“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I decided to remain behind when, finally, last minute requests to evacuate our section of Elmira were made before dawn. Our decision, of course, contained deeply symbolic meanings for us that we still only partially understand. The Chemung River passes less than a block from our apartment house on its way through the center of the city, but since we lived on the second floor we thought we’d be secure. The house was solid, we decided. The neighborhood emptied itself except for us, and became extremely quiet.

(We were lucky compared to many others in the city. We’d lost our car, but we had a place to live and had all of our paintings, manuscripts and records, including the fifty-three volumes of the Seth material, intact. Since we occupy two apartments in order to have enough living and working space, we had room to take in a couple who had been flooded out. The weather was cold and rainy. Our days became a routine of actions devoted to survival, although Jane finished Oversoul 7 early in July, and resumed her classes. This book was put aside for a long time.

There is no other valid way of changing physical events. It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.

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 are you given the gift of creating your experience.

Some feelings and thoughts are translated into structures that you call objects; these exist, in your terms, in a medium you call space. Others are translated instead into psychological structures called events, that seem to exist in a medium you call time.

(9:40.) If the doll sat on a bureau and this is also vividly recalled, then the space in which the doll sat still carries the impression of the doll, though other objects may be placed there. You react, therefore, not only to what is visible to your physical eyes in space, or to what is directly in front of you in time, but also to objects and events whose reality is still with you, though they may seem to have disappeared.

Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations. Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.

If you have become afraid of emotion or the expression of feeling, or if you have been taught that the inner self is no more than a repository of uncivilized impulses, then you may have the habit of denying this deep rhythm. You may try to operate as if it did not exist, or even try to refute it. But it represents your deepest, most creative impulses; to fight against it is like trying to swim upstream against a strong current.

In other terms it represents the expression of yourself in pure energy, from which your individuality rises, the You of you, unmistakably given identity that is never duplicated.

While your feeling-tone is uniquely yours, still it is expressed in a certain fashion that is shared by all consciousnesses focused in physical reality. So in those terms you spring from the earth as all the other creatures and natural living structures. You are, while physical, a portion of nature, therefore, not apart from it.

(Pause.) New paragraph: You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.

In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality. But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life. The ego, while appearing the same to itself, ever changes. It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions, that difficulties arise. Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain directions and blocks its awareness in others.

Now: The book will enable others to help themselves, and will reach a far greater audience and help more people than Ruburt could meet alone, or than I could help through individual sessions. Those who request help should be put on a list to make sure they know of the book.

The effect of the visit was good, particularly on Ruburt. We will get to his [scientific] questions. For Ruburt’s confidence, I wanted this book decently begun. Other sessions may take over from dictation now and then, but the main project will be the book.

The flood material will be used as an example in the book later on, when natural disasters are discussed; so you will have that material, and others may use and understand it.

(End at 11:32 p.m. Jane was quickly out of an excellent dissociated state. “I’m glad Seth’s working on his book again,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I feel a lot better. I was even wondering if my own attitude was holding the thing up now, after all of those other interruptions….” And so, like Seth Speaks, this is really two books in one: It’s not only about the nature of personal reality, but the circumstances surrounding Jane’s production of the material and the many ideas she has concerning it.

(I was happy to learn that Seth plans to incorporate flood data in his book — I’ve been concerned lest that subject be pushed aside by other events, then perhaps forgotten.)

1. For those who have forgotten: Chromosomes are microscopic bodies into which the protoplasmic substance of a cell nucleus separates during cell division. They carry the genes, the “blueprints” that determine hereditary characteristics. Occasionally a footnote like this will be included in order to point up Seth’s own material. Often he’ll “take off” from such standard definitions in his own way.

2. A note added later: The Seth Material and Seth Speaks contain some references to the reincarnational connections that Seth postulates involving himself, Jane, and me. Such personal data is outside the scope of this book; but in Chapter Nineteen, Seth does go into his ideas on reincarnation, time, etc., in a more objective way.