perfect
picture, an excellent construct of its own—and why not? For any
answers that do not fit the construct are simply thrown away and never
appear. So in a fashion we are dealing with what science has thrown
away. The picture we will end up presenting, then, will certainly not fit
that of established science.
However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority
for facts, then as you know science cannot prove its version of the
[universe's] origin either. It only sets up an hypothesis, which collects
about it all data that agree, and again ignores what does not fit.
Moreover, science's thesis meets with no answering affirmation in
the human heart—and in fact
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 147
arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own
worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident.5 The
psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation
that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that
keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices
(all with much emphasis and fast delivery.
(9:33.) There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately
knowledgeable standard within man's consciousness by which he
ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even
if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that
point of integrity within him is never fooled.
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. (Pause.) In a fashion, creative play is your
human version of far greater characteristics from which your universe
itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific,
subjective evidence for the nature of your own reality—evidence that is
readily apparent once you really begin to look for it, particularly by
comparing the world of your dreams with your daily life.
In other words, subjective play is the basis for all creativity, of course
—but far more, it is responsible for the great inner play of subjective
and objective reality.
With all due respect, your friend [the psychologist] is, with the best
of intentions, barking up the wrong psychological tree. He is very
enthusiastic about his value tests, and his enthusiasm is what is
important The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open
itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of
mechanical psychology, as if you could break down human values to a
kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try
(with humor), but representative of psychology's best attempt to make
sense of a poor hypothesis.
148 Jane Roberts
You may do what you wish yourselves (about taking the tests), of
course, but our main purpose is to drive beyond psychology's
boundaries, and not play pussyfoot among the current psychological
lilies of the field.
As for Ruburt, he became overconcerned about work because of the
contracts (for Mass Events and God of Jane, which we have yet to sign
with Prentice-Hall), and the foreign hassles. It would be nice if you
took it for granted that all of those issues were also being creatively
worked out to your advantage. He is still somewhat afraid of relaxing. It
makes him feel guilty. His body is responding, however, so let him
remember that creativity is playful, and that it always surfaces when he
allows his mind to drop its worries.
Do you have questions?
("No, I guess not.")
You are doing well, and your notes (for Mass Events) are coming
together in their own order, so let them.
I bid you a fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. The same to you.")
(9:57 P.M. "He was right there," Jane said with a smile. "That's nice."
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. I thought they'd been [perhaps unwittingly] oriented
in certain negative directions—that is, the one taking the test has to
choose from a series of more or less negative possibilities, listing specific
choices in an order that depends upon his or her personal belief systems
—/ think.
Obviously, Seth didn't follow' through on the statement he'd made near
the end of the last book session, which we held much earlier this month:
"Remind me, for our next session, to wind in a discussion of those
subjective entities as they learned how to translate themselves into physical
individuals." However, I didn't ask him for the material tonight, either.
Jane hasn't mentioned it. Such omissions can easily result when the
session routine is interrupted—we simply may not keep a particular
session that closely in mind as we become involved in other matters during
a break. The information in question will be most interesting when Seth
does come through with it.)
Dreams, "Evolution, "and Value Fulfillment 149
VOTES. Session 885
1. Some of my letters were triggered on October 9 (this month), when
Jane and I received our first copies of Seth Spreekt, the Dutch-language
edition of Seth Speaks. We saw at once that the people at Ankh-Hermes,
the publishing company in the Netherlands, had cut the book
considerably. As I wrote in the notes for the private session we held the
next evening: "Our first reactions were ones of such stunned surprise
that we didn't even get mad."
In effect, Ankh-Hermes has published not only a translation but a
condensation. Considering the eagerness with which we've looked
forward to having the Seth material published in other languages, and
the long waiting periods involved, this situation is frustrating indeed.
Many of my notes, some of which contain excerpts of Seth material,
have been eliminated. So have large portions of a number of the
sessions themselves. The Appendix in Seth Spreekt is only 11 pages
long, chopped down from 67 pages.
"My own position cannot be as immediate as your own," Seth said
on October 10. "I respect your emotional reactions, whatever they are,
and your right to them. (Loudly and amused:) Seth, it seems, speaks a
bit more briefly in Dutch than he does in English—but the material is
there, and if the Dutch have cut it, or your notes, it is, in the most basic
of terms, now, their loss. Agreements of a legal order should, however,
always be honored, and each society has been built upon that precept. .
. ."
"Whenever a book is translated, it is almost impossible, of course, to
say the same thing in the same way. Such a book will always be
expressed through those invisible national characteristics that are so
intimately involved with language—and obviously, were that not so, no
book could be understood by someone of a foreign language. There are
bound to be distortions, but the distortions themselves are meaningful."
Our editor, Tarn 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. Already those at
Ankh-Hermes have been asked to withdraw from sale their shortened
version of Seth Spreekt, and to publish
150 Jane Roberts
a full-length one instead—a very expensive proposition indeed. 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. We fully agree
with Seth that changes and distortions are inevitable as the Seth
material is moved from English into other languages; we just want
those alterations kept to a minimum. It appears that language
difficulties involving publishers and agents led to the whole mix-up to
begin with. Tarn has begun work on a contractual amendment designed
to prevent more such confusions. And all concerned must wait at least
another year before a full-length version of Seth Speaks will be
published in the Dutch language.
For a number of reasons, hardcover books especially are much more
expensive in Europe than they are in the United States. In Europe a
book can be priced at more than double its comparative cost in this
country.
2. Jane hasn't given titles to any of her poems of the day. In all three of
them she celebrated, in a deceptively simple, almost innocently
mystical way, the changing look of autumn. For example:
When all of summer's splendid leafery is
gone then space seems to surround us
everywhere, far and close. The immense
vault of the universe turns intimate,
reaches to our chimneytops in shining
swirls of sudden openness just outside of
our back doors. Space from the galaxies
rushes in to fill the new emptiness
where a million million leaves were, and
the valleys hold natural cupfuls of
space, filled to their transparent brims.
Jane has been doing 3" x 6" sketches in concert with her poetry
about nature. She works in brilliant simple colors, obtainDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 151
ing her effects with porous pens whose inks she can partially blend
with water. I'd like to frame some of those little pieces, for visually they
present the same qualities her poetry does verbally. We usually keep her
sketches covered, however, since their colors begin to fade after a few
weeks' exposure to light.
3. I've also suggested to Jane that she might be able to incorpo
rate into her story about Billy and Mitzi the little poem below.
It's from a number of sketches and untitled poems she did as a
birthday book for me last June:
There seems to be
no unexpressed self
in animals, as if
they are as fully
themselves in flesh
as possible, with no
lag of consciousness
to fill up, while we
keep trying to grow
into something else.
4.Seven Two, as we call it, was published by Prentice-Hall in May —
five months ago. Delacorte Press published Emir just last month.
5.By now, a number of the world's leading scientists in the physical
disciplines have publicly stated their beliefs that basically
consciousness plays the primary role in our world and/or universe. For
reasons too complicated to go into here, this attitude prevails even with
some mathematicians who seek to penetrate to the core of our reality as
they understand it.
However, for every scientist bold enough to think this way, there
are scores of others who vehemently disagree. For most scientific
materialists only physical matter is real. For them consciousness is
nothing more than an epiphenomenon, the passive by-product of the
brain's physiology and chemical events. They believe that physical
death is the end of everything, that ultimately all is pointless. They
derisively call their rebellious col152
Jane Roberts
leagues "animists"—those who believe that all life forms and natural
phenomena have a spiritual origin independent of physical matter.
(Such heretics are also called "vitalists," a term related to animism, and
one which also has a long history of scientific contempt behind it.)
Jane and I have often been most intrigued by the obvious
contradictions involved here, for what can the materialistic scientists
use other than mind—or consciousness, that poor epi-phenomenon—to
study and dissect matter? (Not to mention that innumerable
experiments have proven that "physical matter" isn't solid or objective
at all, but "only" energy!) We have, then, the paradox of mind denying
its own reality, let alone its importance. As far as we know, human
beings are the only creatures on earth who would seriously engage in
such learned, futile behavior. It's also very ironic, I think, that the
materialists spend years acquiring their specialized educations, and
prestige, both of which they then use to inform us of the ultimate
futility of all of our endeavors (including their own, of course). But for
the materialists, the mind-brain duality isn't scientific in the orthodox
sense. It isn't falsifiable; that is, it cannot be stated under what precise
conditions the mind-brain duality could be proven false. To which,
understandably enough, those scientists who do accept the reality of
mind reply that neither can the idea be falsified that only what is
"physical" is real.
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. Discoveries in the "future" are quite apt to
prove such limited viewpoints wrong. The history of science itself
contains many examples of theories and "facts" gone awry. Moreover,
why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as
epipheno-menalism through which to comprehend our reality? Or better
yet, why does it in large part? 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
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 153
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. Human
beings do know their own worth, as Seth stated in this session.
Jane herself commented on these questions in her own way recently
(as Seth indicated a bit earlier this evening). Her notes will end up in
one of the later chapters of God of Jane, which she's still roughing out:
"There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning.
That belief may well be a biological imperative. If we were as science
maintains—only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly
in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos
—then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?
"Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a
reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness.
But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily
end up creating its own illusion. It ignores the reality of
experience, the evidence of being, and in so doing it denies rather than
reinforces life's values."
6. Seth's passage reminded both of us of "If Toes Had Eyes," a poem
Jane wrote some four months ago, which she's using in an earlier
chapter of God of Jane. Here's the first verse:
If toes had eyes,
then I could see
how my feet know where to go,
but toes are blind.
And how is it that my tongue
speaks words it cannot hear?
Because for all its eloquence,
the tongue itself is deaf,
and flaps in sonndlessness.
154 Jane Roberts
SESSION 886—December 3, 1979
9:20 P.M. MONDAY
(We've held only three private, or deleted, sessions since Seth came through
with the last regular one [the 885 th] almost six weeks ago. I just wish I could
present those sessions here, for in them Seth gave us much valuable
information—not only about ourselves [including Jane's somewhat impaired
physical condition, her "stiffness"], but about the myriad interchanges
occurring constantly between our inner and outer realities, or Frameworks 1
and 2, as he calls them. Some of that framework material is personal, but
much more of it is general.
In the Preface for Dreams / mentioned Jane's idea for a second book of
poetry. She's progressed with the subject matter for it to the point where Seth
could remark on November 21: "The book of love poetry is an excellent idea."
For now Jane wants the volume to contain some of the poetry she's dedicated
to me over the years since we met in February 1954. She called Tarn Mossman
last month about the book, and they discussed possible titles for it. But Jane
doesn't yet have one she likes.
In the Preface I also wrote about how I thought the great blossomings of
religious consciousness and scientific consciousness engendered by the events
at Three Mile Island and Jonestown!Iran would continue to grow, once born,
seemingly with lives of their own. Jane and I have watched these effects
steadily increase since we held the 885th session. Now, our country's initial
concern over the accident at TMI has grown to include deep questions about
why we've built so many nuclear energy generating plants near large
population centers; carrying out a mass evacuation in case of a serious
accident at any of those sites seems to present a series of insurmountable
challenges.
As for Iran, I described how last February [1979] a mob of Marxist-led
Iranian guerrillas overran the United States Embassy in that country's capital,
Tehran, and temporarily held prisoner some 70 Americans. I noted that such a
situation could happen again—and it did: On November 4, Iranian students
assaulted our embassy compound and took 63 Americans hostage; 3 others
were imprisoned at Iran's Foreign Ministry. Day I began of a countdown
toward the release of the hostages (it's day 30 as I write this note). The
Moslem militants released 13 of our citizens—5 white women and 8 black men
—who returned home by Thanksgiving Day, but this time they kept in bondage
the remaining 53 Americans. Iran holds our entire country in contempt.
Dreams. "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 155
This may hardly be original thinking here, but these proliferations of
consciousness imply some pretty fantastic abilities on the part of we humans—
for such developments show that even though we live as small
creatures within the incredible richness of an overall consciousness, or
All That Is, still our actions can result in that great consciousness exploring
new areas of itself. Quite awesome creative abilities on our part,
I'd say, and ones that unknowingly we take for granted. We do this all of
the time, of course, individually and collectively.
Earlier today Jane and I had talked about Seth's resuming work on
Dreams. / was still surprised when he did so. Jane had also expressed a
strong desire for some personal information in the session.)
(Rather slowly and deliberately to start:)
Now: In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah,
Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.1
In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological
gestalt—and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition
of the word "being," since it is the source from which all being
emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension (long pause), a
spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your
terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is
characterized (long pause, eyes closed) by such a brilliant concentration
that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are
equally held in a multiloving constant focus.
Your conceptions of beginnings and endings make an explanation of
such a situation most difficult, for in your terms the beginning of the
[universe] is meaningless—that is, in those terms (underlined) there
was no beginning (intently).
The [universe] is, as I explained, always coming into existence, and
each present moment bring its own built-in past along with it. You
agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available
data that compose any moment individually or globally. You accept
only those data that fit in with your ideas of motion in time. As a result,
for example, your archeological evidence usually presents a picture
quite in keeping with your ideas of history, geological eras, and so
forth.
(9:34.) The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited
scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term "conscious mind" as
you define it, for you allow it to accept as evidence only those physical
data available for the five senses—while the five
156 Jane Roberts
senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat2 view of reality, that
deals with the most apparent surface.
The physical senses are the extensions of inner senses3 that are, in
one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its
degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of
communication. The c-e-1-l-s (spelled out), then, possess inner senses.
Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the
nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your]
world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and
there, elements coalescing from brainless gases—nor was the world,
again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by
part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you
(with some humor), and better models coming every geological season.
The universe formed out of what God is.
The universe is the natural extension of divine creativity and intent,
lovingly formed from the inside out (underlined)—so there was
consciousness before there was matter, and not the other way around.
In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion
of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a
metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from
consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in
physical life.
(Long pause.) Your consciousness will survive your body's death, but
it will also take on another kind of form—a form that is itself composed
of "units of consciousness." You have a propensity for wanting to think
in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the
list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in
dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the
consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. The
divine gestalt, however, is expressed in such a way that its quality
(pause) is undiluted. It cannot be watered down, so that in basic terms
one portion of existence is somehow up or down the scale from another.
It is all Grade A (with amusement).
You limit the capacity of your conscious mind by refusing to allow it
to use a larger scope of attention, so that you have remained closed and
ignorant about the different, varied, but rich
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 157
experiences of other species: They do appear beneath you. You have
allowed a certain stubborn literal-mindedness to provide you with
definitions that served to categorize rather than illuminate other
realities beside your own.
(Long pause at 9:55.) In the beginning, then, there was a subjective
world that became objective. Matter was not yet permanent, in your
terms, for consciousness was not yet as stable there. In the beginning,
then, there was a dream world, in which consciousness formed a dream
of physical reality, and gradually became awake within that world.
Mountains rose and tumbled. Oceans filled. Tidal waves thundered.
Islands appeared. The seasons themselves were not stable. In your
terms the magnetic fields themselves fluctuated— but all of the species
were there at the beginning, though in the same fashion, for as the
dream world broke through into physical reality there was all of the
tumultuous excitement and confusion with which a mass creative event
is achieved. There was much greater plasticity, motion, variety, giveand-
take, as consciousness experimented with its own forms. The
species and environment together formed themselves in concert, in
glorious combination, so that each fulfilled the requirements of its own
existence while adding to the fulfillment of all other portions of
physical reality (all very intently, and with many gestures).
That kind of an event simply cannot fit into your concepts of "the
beginning of the world," with consciousness arising out of matter
almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a
divine but mechanistic natural world.
(Pause.) Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil,
as I will explain later in this book. God, or All That Is, is in the deepest
sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the
contradiction that seems to be presented to your minds. In a sense,
however (underlined), a creative product, say, helps complete an artist,
while of course the artist can never be completed. All That is, or God, in
a certain fashion, now (underlined)—and this is qualified—learns as
you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. We
must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too
easily, but in a basic sense you all carry within yourselves the
undeniable mark of All That Is—and an inbuilt capacity— ca pacity —to
glimpse in your own terms undeniable evidence of
158 Jane Roberts
your own greater existence. You are as close to the beginning of [your]
world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or
Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the
moment.
I have a purpose in this book—for this is dictation—and that purpose
is to change your ideas of yourselves, by showing you a truer picture of
your history both in terms of your immortal consciousness and your
physical heritage.
End of dictation.
(10:13. After giving some material for Jane, Seth ended the session at
10:32 P.M. "I had no idea he was going to do it that way," Jane said.
"I'm so glad to be back on the book.")
NOTES. Session 886
1. Since according to Seth something like a basic religious awareness
has always been with mankind, Seth here indicates a few historical and
mythological signposts of that intuitive understanding.
A. God the Father. There's no way to assign any reasonably
accurate date to when God the Father created all things, as de
scribed in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. (The Biblical ac
count of Creation makes evolution an impossibility.) Nor can the
date of Creation be arrived at by counting the Bible's lists of
generations, as given in the Old Testament, since these may well
be incomplete.
B. Mohammed (A.D. 570?-632), the Prophet of Islam,
stressed the uniqueness of the god Allah, whose name was al
ready well known in pre-Islamic Arabia.
C. Zoroaster (628?—551? B.C.) was a Persian religious teacher
and prophet.
D. Zeus was the supreme god of the ancient Greeks, who
worshipped him in connection with almost every facet of daily
life. He was the son of Cronus and Rhea, and the husband of his
sister Hera. The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme
god, Jupiter, or Jove.
E. Buddha. This is the title given to Siddhartha Gautama,
the founder of Buddhism. He was a religious teacher and phi
losopher who lived in India, probably from 563 to 483 B.C.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 159
2.I see correlations between the "Hat view of reality" given to us by our
physical senses, as Seth maintains, and the "flat" view of the universe
that cosmologists perceive when they look way out into space. In his
general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that space can curve,
and this has been shown to happen near our sun. Yet when scientists
examine our universe of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, they see
space as essentially Hat, instead of curving in upon itself as it should
over those enormous distances. Nor can the big-bang theory of the
origin of the universe account for the homogeneity of a flat universe.
The inflationary model can explain both the appearance of flatness and
homogeneity—but, like all theories, it poses other problems that have
yet to be resolved.
3.Jane gave Seth's partial list of the inner senses in Chapter Nineteen of
The Seth Material, which was published back in 1970.
SESSION 887—December 5, 1979
9:17 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(This noon Jane and I signed our wills, with our attorney and his wife
serving as witnesses. Jane had been somewhat depressed this morning,
and her writing hadn't gone well. The obvious implications posed by the
wills did nothing to cheer her up.' Still, trusting her impulses, she slept
for a couple of hours this afternoon—then, perversely, wasn't happy with
herself for doing so when she woke up. She was quieter than usual
through supper, although she said she wanted to hold the session.
Her delivery as Seth was for the most part comparatively subdued.)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Now: Dictation. (With many pauses:) When I speak of the dream
world, I am not referring to some imaginary realm, but to the kind of
world of ideas, of thoughts, of mental actions, out of which all form as
you think of it emerges. In actuality this is an inner universe rather than
an inner world. Your physical reality is but one materialization of that
inner organization. All possible civilizations exist first in that realm of
inner mind.
(Long pause.) In the beginning, then, the species did not have
160 Jane Roberts
the kinds of forms they do now. They had pseudoforms— dream
bodies, if you prefer—and they could not physically reproduce
themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the
beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. In your
terms, this meant that time could be quickened, or lengthened. It was a
kind of psychological time.
Again, forms appeared and disappeared. (Pause.) In your terms of
time, however, the dream bodies took on physical forms. Physical
reproduction was impossible. That did not happen to all of the species
at once, however. For a while, then, the earth had a mixed population of
species who had completely taken on physical forms, and species who
had not. The forms, however, whether physical or not, were complete
in themselves. Birds were birds, and fish fish.
(9:30.) In the beginning there were also species of various other
kinds: combinations of man-animal and animal-man, and many other
"crossbreed" species, some of fairly long duration in your terms. This
applies to all areas. There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that
gradually became aware within that dream (with gentle emphasis),
turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their
dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees.
There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more
advantageous than the term, "the dream world." I am emphasizing this
dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to
each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of
subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream
state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless,
precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality
that dreams appear to be sta-ticky objective background noise, left over
from when you sleep. But that is how physical experience would seem
to someone not focused in it, or inexperienced with its organization.
(Pause.) Again, the world came into being in the same way that any
idea does. The physical world expands in the same way that any idea
does. I am speaking for your edification of the world you recognize, of
the earth you know, but there are probable earths, of course, as real as
your own. They coexist with your own, and they are all in one way or
another connected.
Dreams, "Evolution." and Value Fulfillment 161
Each one carries hints and clues about the others. In the terms used by
science, there was no evolution in linear terms, but vast (long pause)
explosions of consciousness, expansions of capacities, unfoldings on
the parts of all species, and these still continue. They are the inner
manipulations with which consciousness presents itself.
Later in the book I will discuss some of these, but they represent
intuitive leaps of new understandings. The pattern of animal behavior,
for example, is not at all as set and finished as you suppose. Your
physical experience is a combination of dream events interlaced with
what you call objective acts.
Were it not for your myths, you would have discovered no "facts."
Give us a moment. . . . End of dictation.
(9:48. Now Seth came through with a rather long dissertation concerning
the psychological manipulations Jane and I make between
Frameworks 1 and 2, and how we can help each other during those
transitions. End at 10:13 P.M.)
NOTE. Session 887
1. In this note I describe events that are of great importance to Jane and
me.
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.
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
162 Jane Roberts
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.
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 decision is
especially apropos where we have but one copy of the material in
question: We like knowing that "security copies" will be on file
elsewhere—as with Jane's journals, for example, and many of my own
notes.
To make the copies I plan to install equipment here in the house, so
that I can work at the job whenever I have a minute. The task will take
lots of time—perhaps several years—and I may have to hire help; it
will cost us something to copy the many thousands of papers for the
library. Others are to duplicate tapes and photographs for us.
Jane's editor, Tarn Mossman, who graduated from Yale, helped us
contact officials at Sterling Memorial a year ago (in December 1978).
Jane and I completed arrangements after that, when those at the library
explained how our collection would complement others already there.
An archivist from Manuscripts and Archives has visited us to get a
rough idea of the amount of material we have to offer. We don't know
when our work will actually be ready for study: First we must get it to
the library, and then the staff must see to its processing—which will be
quite a project in itself. Jane and I are most pleased that the Seth
material and everything connected with it are to be preserved.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 163
SESSION 888—December 10, 1979
9:04 P.M. MONDAY
(Last Saturday evening we were visited by Dr. LeRoy Guy [I'll call him],
a professor of psychology at a well-known nearby university. He'd written
Jane on November 16. When Jane called Dr. Guy in return, he told her
that he'd contacted her at the behest of a Dr. Camper [another pseudonym].
' Dr. Camper, a professor of sociology at a midwestern university,
had asked Dr. Guy to ask Jane to be tested for her psychic ability. [The
two scientists haven't met personally, by the way.]
The evening had been very pleasant. Dr. Guy knows a number of
people who are prominent in parapsychology. Both Dr. Guy and Dr.
Camper have a strong interest in magic. Seth came through several times,
delivering beautifully organized little dissertations to Dr. Guy on how he
might relax enough to allow the psychic signs that he's so interested in to
come through. Strangely enough, Dr. Guy didn't bring a tape recorder
with him. We didn't use one either, and so for the first time in a long
while Seth's material disappeared as rapidly as it was given—an odd
experience for us. Seth also discussed with Dr. Guy the practice of, and
the motivations behind, the art of magic. And in return for Seth speaking,
Dr. Guy staged his own little magic show for Jane and me—to our
amazement and intense interest—as the three of us sat around the livingroom
table.
As Jane commented afterward, LeRoy Guy said not a single word to
us about his reaction to Seth, although I'd watched him pay the same rapt
attention to that personality as had many others. "I suppose he'll write to
Camper now," Jane said. We hadn't asked Dr. Guy what he intended to
do. For that matter, we hadn't even asked him exactly what Dr. Camper
wanted him to find out about Jane and Seth—or even me. Dr. Guy left
us a book written by a scientist about a famous medium, and I'll be
mailing it back to him as soon as we've read it.)
(With a smile:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Dictation: You can only locate or pinpoint an event that falls one
way or another into the range of your perception.
You cannot really locate or pinpoint microscopic or macroscopic
events with any precision. You cannot pinpoint "invisible" events, for
even as your sophisticated instruments perceive them, they have not
met them in the same time scheme. I want
164 Jane Roberts
to deal briefly with such ideas, so that later we can discuss the location
of the universe.
Any event that you perceive is only a portion of the true dimensionality
of that event. The observer and the object perceived are a
part of the same event, each changing the other. This interrelationship
always exists in any system of reality and at any level of activity. In
certain terms, for example, even an electron "knows" it is being
observed through your instrument. The electrons within the instrument
itself have a relationship with the electron that scientists may be trying
to "isolate" for examination.
Quite apart from that, however, there is what we will call for now the
collective unconscious of all of the electrons that compose the entire
seemingly separate event of the scientists observing the electron. In
your range of activity you can adequately identify events, project them
in time and space, only by isolating certain portions of much larger and
much smaller events, and recognizing a highly specific order of events
as real.
(Pause, one of many.) Light can be defined as a wave or as a
particle,2 and the same is true in many other instances. Consciousness,
for example, can be defined as a wave or as a particle, for it can operate
as either, and appear as either, even though its true definition would
have to include the creative capacity to shape itself into such forms.
You cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe—for (suddenly
louder) that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be
contained in any of your specifications. While everything seems neat
and tidy within those specifications, and whole, you operate with
brilliant nonchalance in the theater of time and space. Time and space
are each the result of psychological properties. (Pause.) When you ask
how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then you are taking it
for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute
qualities. You are asking for answers that can only be found by going
outside of the context of usual experience—for within that experience
you are always led back to beginnings and endings, consecutive moments,
and a world that seems to have within it no evidences of any
other source.
(Pause at 9:23.) The physical world as you know it is unique, vital to
the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 165
of that universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. That reality is
dependent upon the perceptions of each kind of life that composes it. It
is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression
from that divine gestalt of being— and that divine gestalt of being is of
such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear
within any one of its own realities, its own worlds.
Space, again, is a psychological property. So is time. The universe
did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular
location in space—for (louder) it is true to say that all of space and all
of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously.
You cannot pinpoint the location of consciousness.
(Long pause.) When you are dreaming you cannot pinpoint your
dream location in the same way that you can determine, say, the chair
or the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which you dream.
That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take
place within it. Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it
is a mass psychologically shared property—but at one "time" in the
beginning this was not so.
In the beginning, physical space had the qualities that dream space
has to you now. It seemed to have a more private nature, and only
gradually, in those terms, did it become publicly shared.
(Pause.) What was such a world like, and how can you possibly
relate it to the world that you know?
End of chapter.

CHAPTER 3
Sleepwalkers. The World in Early Trance. The Awakening of the Species

(9:36.) Chapter Three.
("Three?")
Three: "Sleepwalkers. The World in Early Trance. The Awakening of
the Species." Those are the headings.
(Pause.) Give us a moment. . . . You have taught yourselves to
respond to certain neural patterns, and to ignore alternate ones that now
simply operate as background activity. That background activity,
however, supports a million forces: the neural stimuli that you accept as
biologically real. Those other background stimuli are now quite
difficult for you to identify, but they are always there in the [hinterland]
of your waking consciousness, like dream chatter way beneath your
usual associations.
Neurologically, you tune into only a portion of your body's reality
and are ignorant of the great, tiny but tumultuous communications that
are ever flying back and forth in the microscopic but vital cellular
world.
166
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 167
Electrons in your terms are precognitive, and so is your cellular
consciousness. Your body's relative permanence in time is dependent
upon the electron's magnificent behavior as it deals with probabilities.
(Pause.) The cell's stability, and its reliability in the bodily
environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant
communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication
with all others and is united with all others through fields of
consciousness,3 in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.
At one level your cells obey the rules of time, but on other levels
they defy it. All of these communications are a part of the human parcel
of reality, and they all exist beneath what you think of as normal
consciousness. Events are not built up initially from physical particles.
They are the result of psychological activity.
(9:51.) Give us a moment. . . . "In the beginning" you were only
aware of that psychological activity. It had not "as yet" thickened itself
into form. The form was there, but it was not manifest (intently). I do
not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small
particles (Long pause), you had small units of consciousness gradually
building themselves into large ones —but a smaller unit of
consciousness, you see, is not "less than" a larger unit, for each unit of
consciousness contains within itself the innate (underlined) heritage of
All That Is.
You think of the conscious mind, as you know it, as the only kind of
consciousness with a deliberate intent, awareness of itself as itself, and
with a capacity for logic and the appreciation of symbolism. That only
seems true because of your particular range of activity, and because you
can only pinpoint events within a particular psychological spectrum.
End of dictation. For our friend:
(10:01. Now Seth gave a few paragraphs for Jane, then said good
night at 10:10 P.M. Even with the many pauses she'd used this evening
—most of which I didn't indicate—Jane's delivery had often been quite
intent and meaningful. In their own way the pauses served as additional
punctuation and emphasis for some of Seth's information.)
168 Jane Roberts
NOTES. Session 888
1.Last summer, through the mail, Jane and I had our own encounters
with Dr. Camper. Those events are too complicated to go into here, but
Jane is devoting considerable space to them in her own God of Jane.
2.Seth should have said that light can be defined as being made up of
waves or particles, but he didn't put it quite that way, and I let stand
what he did say. He gave me a knowing, half-smiling look while
delivering this paragraph, for it was obvious that his material was
related to a note I'd shown Jane today—one I'm finishing for Mass
Events. In it, I'm trying to deal very simply with both the uncertainty
principle and the complementarity of light, among other tenets of
physics. (It will be Note 2 for Session 823.)
In fact, I believe that a good amount of Seth's material this evening
was inspired by my struggles with that note. Such interchanges among
Jane, Seth, and me—and among books—often take place.
3. Seth's "fields of consciousness" sounds like an elaboration of
field theory in physics. In physics, however, the field is called
"energy and momentum," not consciousness.
SESSION 889—December 17, 1979
8:45 P.M. MONDAY
(On December 13 Jane came up with her best title yet for the book of
poetry she's putting together: If We Live Again: Love's Lives and
Probable Selves. She's writing some excellent new poems for the book,
besides working on God of Jane. My wife is also doing some poetry as
a Christmas present for me—though she's very secretive about this activity;
I'm not supposed to know what she's up to.
Last night was our coldest of the winter, I believe—about 9°—and
this evening wasn't much warmer as we sat for the session. However, the
season has been exceptionally mild in our area. The ground has been
bare of snow most oj the time—so far!
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 169
Jane called me at 8:30 to say that she was ready for the session. "I'd
better get started," she said. "Otherwise I might put it off, I'm getting so
relaxed. I've been picking up some great stuff from Seth on the book,
too. ..." And that's why we missed the regularly scheduled session for
last Wednesday evening: She became so relaxed she didn't care to focus
on going into trance.)
Dictation.
Now: I call the building blocks of matter CU's—units of consciousness.
They form physical matter as it exists in your understanding
and experience. Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter
that you do not perceive.1
CU's can also operate as "particles" or as "waves." Whichever way
they operate, they are aware of their own existences. When CU's
operate as particles, in your terms, they build up a continuity in time.
They take on the characteristics of particularity. They identify
themselves by the establishment of specific boundaries.
(Long pause.) They take certain forms, then, when they operate as
particles, and experience their reality from "the center of" those forms.
They concentrate upon, or focus upon, their unique specificiations.
They become in your terms (underlined) individual.
When CU's operate as waves, however, they do not set up any
boundaries about their own self-awareness—and when operating as
waves CU's can indeed be in more than one place at one time.
I understand that this is somewhat difficult material to comprehend.
However (pause), in its purest form a unit of consciousness can be in
all places at the same time (forcefully). It becomes beside the point,
then, to say that when it operates as a wave a unit of consciousness is
precognitive, or clairvoyant, since it has the capacity to be in all places
and all times simultaneously.
Those units of consciousness are the building blocks for the physical
material of your body, for the trees and rocks, the oceans, the
continents, and the very manifestation of space itself as you understand
it.
(Seth repeated the last phrase very loudly when I failed to understand
him the first time.)
These CU's can operate as separate entities, as identities, or they can
flow together in a vast, harmonious wave of activity, as
170 Jane Roberts
a force. Period. Actually, units of consciousness operate in both ways
all of the time. No identity, once "formed," is ever annihilated, for its
existence is indelibly a part of "the entire wave of consciousness to
which it belongs."
(Pause at 9:04, one of many.) Each "particleized" unit, however, rides
the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave
and particle both belong. Each particleized unit of consciousness
contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles—
for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. Basically the
units move faster than light,2 slowing down, in your terms, to form
matter. (Pause.) These units can be considered, again, as entities or as
forces, and they can operate as either. Metaphysically, they can be
thought of as the point at which All That Is acts to form [your] world—
the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming
into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that
brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of
divine fact. Scientifically, again, the units can be thought of as building
blocks of matter. Ethically, the CU's represent the spectacular
foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of
consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each
participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see
how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man's
relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with
them.
(Pause at 9:17. Once again, as it often has since she began dictating
this book, Jane's delivery for Seth had taken on a charged and inspired
cast. The words in paragraphs like the one above rolled out of her in a
strong and almost grand manner. It was easy to tell that she enjoyed
working on Dreams—that she gave permission to be carried away if
need be. Perhaps her method of presentation was in keeping with Seth's
own pronouncement at the beginning of his Preface, almost three months
ago: "This book will be my most ambitious project thus far. Period.")
In the beginning CU's, then, units of consciousness, existing within a
divine psychological gestalt, endowed with the unimaginable creativity
of that sublime identity, began themselves to create, to explore, and to
fulfill those innate values by which they were characterized. Operating
both as waves and particles, directed in part by their own creative
restlessness, and directed in part by the unquenchable creativity of All
That Is, they emDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 171
barked upon the project that brought time and space and your entire
[universe] into being. They were the first entities, then.
I want you to try and imagine a situation in which (long pause) there
exists a psychological force that includes within its capabilities the
ability to act simultaneously on the most microscopic and the most
macroscopic levels; that can form within itself (long pause, eyes
closed) a million separate inviolate unique identities, and that can still
operate as a part of those identities, and as a larger unit that is their
source—in which case it is a wave from which the particles emerge.
That description fits our units of consciousness.
(9:26.) They built your world from the inside out. As physical
creatures, they focused upon what you think of as physical identities:
separate, individual differences, endowing each physical consciousness
with its own original variations and creative potentials, its own
opportunity for completely original experience, and a viewpoint or
platform from which to participate in reality —one that at that level
could not be experienced in the same way by any other individual (all
very intently). This is [the] privileged, always new7, private and
immediate, direct experience of any individual of any species, or of any
degree, as it encounters the objective universe.
At other levels, while each individuality is maintained, it rides the
wavelike formations of consciousness. It is everywhere at once, and the
units of consciousness that make up your cells know the positions of all
other such units, both in time and in space.
In the beginning, then, these units operated both as identities or
particles, and as waves. The main concentration was not yet physical in
your terms. What you now think of as the dream state was the waking
one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity,
creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective
between the two realities, and as a species you literally learned to walk
by first being sleepwalkers. You walked in your sleep. You dreamed
your languages. You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the
alphabets—and your knowledge and your intellect have always been
fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your
minds emerged.
Physical matter by itself could never produce consciousness.
172 Jane Roberts
One mind alone could not come into being from chance alone; one
thought could not leap from an infinite number of nerve ends, if matter
itself was not initially alive with consciousness, packed with the intent
to be. A man who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life—
and a meaningless existence could never produce life (intently). Nor
was the universe created for one species alone, by a God who is simply
a supervision of the same species—as willful and destructive as man at
his worst.
(9:45.) Instead, you have an inner dimension of activity, a vast field
of multidimensional creativity, a Creator that becomes a portion of each
of its creations, and yet a Creator that is greater than the sum of its
parts: a Creator that can know itself as a mouse in a field, or as the
field, or as the continent upon which the field rests, or as the planet that
holds the continent, or as the universe that holds the world—a force that
is whole yet divisible, that is one and the inconceivably many, a force
that is eternal and mortal at once, a force that plunges headlong into its
own creativity, forming the seasons and experiencing them as well,
glorifying in individuation, and yet always aware of the great unity that
is within and behind and through all experiences of individuality: a
force from [which] each moment pasts and futures flow out in every
conceivable direction.
(Jane delivered that whole paragraph with great flowing intensity,
and I've punctuated it to the best of my ability just as it came through
her. I don't think I've ever heard her speak more eloquently for Seth, and
with more certainty. This book has turned her on.)
(Long pause.) In your terms of time, however, we will speak of a
beginning, and in that beginning it was early man's dreams that allowed
him to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his original
learning ground. In times of drought he would dream of the location of
water. In times of famine he would dream of the location of food. That
is, his dreaming allowed him to clairvoyantly view the body of land. He
would not waste time in the trial-and-error procedures that you now
take for granted. In dreams his consciousness operated as a wave.
In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is
now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of
the animals also—long before he learned to follow the animal tracks,
for example. Where is there food or water? What is the lay of the land?
Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was
there.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 173
People were not nearly as isolated as it now appears, for in their
dreams early men communicated their various locations, the symbols of
their cultures and understanding, the nature of their arts. All of the
inventions that you often think now happened quite by chance—the
discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the
coming of the Iron Age or whatever—all of that inventiveness was the
result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. Man
dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness
first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know.
(Pause at 10:02.) There is a point here that I want to emphasize
before we go too far, and it is this: The dream world is not an aimless,
nonlogical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that your own
perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect
can put your computers to shame. I am not, therefore, putting the
intellectual capacities in the background —but I am saying that they
emerge as you know them because of the dreaming self's uninterrupted
use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions.
The intellectual abilities as you know them (pause) cannot compare
to those greater capacities that are a part of your own inner reality.
End of dictation.
("Okay.")
(10:08. Now Seth came though with a paragraph—here deleted—
for Jane and me. Then:)
Do you have questions?
("What do you think of my remarks about watching the news on
television every day?"3)
It makes little difference whether you watch the news or not —but it
makes all the difference in the world what you think of world events.
The perspective from which you watch world events is vital, and it is
true that communication now brings to the conscious mind a far greater
barrage than before. But it is also a barrage that makes man see his own
activities, and even with the growth of the new nationalism in the Third
World, those nations begin from a new perspective, in which the eyes
of the world are indeed upon them.
Your country faces the results of its own policies—its greed as well
as its good intent, but it is out in the open in a new way. The
174 Jane Roberts
world will be seen as one, but there may be changes in the overall tax
assessments along the way, as those who have not paid much, pay
more.
The results of fanaticism are also out in the open. Never before, in
your terms, has the private person been able to see a picture of the mass
world in such a way, or been forced to identify with the policies of his
or her government. That in itself is a creative achievement, and means
that man is not closing his eyes to the inequities of his world.
End of session. A fond good evening.
("The same to you, Seth. Thank you very much.")
(10:18 P.M. "Talk about energy!" Jane exclaimed as soon as she was
out of her excellent trance state. "I just had the feeling we were getting
some great stuff—I just had the feeling. I don't remember what he said
that well, but I just felt that terrific conviction. You know what I mean?"
I certainly did. I congratulated her upon the session.)
NOTES. Session 889
1. Later, I asked Seth to comment upon his most intriguing
statement. His answer was brief, for insertion here, and as much
as I wanted to I didn't ask him to enlarge upon it. However, I'm
sure that the subject of "other kinds of matter" is one with almost
endless ramifications. Seth:
"Units of consciousness do help form different kinds of physical
realities—as indeed Ruburt has himself hinted in some of his poetry.
There are many dimensions that are as physical, so to speak, as your
own world, but if you are not focused in them you would not at all be
aware of their existence, but perceive only empty space.
"Nothing in the universe is ever lost, or mislaid, or wasted, so the
energy of your own thoughts, while they are still your own thoughts,
helps to form the natural attributes of physical realities that you do not
perceive. So is your own world formed by units of consciousness. Its
natural elements are the glistening remnants of other units of
consciousness that you do not see."
2. According to Albert Einstein, no material particle in our uni
verse can be accelerated from rest to quite the speed of light,
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 175
which is about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. However, as I
wrote in Note 1 for Session 709, in Volume 2 of "Unknown" Reality,
"supposed faster-than-light particles are thought to be possible within
the context of Einstein's special theory of relativity."
Seth gave excellent material on the units of consciousness in both
volumes of "Unknown" Reality. In Volume 1, for example, see Session
682 for February 13, 1974.
3. Earlier this evening I'd wondered to Jane why we keep dosing
ourselves with the endless barrage of bad news the TV networks offer
us as we eat supper each day. The hostage crisis in Iran is a case in
point. I remarked that most of our world's problems seem to result from
Framework-1 thinking, that our species is so steeped in such consciousmind
behavior—locally, nationally, and worldwide—that there seems
little chance of our ever breaking out of that iron pattern. I further told
Jane that our history reflects our stubborn refusal to modify to any
significant degree our great reliance upon Framework-1 manipulations,
even though I grant that there are many complicated reasons for such
long-term mass behavior.
I also felt that my question grew out of Jane's and my own recent
efforts to improve our habitual thinking patterns, to draw from
Framework 2 more of those elements that will help us create the daily
results we really want. As an aid, I use a set of resolutions Seth gave us
last January 1—although, oddly, Jane doesn't pay that much attention to
them. However, both of us have noticed definite improvements lately in
attitude and peace of mind.
SESSION 890—December 19, 1979
9:17 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(Jane was in a "bitchy" mood as session time approached. Her manner
was both funny and understandably sharp when I asked her if she had
any questions for Seth tonight. She'd wanted to start the session at 8
o'clock, but it hadn't worked out. "But now I'm beginning to feel him
around," she said at 9:10. Her delivery was quite slow as the session
opened.)
176 Jane Roberts
Now: Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Dictation: This inner universe (pause) is a gestalt formed by fields of
awareized energy that contains what we will call "information" for now
—but we will have some comments later, for this is not the kind of
information you are used to.
Each unit of consciousness inherently possesses within itself all of
the information available to the whole, and its specific nature when it
operates as a particle rests upon that great "body" of inner knowledge.
Any one such particle can be where it "is," be what it is, and be when it
is only because the positions, relative positions, and situations of all
other such particles are known.
(Long pause at 9:23.) In the deepest terms, again, your physical
world is beginning at each point at which these units of consciousness
assert themselves to form physical reality. Otherwise, life would not be
"handed down" through the generations. Each unit of consciousness (or
CU) intensifies, magnifies its own intent to be—and, you might say,
works up from within itself an explosive spark of primal desire that
"explodes" into a process that causes physical materialization. It turns
into what I have called [an] EE unit,1 in which case it is embarked upon
its own kind of physical experience.
These EE units also operate as fields, as waves, or as particles, as the
units of consciousness do—but in your terms they are closer to physical
orientation. Their die is cast, so to speak: They have already begun the
special kind of screening process necessary that will bring about
physical form. They begin to deal with the kinds of information that
will help form your world. There are literally numberless steps taken
before EE units combine in their own fashion to form the most
microscopic physical particles, and even here the greatest, gentlest
sorting-out process takes place as these units disentangle themselves at
certain op erational levels (underlined) from their own greater fields of
"information," to specialize in the various elements that will allow for
the production of atoms and molecules impeccably suited to your kind
of world.
(By now Jane was moving into a more subdued form of that rolling,
resonant delivery for Seth that she'd used in the last session.)
First, again, you have various stages of, say, pseudomatter, of
Dreams, "Evolution,"' and Value Fulfillment 177
dream images, that only gradually—in those terms—coalesce and
become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of "matter"
between the matter that you recognize and the antimatter of physicists'
theories.
Form exists at many other levels than those you recognize, in other
words. Your dream forms are quite as real as your physical ones. They
simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and
they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that you had in the
beginning of [your] world.
While you and all of the other species were what I have called
sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner
of speaking, you did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now,
from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can
seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with
strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, you had to learn
to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a
world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest your food, and to perform
all of the biological manipulations that now you take for granted (all
most emphatically).
You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies
until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state
(pause) the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earthtuned
consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions
of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and
cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the
body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the
overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate
fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body's efficiency is the
result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to
other levels of existence that do not physically appear.
(9:48.) Units of consciousness (CU's), transforming themselves into
EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same
process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial
one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical
manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an
entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms (underlined),
each portion of
178 Jane Roberts
physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its
own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even
though this may involve a larger generalized held than your own, or a
smaller one.
So to rocks, say, you can be considered a portion of their
environment, while you may consider them merely a portion of your
environment. You simply do not tune into the range of rock
consciousness. Actually (pause), many other kinds of consciousness,
while focused in their own specific ways, are more aware than man is
of earth's unified nature—but man, in following his own ways, also
adds to the value fulfillment of all other consciousnesses in ways that
are quite outside of usual systems of knowledge.
If you remember that beneath all, each unit of consciousness is
aware of the position of each other unit, and that these units form all
physical matter, then perhaps you can intuitively follow what I mean,
for whatever knowledge man attains, whatever experience any one
person accumulates, whatever arts or sciences you produce, all such
information is instantly perceived at other levels of activity by each of
the other units of consciousness that compose physical reality—
whether those units form the shape of a rock, a raindrop, an apple, a cat,
a frog or a shoe. Manufactured products are also composed of atoms
and molecules that ride upon units of consciousness transformed into
EE units, and hence into physical elements.
What you have, really, is a manifested and an unmanifested
consciousness, but only relatively speaking. You do not perceive the
consciousness of objects. It is not manifest to you because your range
of activities requires boundaries to frame your picture of reality.
All of your manufactured objects also originated in the realm of
dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same
way man produced his first tools. He was born with (long pause) all of
those abilities—abilities by which he is now characterized—and with
other abilities that in your terms still wait for development. Not that he
has not used them so far, but that he has not focused upon them in what
you consider the main lines of civilized continuity. Hints of those
abilities are always present in the dream state, and in the arts, in the
religions, and even in the sciences. They appear in politics and
business,
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 179
but as the largely unmanifcst intuitive background, which is largely
ignored. We will return to these later in the book.
(10:12.) Man's dreams have always provided him with a sense of
impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which
to form his civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of
man's dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for
all historic developments.
They were responsible for the birth of agriculture, as well as
industry, the rise and fall of nations, the "glory" that was Rome, and
Rome's destruction. (Pause.) Your present technological advances can
almost be dated from the [invention of] the printing press, to Edison's
inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. But if what
I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that your
physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean
something far different from the usual definition of dream reality.
Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each
person's intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what
you think of as the state of dreaming (all very intently).
That analogy will help you at least intuitively understand the
existence of situations such as suffering, and poverty, that otherwise
seem to have no adequate explanations (as Jane and I were discussing
today). I hope also to account for behavior on the part of nature that
certainly seems to imply the survival of the fittest in a tooth-and-claw
fashion, or the punishing acts of a vengeful God on the one hand and
the triumph of an evil force on the other.
For now in our tale of beginnings, however, we still have a
spasmodic universe that appears and disappears—that gradually, in
those terms, manifests for longer periods of time. What you really had
in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form,
blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not
completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that
you now consider formed physical matter.
As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more
specific orientations, greater organizations at your end. At the "other
end," it disentangled itself from vaster fields of activity to allow for this
specific behavior. All of these units of consciousness, again, operate as
entities (or particles, or as waves or
180 Jane Roberts
forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time—
and not, of course, the other way around. (Quietly at 10:29:) End of
dictation. A small note: (Seth came through with a couple of sentences
for Jane. Then:) I bid you a fond good evening. And we will have a
session on anything you want, at any time. ("Thank you, Seth. Good
night.")
(10:31 P.M. Seth's last remark, which I took to be rather humorous,
reflected one of the reasons for Jane's upset before the session: the conflict
she feels between having just book sessions versus obtaining Seth material
on at least a few of the other subjects we always have in mind. Currently
these include topics like Jonestown, Iran, Frameworks 1 and 2—and
one I initialed earlier this year about human reproduction, called "the
community of sperm." In a couple of essays I discussed, and asked questions
about, the roles played by the 200 million to 500 million sperm that
don't make contact with the female egg at the time of conception. I also
wanted to know about the deep biological communication that must go
on among all of the sperm in a man's body at any given time, and why
one of the "fittest" sperm in a particular ejaculate evidently doesn't always
fertilize the egg. Seth has given some answers in a couple of sessions,
and we want more. Originally I'd planned to present excerpts here
from our joint material—but I see now that I have no space in which to
do so.
Jane's delivery had turned out to be excellent this evening, her manner
steady and with fewer pauses than she'd used in Monday night's session.
Although she didn't reach the peaks of soaring eloquence she'd touched
upon in that last session, elements of that state were present tonight.)
MOTE. Session 890
1. Seth's earliest material on EE (electromagnetic energy) units came
through in September and October of 1967; in the Appendix of The
Seth Material, see the excerpts Jane presented from sessions 504
through 506. Then in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks, see Session 581 for
April 14, 1971.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 181
SESSION 891—December 26, 1979
9:07 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(No session was held last Monday evening, Christmas Eve. Instead, we
had a few close friends in; all of us exchanged gifts. After the party was
over Jane and I gave each other our own presents. My high point was
receiving the little book of poems and sketches she'd made for me. [I
hadn't created anything like that for her, though.] When Jane read her
poetry to me I strongly felt once again her innocence and perception:
"The universe keeps turning into us. . . ." We had a quiet but very
enjoyable Christmas day.
Tonight's session may not be formal book dictation, but it contains
many connections to Dreams. "/ don't care whether we have a book
session or one on something else," Jane said as we sat for the session at
8:50. "I'm just waiting. I don't even feel him around. ..." She thought
this was strange, since during the last couple of days she'd picked up
quite a few insights from Seth on various subjects. We'd discussed all of
them, but without making any notes.
At 9:06: "I guess I'm ready. It doesn't sound like the book, though.
Sometimes I get a first line. . . .")
(Softly, eyes dark and luminous:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
(With humor:) Tonight's subject matter: "Great Expectations" —for I
am here referring to the book by (Charles) Dickens.
Now: The year 1980 exists in all of its potential versions, now in this
moment. Because mass events are concerned there is not a completely
different year, of course, for each individual on the face of the planet—
but there are literally an endless number of mass-shared worlds of 1980
"in the wings," so to speak.
It is not quite as simple a matter as just deciding what events you
want to materialize as reality, since you have, in your terms, a body of
probabilities of one kind or another already established as the raw
materials for the coming year. It would be quite improbable for you,
Joseph (as Seth calls me), to suddenly turn into a tailor, for example,
for none of your choices with probabilities have led toward such an
action.
In like manner, England in all probability next year will not suddenly
turn into a Mohammedan nation. But within the range
182 Jane Roberts
of workable probabilities, private and mass choices, the people of the
world are choosing their probable 1980s.
(Long pause.) I am taking my time here, for there are some issues
that I would like to clear up, that are difficult to explain.
Any of the probable actions that a person considers are a part of that
person's conscious thought. Just underneath, however, people also
consider other sets of probabilities that may or may not reach conscious
level, simply because they are shunted aside, or because they seem to
meet with no conscious recognition. I want you to try and imagine
actual events, as you think of them, to be (pause) the vitalized
representations of probabilities—that is, as the physical versions of
mental probabilities. The probabilities with which you are not
consciously concerned remain psychologically peripheral: They are
there but not there, so to speak.
Your conscious mind can only accept a certain sequence of
probabilities as recognized experience. As I have said, the choices
among probabilities go on constantly, both on conscious and
unconscious levels. Events that you do not perceive as conscious
experience are (pause) a part of your unconscious experi ence, however ,
to some extent. This applies to the individual, and of course en masse
the same applies to world events. Each action seeks all of its own
possible fulfillments. All That Is seeks all possible experience, but in
such a larger framework in this case that questions of, say, pain or death
simply do not apply, though [certainly] they do on the physical level
(all quite force-fully).
(9:25.) Great expectations, basically, have nothing to do with degree,
for a grass blade is filled with great expectations. Great expectations are
built upon a faith in the nature of reality, a faith in nature itself, a faith
in the life you are given, whatever its degree—and all children, for
example, are born with those expectations. Fairy tales are indeed often
—though not always— carriers of a kind of underground knowledge, as
per your discussion about Cinderella (also see the 824th session for
Mass Events), and the greatest fairy tales are always those in which the
greatest expectations win out: The elements of the physical world that
are unfortunate can be changed in the twinkling of an eye through great
expectations.
Your education tells you that all of that is nonsense, that the
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 183
world is defined by its physical aspects alone. When you think of power
you think of, say, nuclear energy, or solar energy—but power is the
creative energy within men's minds that allows them to use such
powers, such energies, such forces.
The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon
that which is not yet (intently). The imagination, backed by great
expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of
probabilities. All of the possible versions of 1980 will happen. Except
for those you settle upon, all of the others will remain psychologically
peripheral, in the background of your conscious experience—but all of
those possible versions will be connected in one way or another.
The important lessons have never really appeared in your societies:
the most beneficial use of the directed will, with great expectations, and
that coupled with the knowledge of Framework 1 and 2 activities. Very
simply: You want something, you dwell upon it consciously for a
w'hile, you consciously imagine it coming to the forefront of
probabilities, closer to your actuality. Then you drop it like a pebble
into Framework 2, forget about it as much as possible for a fortnight,
and do this in a certain rhythm.
I gave you some New Year's resolutions last year, and it seems to me
(with some irony) that they could be resurrected.
("I read them several times a week," I told Seth. Actually, he gave us
his resolutions this year—on January 1.l)
They are as good, tell Ruburt, who does not read them now, as they
were then. They help focus both mind and imagination. That focusing
helps you to act, to be. Now: give us a moment. . . .
(9:37. Seth came through with two short paragraphs for fane. Then:)
Now: In our book, I will be doing my best to explain the origin of
your universe, and in such a way that most of the pertinent questions
are answered, but man's present concept of reality is so limited that I
must often resort to analogies.
In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes
into your universe is as new7 as if (in your terms) the world were
created yesterday—a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of
the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well
as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980
was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning
of the world.
184 Jane Roberts
(To me.) Your mother did not simply choose to believe, in her old
age, in a different past than the one that was accepted by the family—
she effectively changed probabilities. She was not deluded or obsessed.
Her memory in that regard, now, was not defective: It was the memory
of the probable woman that she became.2
Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event
serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes.
The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream,
meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of
reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that
conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. Everyone
involved was consciously and unconsciously a willing participant at the
most basic levels of human behavior, and it is of course no coincidence
that 1980 is immediately foreshadowed by that event. What will the
world do with it?
Your TV and news systems of communication are a part of the event
itself, of course. It is in a way far better that these events occurred now,
and in the way that they have, so that the problems appear clearly in the
world arena. They are actually thus of a far less violent nature than they
might otherwise have been.
Religious beliefs will be examined as they have not been before, and
their connections and political affiliations. The Arab world still needs
the West, and again, it is better that those issues come to light now,
while they must to some extent consider the rest of the world.
Do not personally give any more conscious consideration, either of
you, to events that you do not want to happen. (Long pause.) Any such
concentration, to whatever degree, ties you in with those probabilities,
so concentrate upon what you want, and as far as public events are
concerned, take it for granted that sometimes even men are wiser than
they know.
Do you have questions?
(Only a million of them, I thought. "No, I guess not," I said to Seth.)
Then I wish you a happy anniversary—
("Thank you.")
—and the most auspicious of 1980's. A fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. Good night.")
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 185
(9:58 p.m. Jane and I celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary tomorrow.)
NOTES. Session 891
1. I referred to Seth's resolutions at the end of the 889th ses
sion. I think they're very effective; I try to keep them constantly
in mind:
"One: I will approve of myself, my characteristics, my abilities, my
likes and dislikes, my inclinations and disinclinations, realizing that
these form my unique individuality. They are given me for a reason.
"Two: I will approve of and rejoice in my accomplishments, and I
will be as vigorous in listing these—as rigorous in remembering them
—as I have ever been in remembering and enumerating my failures or
lacks of accomplishment.
"Three: I will remember the creative framework of existence, in
which I have my being. Therefore the possibilities, potentials, seeming
miracles, and joyful spontaneity of Framework 2 will be in my mind,
so that the doors to creative living are open.
"Four: I will realize that the future is a probability. In terms of
ordinary experience, nothing exists there yet. It is virgin territory,
planted by my feelings and thoughts in the present. Therefore I will
plant accomplishments and successes, and I will do this by
remembering that nothing can exist in the future that I do not want to
be there."
2. Here Seth referred to the striking way in which my mother,
Stella Butts, had recreated for the better her "memories" of her
husband (my father). Robert Butts, Sr., died in February 1971,
34 months before she did. All of the members of the Butts
family observed the pronounced changes in Stella's thinking
about her husband, although Jane and I were the only ones who
ascribed those changes to her moving into another probable
reality.
186 Jane Roberts
SESSION 892—January 2, 1980
8:47 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(On December 27, the night of our anniversary, Jane held an unplanned
session for young married friends of ours. Although she seldom does this
anymore because of the work load involved, such spontaneous expressions
of her creativity help my wife as well as the others involved. I taped the
session on the recorder I'd given Jane for Christmas; our friends are to
send us a transcript of the tape.
Seth didn't come through last Monday evening, New Year's Eve.
Instead, Jane and I gave a party for a change. The next day we were
ready to get back to our writing and painting, but first I cleared the
house of holiday paraphernalia—including our beautiful Christmas
tree. I carefully propped up the tree, a balsam fir, in the woods at the
back of the hill house. I told myself that next summer the tree's skeleton
would remind me of the days that had passed since 1980 began, in our
terms; I knew I'd be grateful for having physically experienced every one
of them. [And as an artist, I'd be as much intrigued by the tree's naked
structure as I had been when it bore its dense greenery.]
Over the weekend we'd signed the contracts with our publisher, Prentice-
Hall, for Mass Events and God of Jane, and I mailed them this
morning. We're progressing well on both projects. In their unique ways,
I told Jane, my notes for Mass Events are the most challenging writing
I've done. We're getting up at 6:00 again, so that we can get in a good
morning's "work" before lunchtime.)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Happy New Year.
("Thank you. The same to you," I said, knowing that Seth's understanding
of "time" was certainly much different than ours.)
Dictation. You were (pause) each present at the beginning of the
world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a
somewhat different fashion.
Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All That
Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make
more sense.
For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or
less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the
surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activDreams,
"Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 187
ity. Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They
worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds
and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling
images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men
could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally
learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and
chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all
physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence.
Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless
of the forms they take, and while men's forms were dream images,
consciousness spun forms into physical material.
Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever
losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix
and combine with others to form a million different sequences of
memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition, [of]
structure and design.
You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion,
identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any
other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity,
would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the
beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and
affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that
were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you
have now— but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one.
While, generally speaking, earth's species existed from the beginning in
the forms by which you now knowr them, consciousness of species was
quite different, and all species were much more intimately related
through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the
underground of awareness.
(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of
as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that
regard the earth's entire environment was built mentally, atom by
conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of
consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as
forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in
the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and
psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite
mind as that
188 Jane Roberts
mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those
entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance
(underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains,
the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of
the earth.
(A one-minute pause at 9:13.) Those entities are in trance, in those
terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant
communication among them always.
(Long pause.) There is also constant communication between them
and you at other levels than those you recognize, so that there is an
unending interplay between each species and its environment.
(Long pause.) There is no place where consciousness stops and the
environment begins, or vice versa. Each form of life is created along
with each other form—environment and organism in those terms
creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all
species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the
scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the
same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical
consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for
example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited
to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures
accommodated each other.
Up until then, the main communications had followed the
characteristic patterns of units of consciousness (long pause), each unit
knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied
upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific
physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This
pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full
arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time
[had to be] impeccable.
Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses
tuned . to physical frequencies—frequencies of such power and allure
that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to
elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time
alignment.
In the beginning, man's dreams were in certain terms of immediate
physical survival. They gave man information—a kind that of necessity
the new physical senses could not contain.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 189
Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but
man's dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his
consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized
information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was
asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in
the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh.
(9:30.) Now (underlined): When he dreamed—when he dreamed
(underlined)—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from
which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new
creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other
species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their
old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions.
"They remembered how it was." They remembered that they formed
each other.
This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple
story of God's creation of the world, or its actual production in a
meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance—and yet
my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find
resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For
men's minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and
they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has
a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in
those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is
made of "soul stuff." Each portion has its own identity and validity—
and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.
(All with a rolling intensity:) I must of necessity tell this story in
serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come
together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical
composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play
themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same,
the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played
continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its
own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of
the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions—so that
each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its
position in the composition as a whole.
190 Jane Roberts
The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional
creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is
carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.
In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity's composition.
You want to know where you came into the musical
production, so to speak. (Pause.) I use a musical analogy here, if a
simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of
perception. You are tuned into earth's orchestration [you might say], and
your perception of time is simply the result of habits—habits of
perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. And you
learned those habits as your physical senses gradually became more
alert and specific.
(9:47.) You "timed" yourselves—but greater perceptions always
appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream
state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as
psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the
world that you know (louder).
End of dictation.
You did an excellent job of your own dream interpretation, and
Ruburt unwittingly added to it with his poetry.1
Do you have any questions?
("Have you got anything to say for the beginning of the year, like you
did with your resolutions for the start of last year?"
(With considerable humor, staring at me:) I thought I gave you my
1980 speech last time.
("Okay.")
Continue with the resolutions. I expect that sessions like this
evening's will themselves help you understand the nature of
Frameworks 1 and 2, and the importance of your mental activity in
bringing about physical events.
("I was thinking about that.")
I bid you a fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth. Goodnight.")
(9:52 P.M. Jane said she'd been pretty far out during the session—
then added later while we talked that she was picking up from Seth
information on the beginning of our own world, species and civilizations
that he intended to give in the next session. Seth, then, was capable of
coming through with that material right now. Only Jane's and my own
conventions of time and habit, even concerning a phenomenon as unusual
as the sessions, stopped him from doing so. Inevitably, the session
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 191
Jane delivers for Seth next Monday evening will be somewhat different
from the one she could produce tonight. There are many interesting
implications here.)
NOTE. Session 892
1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I'd taken early in
this life—one that perhaps I'd felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed
that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground
I'd been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing
in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania.
(Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, New York, where Jane and I live
now.) Even though it was wintertime, the tree carried a sparse cover of
leaves. Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I
became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree.
My interpretation is that I saw the tree as the tree of life even then, and
that I'd chosen to remain close to the world of nature and art instead of
immersing myself in the safer industrial one. Jane was inspired by the
dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.

SESSION 893—January 7, 1980
8:43 P.M. MONDAY
(Jane called me early for the session, just to make sure she had one before
she became too relaxed. She's been planning on going back to taking
breaks between deliveries, so that she can hold longer sessions. By 8:40
she could feel Seth around. "As I say, I'll do the best I can. . . .")
(With a surprising heartiness:) Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
Dictation, to begin: New chapter (four): "The Ancient Dreamers."
Give us a moment. . . . For what would seem to you to be eons,
according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more
than they were in the waking one. They slept long hours, as did the
animals—awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain
sustenance, and, later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike w;orld, but a
highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played
rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture:
imagining the various forms of language and communication possible,
spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own
built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time,
mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures. 192
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 193
These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each
consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that
creatures and environment together formed great environmental
realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together
dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.
The species—from your viewpoint (underlined)—lived at a much
slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to
course so quickly through the veins [and arteries], the heart did not
need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the
creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there
was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.
In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as
yet firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive
sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man was aware of its support in
a luxurious, intimate fashion. He was aware of himself in a different
way, so that, for example, his identification with the self did not stop
where his skin stopped: He could follow it outward into the space about
his form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal senseexperience
that you have forgotten.
(8:58.) During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the
highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic,
and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical
brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the
functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance
and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly
intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the
CU's translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming
into the physical form.
Then in your terms man began, with the other species, to waken
more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to
intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man still
sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his own
origins, and with the origins of the universe as he knows it as well.
(Pause in a steady, if usually rather subdued, delivery.)
Man dreamed his languages. He dreamed how to use his tongue to
form the words. In his dreams he practiced stringing
194 Jane Roberts
the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he could
consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was
begun, yet in the faith that he could and would complete it.
All languages have as their basis the language that was spoken in
dreams. The need for language arose, however, as man became less a
dreamer and more immersed in the specifics of space and time, for in
the dream state his communications with his fellows and other species
was instantaneous. Language arose to take the place of" that inner
communication, then. There is a great underlying unity in all of man's
so-called early cultures— cave drawings and religions—because they
were all fed by that common source, as man tried to transpose inner
knowledge into physical actuality.
The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to
achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather
and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone
could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams—
and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of
consciousness contributes to the health and stability of all other
portions. Far from the claw-and-dagger universe, you have one whose
very foundation is based upon the loving cooperation of all of its parts.
That is given—the gift of life brings along with it the actualization of
that cooperation, for the body's parts exist as a unit because of inner
relationships of a cooperative nature; and those exist at your birth (most
emphatically), when you are innocent of any cultural beliefs that may
be to the contrary.
(9:14.) If it were not for this most basic, initial loving cooperation,
that is a given quality in life itself, life would not have continued. Each
individual of each species takes that initial zest and joy of life as its
own yardstick. Each individual of whatever species, and each
consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the
quality of life itself—not only for itself but for all of reality as well.
This is a given characteristic of life, regardless of the beliefs that
may lead you to misinterpret the actions of nature, casting some of its
creatures in a reprehensible light.
(Pause.) In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense
creativity, dreamed all of life's creatures in all of their pasts, presents,
and futures—that is, their dreams opened up
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 195
the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have
been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of
consciousness were once released from the mind of All That Is.
All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They
[have] always existed and they always will exist. All That Is must, by
its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end
to existence—and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of your
world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and as
psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of your
world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical
form. In your terms those entities are your ancestors—and yet [they
are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that
make up your world.
Take your break.
(9:25. And for the first time in a long while, Jane did take a break
during a session. "You did well," I told her.
"Yes, I was really going to town." Even though her delivery had been
on the quiet side, still at times Seth had come through with considerable
power. "In the winter I like to start sessions earlier, "Jane said, "so I can
finish sooner and watch TV for half an hour—it's relaxing and cozy,
especially when we're alone. . . . I think the rest of the session will be
about me."
She was right. Beginning at 9:34, Seth returned with a good amount
of material for her,' then ended the session at 9:58 P.M.)
NOTE. Session 893
1. It's very interesting to see how Seth's information for Jane grew out
of his work on Dreams tonight. For the most part, I'm presenting only
the beginning of the several pages of notes I took from him—just
enough to show how even his more personal material can fly in the face
of convention (to coin a phrase!):
"Now: It is easy to live—so easy that although you live, rest, create,
respond, feel, touch, see, sleep, and wake, you do not really have to try
to do any of those things. From your viewpoint they are done for you.
"They are done for you in Framework 2—and further dis196
Jane Roberts
cussions of Framework 2, incidentally, will be interwound throughout
our present book. Your beliefs often tell you that life is hard, however,
that living is difficult, that the universe, again, is unsafe, and that you
must use all of your resources— not to meet [life] with anything like
joyful abandon, of course, but to protect yourself against its implied
threats; threats that you have been taught to expect.
"But your beliefs do not stop there. Because of" both scientific and
religious ones, in Western civilization you believe that there are threats
from within also. As a result you forget your natural selves, and become
involved in a secondary, largely imaginary culture: beliefs that are
projected negatively into the future, individually and en masse. People
respond with illnesses of one kind or another, or through exaggerated
[behavior].
"Living is easy (underlined). It is safe and reliable because it is easy.
This is for Ruburt's benefit. . . ."
And later, with much humor: "1 am willing to have longer sessions
for as long as you put up with me. I will work on one book one night
and another one the next, if you prefer, or discuss private material or
other questions of a general nature, or work twice a week on our
present material—whatever suits your fine fancies."
("Well, for someone who wasn't with it too much, I did okay," Jane
said when the session was over. She was rejuvenated to a degree. Both oj
us were impressed anew by Seth's present and potential creativity. "If it
weren't for all that mail we get, I'd try at least three sessions a week," she
added. "But you don't have the time to type any more, with all you're
doing now."
"I'd make the time. It would be worth it." And I reminded Jane that
back in the days of her ESP classes, she'd often given three sessions a
week. We held the last class in February 1975, as we prepared to move
to the hill house from our downtown apartments.)
SESSION 894—January 9, 1980
9:08 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(The weather continues to be unseasonably warm for this time of year,
with the ground still bare. We've had very little snow this winter. It's
hard to believe.
Dreams, "Evolution,'' and Value Fulfillment 197
Jane felt tired and harried as we sat for the session at about 8:50.
She'd just finished reading the last 25 of the 48 fan letters that had
arrived from our publisher this noon; she'd wanted a little time to relax
and write a few notes before the session. However, that pile of letters
means that people are reading our books, and for that we're grateful
indeed. Over the holidays we received more Christmas cards from readers
than ever before; in fact, the greetings are still coming in. "I really get
pooped, going over the mail," Jane said, "but some of them are great
letters." She's answering most of the mail herself these days, since I don't
have the time to help her.)
Good evening.
("Good evening, Seth.")
(With many pauses to start:) Dictation: During this period that we
have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions
took place as the "structure" of earthly tuned consciousness formed the
phenomena of "the self."
What was needed was a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self
that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that was being
formed along with physical creatures—a self, however, that in one way
or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge
of a kind that was basically independent of time and space. A
knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be
allowed to distract the physical focus.
(Long pause.) In one way or another, that inner information had to
connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures
must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made
such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be
consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could
never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the
muscles involved in motion—or in speech, or in any such bodily
performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical
level if you first had to be aware of all of speech's mechanisms,
working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to
have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did
not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.
Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of
explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had
the inner self, the creative dreaming self—composed, again, of units of
consciousness, awarei/.cd energy that forms
198 Jane Roberts
your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth
inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about
them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to
have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of
time.
(Pause at 9:23.) As the body became physical, however, the inner
self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became
more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within
the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body
consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner
environment. The body was lovingly formed from EE units through all
the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body's pattern came
from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this
venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each
suited to the other.
So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling
primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into
physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body
consciousness the inner self gives "its own body of physical
knowledge," the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has
triumphantly produced. (Pause.) The body consciousness is not
"unconscious," but for working purposes in your terms, [the body]
possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now
(underlined), is separated from what you think of as your own normal
consciousness. The body's consciousness is hardly to be considered less
than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it
represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self's
own consciousness—the part delegated to the body.
[Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time
because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position,
health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet. It is. aware of
the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in
those terms it forms a portion of the earth's consciousness.
At that level environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural
world are all united—a point we will return to quite often. Your
intellect as you think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically
(with amusement), sometimes so arrogantly.
Dreams, "Evolution,'' and Value Fulfillment 199
because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified, "ancient,"
"unconscious" power—the power of instant knowing that is a
characteristic of the body consciousness (all very intently).
(Pause, one of many in here.) Thus far in our discussion, we still
have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body
consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self
and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological
double-entendre.
(Pause at 9:42.) Give us a moment. . . . The best analogy I can think
of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band,
snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without
any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a
physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the
body's orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was
intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation,
wonder—and so once again the inner self put a portion of its
consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed
the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned
consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a
way that, alone, the inner self could not be.
(All with emphatic rhythm:) The inner self was too aware of its own
multidimensionality, so in your terms it gave psychological birth to
itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical
creature. That portion of the self is the portion you recognize as your
usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within
the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant
awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self
that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical
senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. That is the self
that lives the life of the body.
It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that you call
egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner
ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness
from which both your own consciousness and your body consciousness
emerged.
You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that
you have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body
consciousness, and the consciousness that you know.
200 Jane Roberts
These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like
three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the
whole. The divisions—the seeming divisions—are not stationary, but
change constantly.
(Long pause at 9:57.) Give us a moment. . . . To one extent or
another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or
another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical
universe. In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three
systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are
speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The
inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are.
(Very rapidly:) "Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn't want to live
there." A twist on an old quote, I believe—but the fact is, you are
physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the
conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and
the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the
earthly environment provides.
(All very intently:) That environment, in your terms, certainly
includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of
earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in
this book. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is
the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind—for the life of
the body provides you, among all things, with a life of sensation, of
feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible
sensations within its overall range.
Now as you will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and
do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will
experience—but to one extent or another (underlined) all, sensations
are felt. We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation,
for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those
attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation.
Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions
made [among] stimuli. The body is made to react. It is made to feel life
and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering
what you might call natural stress. The body maintains its
equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other
bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance
between balance and off-balance.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 201
(Long pause at 10:14, then slowly:) Give us a moment. . . . The body
consciousness is therefore given a> superb sense of its own reality, a
sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it
to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed
with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly
formed to fit into its environment —and the environment is perfectly
formed to have such creatures.
The entities, or units of consciousness—those ancient fragments that
burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of
All That Is—dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space
and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area
of divine creativity that "until then" had been closed, and therefore to
that [degree] extended the experience and immense existence of All
That Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned,
since they contained within themselves their inherent
relationship with All That Is. In those terms All That Is became physical
also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade
through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment
of each creature's existence.
All That Is, therefore, is immersed within your world, present in each
hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion
of matter is created.
That will do it.
(10:25.) Now: My cheers to Ruburt. He is making good psychological
progress, which means that he is making physical progress
as well.
A smaller point I thought I would throw in: My energy is often with
you both in ways that you do not expect. End of session, and a fond
good evening.
("Good night, Seth.")
(10:26 P.M. "Jesus, I was so exhausted before the session, but I really
had the feeling that we were getting some good stuff" Jane said as soon
as she was out of trance. She hadn't taken a break during the session,
either. "I really enjoy getting up early, because no matter what else
happens I know we've got a good morning's work in. ..."
By "what else," Jane referred to a call she'd received today: Three
young members of the ESP class we'd disbanded almost five years ago
are in town from New York City, visiting a local friend from the old
class. All four are dear friends of ours too, of course, and want to see us.
202 Jane Roberts
First, though, they're to visit still another member from class who lives in
a nearby town: He has tapes of some early class sessions that Jane had
forgotten about; copies of the tapes will be made. "The kids" from the city
are to call tomorrow, to learn if Jane will see them. [They did, and she
did, for an hour after lunch.])
SESSION 895—January 14, 1980
9:17 P.M. MONDAY
(Our friend, David Yoder [I'll call him], is 48 years old. He's a bachelor,
and a high-school teacher. Jane and I met him in May 1960, when we
moved from Sayre into an apartment house close to downtown Elmira.
The house had once been a luxurious private home. Jane began the
sessions there three years later; indeed, we were to stay there for 15 years.
At first David lived across the hall from us on the second floor. Eventually
he moved downstairs when a larger apartment right beneath ours
became available: Still later, Jane and I rented the apartment he'd had
on the second floor, so that we ended up with two apartments, side by
side; we needed more room by then, and didn't want to move.
David is one of the kindest people we've ever known. Jane initiated
her ESP classes late in 1967—so each Tuesday night for the next seven
and a half years, our friend put up with a vast amount of shouting and
banging over his head. He knew what Jane was up to, but had only a
peripheral interest in "psychic phenomena." David never complained
about the racket, though sometimes he secluded himself in a back room
down there, or left the house until class was over. It seemed that we were
always apologizing for bothering him.
David let Jane use his telephone to call our publisher when we couldn't
afford a phone ourselves. He gave us his magazines and newspapers—
a practice he continues to this day during his school year. Sometimes we
swapped furniture with him; sometimes he sold us at very reasonable cost
pieces he'd replaced. He has a passion for neatness and the well-ordered
life. He bought a power-driven lawn mower, and for years cut the grass
without asking our landlord for any compensation.
In March 1975 Jane and I purchased the hill house just outside
Elmira, and within a few weeks David acquired his own place not far
from us in the valley below. We didn't see each other as often as we used
to, but one morning each week, on his way to school, David left his
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 203
magazines and newspapers at our hack porch door, whether or not we
were up, or saw him.
During the last couple of weeks David hadn't made his regular trips
up the hill, but Jane and I were so busy that that fact nearly escaped us.
Last Thursday morning, then, we were really shocked when Doris, who
is also a teacher and a friend from those apartment-house years, called
to tell us that David was in the hospital—that he was to undergo triplebypass
heart surgery the next day. Jane and I couldn't believe it. We'd
thought David was in excellent health. He'd taken up jogging some time
ago and was now running 15 miles at a time, three days a week. As he
lay in the hospital, David asked Doris why this was happening to him,
when he'd tried to take care of himself, help others, and "do everything
right."
Each time someone we know gets in serious trouble, Jane and I start
questioning anew our own values, and those of the society we live in, for
such challenges seem to come unbidden and unwanted from way out in
some Jar corner of each person's reality. We also had in mind another
friend who'd died of cancer last year at the age of 39.
David is recovering well from his surgery now, but cannot have visitors
yet. Jane has called the hospital each day to ask about him; she's
putting together for him a unique, evocative little book of poetry and
paintings. I'm running errands for David, and eventually will be taking
him home from the hospital.
Seth talked about illness and suffering in general this evening, and
about David in particular. I'm presenting excerpts from the generalized
part of his material, but none about David himself. We have no idea of
pressing Seth's personal information upon David; doing that would be
an invasion of his privacy. Tonight's material, however, adds to our
understanding of subjects like free will and choosing, good and evil,
sickness and health, and reflects upon many questions people have asked
us over the years.
"Well," Jane said as we sat for the session, "I'd almost rather feel that
you were the victim of blind chance or accident, rather than that you get
sick because of your own dumb ignorance or choice. ..." When I remarked
that I tried not to worry about such things anymore, she replied
that she too had better get back to book work and forget the world's
troubles: "Come on, Seth, I'm here." But even as she felt him around,
she knew that Seth wouldn't be giving book dictation per se.)
(Whispering:) Good evening.
(Whispering as a joke in return: "Good evening, Seth.")
204 Jane Roberts
For many centuries (pause) the structure of the Roman Catholic
church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings
and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the
entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of
knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.
The church's view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too
thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual
human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were
interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations,
plants, and animals. The world's view was a religious one, specified by
the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.
Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse
the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by
keeping him from the sins of pride. Suffering sent by God was
considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.
(Long pause at 9:25.) Some other civilizations have believed that
illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of
good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature
itself, and that man had to walk a careful line lest he upset the more
dangerous or mischievous of those entities. In man's history there have
been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man
believed were real in fact and in religious truth.
It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your
shoulders, wondering at man's distorted views of reality. The entire
scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted (with amused
emphasis). It is as laboriously conceived and inter-wound with
"nonsense." It is about as factual as the "fact" that God sends illness as
punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.
Now: Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of
various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of
indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those
diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in
certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the
various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made
sense within itself. A man might be born deformed or sickly because of
the sins of his father.
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 205
The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though
within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are
viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It
would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into
consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation—and
those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies.
Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church's
concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined)
come from God—an unwelcome gift, perhaps—but after all it was
punishment handed out from a firm father for a child's own good.
Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a
universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main
rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species
itself. It meant you were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of
questions not seriously asked before.
Did those "genetically inferior," for example, have the right to
reproduce?' Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of
physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The
"new" Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new
dilemma, for it was then—as it is now— widely believed that as the
result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious,
might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality,
and trick it into illness and disaster.
In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the
metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real
meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless.
The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his birth, the
events of his life, and his death are concerned. Illness becomes his most
direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal
existence (all quite intently).
You affect the structure of your body through your thoughts. If you
believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in
your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that
you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific
instruments uncover the "faulty mechanism," or whatever, and there is
the evidence for all to see.
206 Jane Roberts
(Pause at 9:50.) There are obviously some conditions that in your
terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but
these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you
believe are hereditary—many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or
rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties,
changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other
mental methods that we will certainly get to someday.
There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and
there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures
you accept the conditions of life. You create from those conditions the
experiences of your days. You are born into belief systems as you are
born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the
freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous
fashions (all intently). The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of
suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief. I hope
to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its
proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it
touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind,
and your fears for yourselves and for mankind.
Give us a moment. . . . You have taught yourselves to be aware of
and to follow only certain portions of your own consciousnesses, so that
mentally you consider certain subjects taboo. Thoughts of death and
suffering are among those. In a species geared above all to the survival
of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of
suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable,
biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. Life is to be pursued at
all costs—not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the
only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all you
have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster,
and war —and if you escape such drastic circumstances, then you are
still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements
briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.
(Pause at 10:05. Jane had delivered all of the above material for Seth
with an emphatic mixture of speed, irony, and amusement.)
In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen
as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 207
(pause), or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone
bring on suffering. All of science, in your time, has been set up to
promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of
man's heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is
not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but
that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from
the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.
I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least
many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they
also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality— and I do not want to
be misinterpreted in that direction.
Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified
suffering, elevated it to [be] one of the prime virtues— and it has
degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or
seeing the insane as less than human. So there are many issues
involved.
Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the
idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that
man's suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: You simply give
the machine some better parts and all will be well (amused). Science
also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in
science itself will seemingly-work miracles: The new heart will give a
man new heart, for example.
(10:16. After discussing David Yoder's personal situation, Seth returned
to his more generalized material at 10:30.)
Illness is used as a part of man's motivations. What I mean is that
there is no human motivation that may not at some time be involved
with illness, for often it is a means to a desired end—a method of
achieving something a person thinks may not be achieved otherwise.
One man might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve
failure. A person might use it as a means of showing pride or humility,
of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of
expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have
its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the
purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often
misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important.
[Sickness] can be
208 Jane Roberts
a badge of honor or dishonor—but there can be no question, when you
look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one,
suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for
one reason or another.
Most people do not seek out suffering's extreme experience, but
within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that
could be considered painful, that are actively sought. Man's
involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society's
rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead
athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the
ordinary individual. People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a
good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals.
(10:37. Seth came through with some more information concerning
David. Then:)
I do not want any of this to appear too simplistic, but we must begin
somewhere in this kind of discussion. . . . This is far from the entire
story [of illness], but it is enough for this evening's saga. When you
can, encourage your fine wife to follow your example in determining
not to worry. It should be the first commandment.
("Okay.")
My heartiest regards, and a fond good evening.
("Thank you, Seth, and the same to you.")
(10:45 P.M. "My God, your fingers must be read's to fall off!" Jane
exclaimed as she quickly came out of her excellent trance state. She moved
over to the couch from her rocker. "Why didn't you ask for a break?"
"You didn't seem to want to take one." But also, I'd become so interested
in the session that I forgot everything else. My light hand was tired
now, though.
"I don't remember much of that," Jane said, "but I've got the feeling
that Seth meant the material to defuse some of my own thoughts lately—
that there isn't any answer for all of the pain and suffering in the world
—that the whole thing is so vast that you can't say or do anything that
will be of much use to anyone. . . . "
Which might help account, I told Jane, for her response to David's
illness, including the book she's making for him. I also said that even
though Seth hadn't called this session dictation for Dreams, he very well
could have done so: Large portions of it might at least help answer
people's questions.)
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment 209
NOTE. Session 895
1. Seth certainly touched upon a question that's loaded with ethical and
legal dilemmas; many of these have grown out of recent scientific
advances in genetics. Some moral philosophers, medical geneticists,
physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry
genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce.
Others of similar background maintain just the opposite—that the right
to recreate one's kind is inalienable. Questions abound involving
amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic
defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction
by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate
motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious
communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people
should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. Years
are expected to pass before our legal system alone catches up with the
scientific progress in genetics—but, ironically, continuing advances in
the field are bound to complicate even further the whole series of
questions.
SESSION 896—January 16, 1980
9:09 P.M. WEDNESDAY
(Jane has been taking time off from God of Jane and If We Live Again
to work on the Introduction for Sue Watkins's Conversation With Seth.
Sue took the manuscript for Conversations with her when she went to
Florida for the month with her son and parents. If those three members of
her family are enjoying a vacation, Sue isn't—but at least she's working
on her book in warm weather!
I finished typing Monday evening's session from my notes just in time
to get ready for this one. In the meantime Jane called David Yoder at the
hospital. To her surprise he sounded weaker than he had the last time
she'd spoken to him, and at his request my planned visit tomorrow was
put off until Friday afternoon.
Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of "Sayre-environment
dreams," as Seth called them. I've recorded six of those long and compli210
Jane Roberts
cated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored
my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting,
my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased]
father as he represented certain other beliefs. I'd recently asked Jane if
Seth would comment.
Tonight Seth did comment—and very perceptively put all of the
dreams together. "In your heart Sayre stands for your childhood," he said
in conclusion, "and to that extent, to you personally, for the childhood of
all men. For, again to some extent, each man feels that somehow humanity
as a whole was born at his own birth."
We took a break at 9:40. "I'll tell you," Jane said as I congratulated
her, "I just glanced at those dreams in your notebook. I didn't take more
than five minutes. I'll be damned." She laughed, pleased at Seth's handling
of them.
"My memories of those dream events are just as real as the memories
of anything else I've done lately," I said. "Going shopping, or working,
or whatever. ..." I've always been intrigued by the simple observation
that for me at least, once they begin moving into the past dream events
assume an increasingly important place in my life. I think that upon
awakening in the present, one is much more likely to call a dream "just
a dream," and not assign to it a reality and validity equal to one's "real"
experience in the waking state.
Jane wanted to quickly return to the session. Even though the following
material isn't book dictation per se, I'm presenting it for obvious
reasons. Resume at 9:52.)
A continuation of our discussion (begun in the last session) on
suffering.
I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life's conditions, when
of course they do not need any such justification.
Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available
knowledge concerning man's psychology—knowledge that would serve
to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering.
Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and
women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and
about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all
kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.
Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits—
to, in quotes (amused and loudly): "explore where no man has ever
gone before"—a bastard version of the introduction [to
Dreams, "Evolution," and Value fulfillment 211
a famous television program], I believe. Men and women are born with
a sense of drama, a need of excitement. Life itself is excitement. The
quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity.
You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and
inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into
the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have
been taught to believe you are. As a result, many of the events of your
lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien
(pause), against your deepest wishes, or thrust upon you, either by
outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious.
The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind's nature,
but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those
that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.
Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is
like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like
Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles
with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults
might approve. They are often quite aware of "willing" themselves sick
to get out of difficult situations—and of willing themselves well again
(with humor).1
They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later,
when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they
caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to
will themselves well again.
(10:05.) As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am
beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in
between regular book dictation, in a very general manner. In times past
in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves,
wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or
otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for
religion's sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for
the soul—a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I
will go into that later—but they understood something else: The body
will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So
they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.
Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimu212
Jane Roberts
lus, and such a means in the overall (underlined) will work against
religious understanding. Those episodes, however, represent one of the
ways in which man can actively seek suffering as a means to another
end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural,
since it exists within nature's framework.
(Long pause.) Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline
is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great
dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child
to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it—and
by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid the suffering he does not want,
to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand,
more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his
heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he
understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his
own emotions.
If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but
muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others
much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon
them—as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other
people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity
to pain, and by repressing your emotio

The Universal Shifts of Consciousness

The mixture of Sun and the Ball of Advanced Thoughts is in my room. Apr. 2010