Mike's commentary · The Magical Approach, Appendix

The "Reading Guide" and "Key Points" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Guide

This chapter consists of the appendix and the afterword. Appendix 1 records that in August 1981, Jane twice wrote down ten predictions, and on the same day several of them came true, including Ed's letter mentioning skiing and detective comics, an old friend's visit, and the song "Auld Lang Syne." Appendix 2 contains Jane's records of precognitive experiences and two examples. Appendix 3 describes a skeptical psychologist and magician who came to visit, when Seth suddenly spoke through Jane, emphasizing that his books and the process of their transmission cannot be replicated. Appendix 4 is written by Laurel discussing science's rejection of the magical approach and how the magical approach operates. The afterword is written by Rob explaining the book's ten-year delay in publication and the situation after Jane's death.

Key Points of This Chapter

• In the predictions Jane wrote down on August 24 and 25, 1981, many items came true that same day, including the snowball machine, the snowshoes, the detective, the old friend, and the song "Auld Lang Syne."
• Jane recorded seemingly coincidental precognitive experiences in her own life and in the lives of others, events in which fleeting glimpses were captured before ordinary events took shape.
• Seth said to the skeptical psychologist-magician that they do not produce replicable effects; only Seth speaking through Jane and the Seth books cannot be replicated.
• Laurel pointed out that science exalts skepticism yet does not apply it to itself; science arose from the world of magic yet denies its own source. The magical approach may operate in unexpected ways and includes both positive and less positive experiences.
• In the afterword, Rob explained that The Magical Approach was delayed for ten years because of Jane's illness and the pressure of other books; after Jane's death he continued the work and ultimately fulfilled the promise of publication.

Main Text

Appendix 1: Jane's Three Prophetic Adventures

After The Magical Approach there are four appendices and one afterword, and today we will go through all of them quickly in one class session. Because there is not much difficulty here, just descriptions of some examples. Let us look at the first appendix.

Appendix 1 is Jane's three prophetic adventures, along with Seth's comments and the contents of Jane's psyche. This appendix contains three unpublished essays by Jane Roberts discussing three different prophetic and precognitive experiences, and it also includes an excerpt of Seth's remarks on Jane's abilities in a similar experience. I will only pick out the key points.

Appendix 1 actually just tells of Jane's three prophecies.

The first one, in May of 1980, was still during the time when The Magical Approach was being written. She said a small incident fascinated her. She kept thinking, this is the eighties now, and she kept thinking about how in the sixties Rob had sold several of his paintings to the Lieb Restaurant Club. She kept wondering whether those paintings were still there. They had been discussing this question. So these various experiences are all coincidences, and in this kind of example, we should not talk about the specific content at all. In this subjective action, in the side branches of our normal thoughts, there will be some magical, hidden psychic actions.

In this event, it was both stealthy and obvious. Because in Seth's session from August of last year, it applied to today's event. For example, on August 24, 1981, she wrote down a prophecy. She spent about three minutes writing ten prophecies: first, a snowball machine; second, something about rescheduling an appointment; third, an egg carton, that is, a gift; fourth, a protruding triangle; fifth, snowshoes; sixth, a boxed set of crayons; seventh, the milkman; eighth, a detective; ninth, the stove was delivered long ago; tenth, a two-digit series.

Jane was testing her own prophetic ability. She had done many tests before, for example, she had predicted what the next day's newspaper would say. Seth in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events also suggested to them that if you want to test whether you have precognitive ability, you can start by predicting very small things. When you predict big things you have no confidence, and when you have no confidence, the matter often cannot be predicted accurately either. So start by predicting very small things, for example, what will be on the front page of today's newspaper. When you become more and more accurate in your predictions, then increase the difficulty and complexity of the predictions.

She wrote down these ten completely unrelated things, and then watched to see what would happen that day. She wrote them at noon. As it turned out, after one o'clock, while she and Rob were having dinner, a mailman came. While she was waiting for the mailman, a reader appeared. This was a person who generally appeared only once a year, and he suddenly showed up. He was the young man I described in the book The God of Jane, a woman wrapped in a man's body. He had once had some suicidal tendencies, which made me worry about him for a time. But this time he appeared with a face full of smiles, lively and energetic, and he had even gained a few pounds. Rob had to go to the bank, so after the mailman came, Rob left first, leaving just this reader and Jane together.

The mailman brought many letters, and Jane was looking through all the mail. She said the cool air of this August was blowing in, and she pulled on a sweater. Then one letter particularly caught her attention, because it came from an old friend, Ed. This old friend was the person who had introduced Rob and Jane. She said we had lost track of him for a long time, until two years ago he suddenly sent a letter from Alaska. Alaska is in the northern part of Canada¹, a very cold place, and if you want to see the aurora borealis or something you can go there; the natural scenery is also very beautiful.

While listening to the visiting Larry talk, she was reading those letters. Her thoughts drifted to Ed, Rob, and Mickey, and also Spillane, when they were making detective comic strips together. Two years ago Ed had sent them another letter from Alaska, breaking a silence of twenty years. They had not been in contact for twenty years, and then he suddenly wrote a letter after twenty years, telling them, I am skiing in Alaska. In fact, the letter now before my eyes also mentioned the skiing trip in Alaska. That may have been the related matter that suddenly made me shiver.

Why did she shiver? Look at what she had written in her earlier prophecy: it was August, still summer in America, still very hot, yet Jane had actually written down things related to snow, like a snowball machine and snowshoes. She had even written down a detective. Why was it related to a detective? Because at that time they were drawing a comic, and this comic was called the detective series. This series of coincidences, because Jane had just finished making this prophecy — she had just made it at noon, and now it was only a little past one in the afternoon — so Jane was quite astonished that the prophecy had manifested so quickly, so uncannily that she shivered.

However, at that moment Larry told her that he had found a new job, working as a cashier at a convenience store. The shivering feeling still continued, and while listening to him talk she kept shivering, because she found that her prophecy was too accurate. She circled items one, five, and eight, which were the snowball machine, snowshoes, and detective. They all undoubtedly applied to Ed's letter, in which he mentioned the skiing trip in Alaska, and the time when he and Rob were doing detective comics. When I made this morning's prophecy, the letter itself was already in the mailman's mail truck.

She said this prophecy was nothing remarkable; these were just small things in life, not earth-shattering events, but they gave me a very satisfying feeling. I suppose the snowball machine and snowshoes were my interpretation of something related to skiing equipment. Besides skiing, Ed may have used a snowmobile and snowshoes, so we had related and similar prophecies, especially in summer.

Besides this prophecy, she looked again at items three and seven on the prophecy list: the egg carton and the milkman. These might be related to Larry and his grocery store job, because a grocery store certainly has eggs; American grocery stores sell eggs, carton after carton. The milkman, another connection: her young reader Larry had once been willing to drink only milk, at a time when he was eating natural foods. In fact, when I was looking at my prophecy list, I had offered him milk. When Larry came to her house, she always remembered that he only drank milk, so she still offered him milk, so this milk was again connected to that item.

She said she suddenly remembered another thing. That morning before starting work, at my desk, without any reason I was thinking about the way Rob and I met. She had an impulse that day to write down the story of that meeting, but she did not want to write The Magical Approach; she wanted to write about how she and Rob met. She spent ten minutes thinking about the whole thing.

It was on a spring evening. Her first husband — Jane had actually been married before she met Rob — the two of them were driving up to the house of Jane's mother, and she was going to visit her mother. Then a car rushed up very quickly and stopped in front of their car, and then they heard the voice of Ed Robinson, the same Ed who wrote from Alaska thirty years later. Then the person who leaned down at the car window to talk to her, to look at her, was Rob. Ed recognized her husband's car, followed them, and told them that after they had visited her mother, they should come to his house to meet his new work partner, Rob. At that time Rob was Ed's work partner, and they were drawing a series of comics together, and this comic was called something like the detective agency, so it was related to the detective.

All of this came back to my mind this morning, and later that same day I received Ed's message. After making three prophecies that seemed to fit, of course it was not impossible that these were merely coincidences. But undoubtedly, there must be one point: the feeling itself is the meaning. The feeling of this kind of thing is itself a meaning. There, new evidence intuitively affirms what the intellect must question. Intuition will affirm what the intellect must question — question what? That there are too many coincidences. The feeling itself is the meaning. And I know that those memories and thoughts were connected to my later prophecy, and to the noon mail and Ed's message. Before Ed's letter arrived, I had already reacted to it.

She might receive a third letter, still about their earlier matters, and I will skip that here.

The next day, Tuesday, August 25, 1981, she wrote down another prophecy. She saw an old friend, a friend she had not seen in over twenty years. The stove she had bought was delivered, and the delivery person happened to be someone they had known in the sixties, because that person lived downstairs from someone they had often visited twenty years ago. In the evening, another old friend came to visit, and showed them slides taken during their trip to London at Christmas in 1980, and also mentioned the matter of them all singing "Auld Lang Syne" together. "Auld Lang Syne" is the song that British and American people sing together at midnight on New Year's Eve.

She said I have a feeling that events are constantly being kicked into and out of this kind of prominent event, and capturing that dynamic is another matter. She said she had a feeling that events were constantly coming in and going out. But if you can capture that sense of prominence, then it can be captured by you.

On the twenty-fifth she wrote another ten prophecies: a steam shovel; more news from Dick and David; Frank in French; a silver pendant or necklace; the aquaculture industry; old friends and "Auld Lang Syne"; a plow; the radiance of night; the name of hope; an overly ambitious person and father. As it turned out, item six was very accurate: that day they encountered two old friends. The person who delivered the stove was someone they had known twenty years ago, and another old friend came to visit on Thursday evening and showed them travel slides, mentioning the matter of them singing "Auld Lang Syne" together.

Then Jane in the second volume of Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment described another prophetic story. It was last weekend morning, and Ruburt found himself suddenly thinking of some married friends who lived in the suburbs, a half-hour drive away. He suddenly had a desire to see them. He imagined that the couple was right there in the house, and that perhaps they would call later to say they were coming over that evening, even though he and Rob had decided not to have guests that weekend. Ruburt actually did not want to invite people over so hastily; he felt it was not quite appropriate to call and invite people so late, so he tossed the thought aside.

But after a while, about fifteen minutes later, the same thought came back, and this time it was more insistent. He thought about it for another five minutes. Ruburt noticed them, but again tossed them aside, feeling it was too unrealistic. He decided not to call, and went to do his own things. About half an hour later, the same thought came back again. Ruburt found himself amazed by this feeling: why would an old friend he had not seen for a long time suddenly come to mind three times in a row tonight? He told Rob about it, and after saying it, again pushed it out of his mind.

By this time it was already quite late. They had eaten lunch, and the mail had arrived. In the mail there was a letter, written on Friday morning the day before. The couple said they were going out on Saturday, and asked whether they could come visit them that same afternoon. Judging from the way the letter was written, the couple seemed to have already set out that morning, and on the return trip in the evening they might pass through Elmira and possibly visit them. But at this point they could not write back to agree or disagree. As it turned out, that evening they really did come, although they arrived a little late.

Through these three prophetic events — August 24, August 25, and this matter of thinking of friends and the friends arriving that evening — although there is nothing magical in these things, and no earth-shattering stories, such things happen often in our lives. I have experienced them many times, and I think each of you has probably experienced many such things in your lives. But we generally classify them as coincidences and do not feel that they are anything magical.

Appendix 2: Jane's Records and Two Examples

The second appendix contains two people's dreams, and it is also an essay Jane wrote herself.

This is a record from August 6, 1980, after Jane finished a session. She said it took me a few minutes to come out of the trance state and return to my ordinary state of consciousness, and immediately I felt hot again. When she spoke for Seth she did not feel hot, but as soon as she returned to her own state, she felt hot again.

She said crickets and wood beetles, referring to the surrounding environment. She said I do not remember what Seth said, and I am not certain what magic is, or what it is not. But I know that the night is magical, filled with its own natural celebration.

See how poetic Jane is. The book she was writing is called The Magical Approach, yet she said I do not know what magic is, and I do not know what is not magic either. But she said I know the night is magical, and it has its own celebration. Just like the crickets and insects chirping, she felt this was the celebration of a summer night. She said Seth's sessions were as natural and smooth as a summer night.

She said I have begun writing more and more poetry, quite drawn to many of Seth's concepts. In fact, as I sat by the window, the window open, the fan on full blast, I jotted down many short lines, trying not to think about the steady heat of nearly ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes I thought, if Rob says "it's a wonderful day" one more time, I will scream. Because for her it was too hot, but Rob would often say "it's a really nice day."

She said around my life, several other themes were still floating. For example, Sue Watkins's book about her ESP class, Conversations with Seth, would be published in the fall. A vague unease was growing in my mind, as it seemed the publisher was taking an unusual amount of time to formally approve The God of Jane and the Seth book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. As mentioned earlier, the publication of this book had been tangled up for a long time. Meanwhile, the annoying fleas continued to run rampant in the house. And all of this, as we watched the news of the Democratic and Republican debates before returning to our separate studios, was somehow wrapped in a string of excitement.

She said when the light of the magical approach concepts that Seth transmitted shone upon these current matters—including everything she mentioned before, the Democratic debates, one book about to be published, two books delayed, and so on—all of these things seemed to take place in an atmosphere slightly different from before. Jane could feel this subtle difference.

Many subtle examples of magical orientations kept appearing in our lives. We seemed to catch glimpses of things before ordinary events fully formed, having some precognitive and premonitory abilities in advance. And we felt the invisible yet clear restlessness of the overheated summer night, the stirring of probable movements. At first, these hinted events only expanded our imagination, expanded our thoughts. But later they became more numerous. These subtle magical precognitive events became more and more magical. When you are about to do something but have not done it yet, you have a feeling that something is going to happen. This became more and more frequent and continuous, to the point that when we made normal decisions, we had to take them into account.

As with many examples, this was not a mysterious, startling apparition, but a vague kind of event, hard to identify. It was not the kind of magical, occult thing where "a fortune-teller tells you that on a certain day of a certain month you will have a bloody disaster." It was just trivial matters in daily life.

She then gave an example of a secondhand event. On August 7, at dinnertime the next day, a young reader arrived unexpectedly, without calling ahead. In America, visiting without notice is actually not common, and it is also somewhat impolite. But this person came anyway. The moment Rob saw him, he broke into a smile and liked him very much. Because he had come twice before, visiting them on average once every two years. He had a very good temperament, was handsome, warm, healthy, strong, and charming. He himself knew he was charming. Such a handsome young man coming to see them—Jane and Rob were both willing to chat with him, and it was pleasing to the eye as well.

So they chatted for an hour. American dinners are different from Chinese ones; adding one more person is not as simple as adding an extra pair of chopsticks. American dinners are served in individual portions; a meal for two is for two, a meal for three is for three. He talked about being talented in many areas, but not yet settled on which one to develop.

He told Jane about a magical thing that happened to him. When this John drove into town, he saw a very familiar-looking girl on the street. Because the first time he came here, he had seen this girl in a bar. John said, I have only come to this small town twice, and this is the third time. Yet earlier today, as I drove down a street, I suddenly recognized a girl who looked familiar. Coming once every two years, and on this visit he happened to run into a girl he had met in a bar four years earlier. He slowed the car down to take another look and see if it was really her. She kept walking on the sidewalk, and sure enough, it was her. He said I could hardly believe it, so I stopped the car and chatted with her for a while. She remembered me immediately—even after four years she could remember right away, because he was a very handsome man. The odds of such a meeting must have been astronomically rare.

The girl told him he could spend the night at her place. This meant the girl liked him, and even invited him to stay overnight at her home. Before John came to visit Jane, he had thought: after the visit, what would he do that evening? This small town had hardly any bars, maybe only one or two. He had been thinking about how to pass the long night. In the end, he had not been thinking about this specific girl, yet out of nowhere appeared a girl he had met in a bar four years earlier, and she invited him to stay at her house.

Jane said, on that same night, the dialogue experience in my mind turned out to be precognitive. I think both examples represent activity and communication at the magical level. They represent a kind of movement, a movement of the psyche, a psychological movement, occurring at other levels beyond the ordinary conscious level. He had not expected at all to meet this girl, but in fact such a thing happened, and so coincidentally.

She said our next scheduled Seth session was the following week, another day with temperatures in the nineties, and I found myself full of anticipation and hope. Would Seth discuss those topics? This was the matter we just wrote about. She said a whole set of new session data was coming, and I wanted to be able to put it to practical use. She said you can see Session 2, this was their second session, along with Rob's edited short piece, with only one very personal item deleted. This was a description by Jane at the second session.

Appendix 3: The Skeptical Psychologist and Magic

Appendix 3 is about Jane and Rob meeting a skeptical psychologist and his magic. Jane has a poem called "Magic as Public as the Air," which she will attach later.

Gramacy was a psychologist and a magician. He was both a psychologist and a magician, which is very interesting. He came to their home, and he was also a scientist, searching for some real magic. He brought a small tape recorder, and classical music echoed through the room. As the music echoed, he lowered his dark head, just for a moment, then raised it, and those soft eyes were now at once both soft and merciless. He was performing magic, his hands moving with the rhythm of the music. His whole body was a spectacle of motion, shoulders, head, arms, chest, his entire frame responding to the music. Then at his command, four silver dollars passed through the tabletop and vanished. Cards appeared and disappeared.

Actually, Liu Qian also performed this silver-dollar-through-the-table trick² on a Spring Festival Gala one year, and many magicians have performed it. After all, it is just a magic trick.

This magician and psychologist harbored a faint hope that could not quite be realized: that someday, somehow, the coins would really pass through the tabletop. He knew his magic was fake, and he hoped that one day the coins could really pass through the table, rather than it being just a trick. He said, or maybe something would happen to me that would prove that life has more than just ordinary cause-and-effect events. These are his own words: perhaps something will happen to me that will make me believe that this world does not only have ordinary cause-and-effect events, but that there are also those magical events happening. He said I almost believe they exist, but in my life I cannot find them. This magician actually wanted to find something truly magical in life, something that would let him truly verify that this world is not just the cause-and-effect relationships we recognize, but that there is also magic beyond cause and effect. He said he almost believed such things existed, but he had never found them.

Then he said, but if someone told me things about myself that no one else could know. What he meant was, if this kind of magical thing happened to me, I would accept it too.

At this point Jane made an assumption: why don't you seize the knowledge that you yourself possess but assume you should not have? Jane said, why don't you go and grasp the knowledge you think you do not have? If you think you do not have it, then you do not have it. If you assume you should not have it, then you will not even try, will you? For example, precognitive information, because Jane had been practicing precognition these past two days, so she was very sensitive to precognitive information. This was the psychologist himself who said that precognition could also prove the existence of this kind of magic. He said I have never had it, never at all, that is exactly what I mean, nothing magical has ever happened to me.

Jane replied: have you never known, in the instant before someone actually called, that they would call? Or have you never known, before the doorbell rang, that it would ring? Or just before you actually ran into someone you had not seen in a long time, known that you would meet them?

Gramacy said, those are all coincidences. He said gloomily, that is how I would explain such examples, I think they are just coincidences.

Jane went on: if you wrote all these examples down and made sure to keep a consistent record, you would find that if you tried to assign them all to coincidence, there would simply be too many examples, they could not all be coincidences. Or you would find that some simply cannot be made to fit, some examples cannot be explained by coincidence. You would have more and more examples of your own to examine, and you could not prove whether coincidence could be responsible for such things. But you could consider the unofficial hypothesis as a possibility. You might find that in your own life, you have evidence of precognition that you have overlooked. You have ignored it. Every one of us actually has it.

The psychologist shrugged his thick eyebrows. He said, I would still rather have something truly extraordinary happen. He said these things do not count, I do not think such things prove anything. What I am saying is, why don't these extraordinary things happen? Then he broke into a smile and said, like the test you two did about an advertisement in the New York Times that you wrote about in The Seth Material, that is the kind of thing that would convince me. He could not quite recall what test it was they had done, but anyway, Jane and Rob had done a test about a newspaper advertisement, and it appeared in the paper the next day.

At this point Rob interjected: that test was one of many we did, not the only time. We did not discount anything, we just reported everything straight. He said when you use coincidence as a convenient explanation for everything, you will never become a master. Rob also spoke very directly. If you take all these magical things, this ability that you yourself possess, and you consider them all to be coincidences, if you use coincidence to conveniently explain everything, then you will never accomplish anything great. You always want those truly extraordinary things to happen, but you do not even consider the magical things happening around you to be magical, you lump them all into the category of coincidence. How could magical things happen to you? How could those greater, more extraordinary things happen? Impossible, because you do not even acknowledge them.

Gramacy nodded. He said I know a magician who can replicate almost any specific manifestation that a psychic can perform. He was himself a magician, so he knew another magician. He said this magician can perform everything that a psychic can perform. What he implied was that this kind of psychic phenomenon, or this kind of thing, is not all that magical in our magic circles. We can be without psychic ability, and yet make you in the audience see something just as lifelike as Jane's channeling.

At this moment, Seth suddenly spoke. What is interesting about this session is that Jane was chatting with this magician, and Seth suddenly spoke through Jane.

That is why we do not bother with effects that can be duplicated at all. But only this performance and our books, those cannot be duplicated.

Seth suddenly popped out. He wanted to tell him why they do not do the kind of thing that can be repeatedly verified: because what you can repeatedly verify, others can repeat as well. That would make you feel that it is just a performance, like a magic show. What Seth meant was, we do not do that kind of performance-oriented thing. But only this performance and our books cannot be duplicated. What does this performance mean? This performance is the very act of him speaking through Jane. What he was pointing to was: I can, right now, immediately speak to you through Jane, right in the middle of Jane's conversation with this magician, I can come through her and speak to you. He said this is a performance, and this performance cannot be duplicated, it is just that magical.

And the material in our books, that also cannot be duplicated. You cannot go and continue writing this book, nor can you say, "I also connected with Seth, and I am also writing a book." And where this material comes from, why it keeps coming from there, you cannot figure that out either. Can you imitate Seth and write another book or a similar one? No. In the fifty or sixty years since, not a single person has reached Seth's level, or imitated Seth's level, or imitated any of his books.

Although there are many people who claim they have channeled Seth, made contact with Seth, and that Seth is speaking through them. In America, in Taiwan, in mainland China, all over the world, there are people like this. But no matter what it is they transmit, if you look carefully at their content, there is nothing new. It is just a repetition of Seth's old knowledge from before. It is very hard for them to say anything more insightful, anything beyond the scope of the earlier Seth material. There is nothing new. That is to say, it is just a rephrasing of old material. So they cannot reach Seth's level, they cannot produce that content. So Seth said, such a book, and such a process of transmitting the book, is itself a magical thing.

Gramacy said, oh, it actually startled him, because he had not expected Seth to suddenly come out. And Rob laughed out loud. In the blink of an eye, Jane herself said, in an instant I became Seth again. Seth said:

I have no strings. No cards hidden in the deck, and no bag of tricks on the floor beside me.

He was mocking the magician. Seth spoke with a smile and with warmth about magic, cause and effect, since that was what the man had been hung up on all along. And at the same time, he displayed a magic that surpassed superficial cleverness of manipulation. A personality from another realm joined the gathering, no matter which realm it came from. What had been a gathering of three became a gathering of four, Seth had joined in. And that in itself was as magical as a trick.

She said it was really too bad that we did not record that session, and it was quite unusual. She said we should have recorded it, because it was so much fun. Three people were eating and chatting, and suddenly there was one more person. She said by the time I thought to remind Gramacy to record it, it was already too late, Seth had arrived. She said somehow, not recording the session actually enhanced its magical quality. Not recording it actually strengthened that feeling of magic. The spontaneous psychological or psychic transformation came and went.

We sat at the table in the living room, the light shining clearly on my face. That was Jane herself speaking. Gramacy could follow Seth's psychological changes, see the alterations in my features, very subtly accepting those other contours. That is, when Jane was transmitting Seth, her facial expression was like a man's. Normally she was very feminine, and although her features were somewhat androgynous, she was still a very typical woman. But when she transmitted the Seth material, if you have seen the video of Jane transmitting, there are a few videos you can find on YouTube, you would suddenly discover that at this time Jane seemed, from her voice to her tone, to her expression, to her appearance, to have completely become a male. So Jane said, those other contours refer to the contours of Seth coming through her, the changes in her features, very subtly accepted. And Seth's voice was cheerful and rumbling.

If you have heard Jane's recordings, you will certainly know that the voice was very loud, very resonant, not like a human voice, impossible to describe that kind of sound, "rumbling," rumbling is a very vivid description. Jane was a novelist, and her depiction of this detail is very accurate, it really was rumbling, like distant rolling thunder on a summer night. She wrote: "You did not need to strain to hear the words, the voice was loud, and there was no prepared message either."

Until that night, we did not know that Gramacy was a scientist. And when Seth spoke with him, he did not treat him as a scientist, but kept talking to him as a magician, telling him to trust his dramatic and imaginative abilities. Seth was telling him to trust that dramatic quality in his magic performances, and his imaginative ability.

After this session, there is a poem by Jane attached, and the poem itself is about magic and the magical. This poem seems to have some kind of hidden connection with this meeting with the magician. The poem is very short, so we will not read it line by line; if you are interested, you can go read it.

Appendix 4: The Scope of Jane's Identity and the Challenge from the Scientific Establishment

Now we enter Appendix 4. This was written by Laurel Lee Davies, not by Jane and not by Rob, but by another friend of theirs. Laurel writes:

After Jane began speaking the Seth material in late 1963, as her psychic abilities began to grow rapidly, she had to become willing to consciously expand the scope of her identity.

She was no longer just a writer. Of course, it only became increasingly obvious later on: her initial doubts and questions about psychic events meant she inevitably had to confront this fundamental issue -- she had to adjust her identity, from being a writer to becoming a psychic.

And it is also characteristic of us that, when we try to learn more about what we are doing, we work alone for a long time, but our naivete made it quite unacceptable when we really began to reach outward. We faced skeptical arguments from the learned "establishment."

What she means here is that when Jane did psychic work, she worked alone while focusing on it. But when she really had to extend outward -- for example, publishing books, making things public -- the skeptical arguments from within the establishment came out, and they kept rejecting her. Continuing:

For the most part, that rejection still continues. Jane, then, for herself and for Seth both, would speak so eloquently about the discrepancy that exists between her psychic abilities and the kind of rationalism of the present scientific orientation, as Seth described earlier in Session 6 of The Magical Approach.

Rob's Discovery: The Conflict Between Rationalism and Traditional Values

In this appendix, Rob talks about how, while researching Jane's published and unpublished notes, diaries, and books for The Magical Approach, he discovered that Jane had originally and consciously called this book "The Journal of a Psychic Naturalist." Rob also found that in Jane's 1980 book The God of Jane, she had written some powerful passages about cultural acceptability. She wrote these in the same year she was dictating The Magical Approach for Seth. For example, in Chapter 12 of Jane's own book The God of Jane, she began quoting from her own notes and launched into a passionate four-page discussion of that subject.

What did Rob write about in those four pages of passionate discussion? He wrote:

Science extols skepticism, except when skepticism is applied to science's own assumptions, methods, and procedures.

That is a very interesting statement: science extols skepticism, telling you that you should doubt everything, that anything unverified should be doubted. But science refuses to allow skepticism to be applied to itself. Why? Because science considers itself beyond doubt. Yet science itself is built on a process of premises and assumptions—mathematics has its own principles, axioms, and reasoning, and physics is the same. If these premises and assumptions were not accepted, the discipline would not exist. But these "principles" were all proposed by various people, and once proposed and accepted by the group, they are no longer open to doubt. Rob's words are very direct: science extols doubt, yet does not allow others to doubt it.

What we need are more skeptics who are not afraid to examine the claims of science with the same fine discrimination used to examine other alternative disciplines and fields of endeavor.

What she means is that we need people to examine whether science itself has problems, with the same rigorous attitude. It is like The New York Times' science section's "all the news that's fit to print"—all the news that fits the officially accepted view of reality, news that has already been invisibly screened, filtered layer by layer through reporters, editors, managing editors, and the final copy editors. What Rob is saying is this: science is the same kind of thing, and yet we all live our lives according to that official definition of experience.

Science: Rising from a World of Magic

On September 27, 1994 — by this time more than a decade had passed since Jane's era — Rob wrote:

Science arose from a religious world that had once been filled with magic. It was meant to protect people from certain mysterious influences of the natural world, so it began by opposing mysticism and defending against it.

Modern science was born in an era rampant with magic, so from the very beginning it had an instinct: to prevent and guard against all things mysterious. Science was born precisely to defend against it. Then:

Since then it has discovered that it denies the very realities from which it arose in order to tame them.

It denies all these mysterious things, yet it ultimately discovers that it itself arose from those mysterious things, that it comes from those very realities, from that magical world. But because of its historical origins, it denies them.

The Seth Material and Institutional Trust

Luorou said that Jane Roberts and Robert Butts received letters from all sorts of scientists over the nearly twenty years their books were published and the more than twenty years the material was transmitted. Many of these scientists were academics, people doing scientific research. In certain respects, the Seth material gained institutional trust -- for example, it was taught in universities and became a course with academic credit. It is not that it was not accepted; there were many scientists of genuine courage who acknowledged it, and so they put it into university curricula.

But readers are often afraid to openly admit that they are studying Seth or reading Seth, furtively not daring to tell others. Because they feel this is metaphysical, and they fear being seen as seeking truth from this kind of metaphysical source rather than from scientific experiments. The metaphysical has never been acknowledged by science; science only acknowledges experimental data.

Luorou said:

In terms of national chauvinism, the perfect "one set" of beliefs denies, avoids, and excludes the metaphysical mystery.

This refers to the kind of national chauvinism in American society that prides itself on science; it denies and avoids the metaphysical mystery, wanting there to be nothing mysterious in science.

To this day, metaphysics has only been entertainment, an "adopted science" in our culture, becoming part of the extended family of science only for the purposes of inspiration and concepts, yet not trusted as scientific truth.

All metaphysical things can only become marginalized aspects of science -- being a fringe science is already not bad, at least they still attach the word "science" to you and have not branded you as feudal superstition, but on the whole it is not endorsed, and is even feared.

Scientific Truth Keeps Being Rewritten

Rob's wife also wrote:

Throughout the ages, scientific truth has kept being rewritten.

Throughout history, what science has called truth has been overturned and redone again and again. The scientific community declares something to be truth, and a couple of days later another new experiment proves it is not, and then a new theory emerges and becomes the new truth. Her implied meaning is this: there is a truer truth that has never changed, but you cannot see it, and you do not acknowledge it. Yet you acknowledge this kind of truth that keeps being rewritten, overturned today by tomorrow and tomorrow by the day after, while you do not believe that kind of timeless, unchanging theory that transcends space and time is truth. That is what she really wanted to say.

She said she believes metaphysics is a science of empathic response. The Magical Approach is a perfect example of a method of dealing with reality that is not accepted by science. And yet the magical approach is useful. Rob's wife said:

I can say that from my own experience, with a sense of wonder. At the very beginning it may seem not to have given you the result you expected, but in the course of your broader dealings with time, your timetable may have to change. You may begin to bring about experiences that are not what you thought you were pursuing, you bring about things that are not what you were pursuing, and yet later your original request is then materialized.

What she means is that when you are applying the magical approach, certain manifestations begin to appear in your life, and they may not actually be the results you truly expected. But if you stretch the dimension of time a little longer — if you look back after one year, two years, three years — you will discover that the things that manifested one year or two years ago were what you truly needed, not the thing your heart wanted at that time. This is beyond the scope of human cognition and consciousness.

Two Examples: How the Magical Approach Works in Unexpected Ways

These are two very typical examples I have talked about before, so I will just briefly repeat them.

One person wanted a promotion and a raise, and wanted an annual salary of one hundred thousand. He was dissatisfied with his boss, so he went to talk to his boss about it, and his boss said, well then, get lost. Not only did he not get a raise, he was actually fired. After losing his source of income, he had no choice but to learn a new skill, because he discovered that his original level of knowledge gave him no particular advantage when looking for a job. He studied for three months, for example web design, and then used his newly learned knowledge to look for a job, and right away he got an annual salary of one hundred thousand, exactly the same as what he had originally expected. But the process in between was completely different from what he had expected. He had thought that his original boss would give him a raise.

The second example: a woman whose husband treated her badly. She kept using The Magical Approach, or the belief substitution in The Nature of Personal Reality, and kept thinking about making her husband love her more, making their married life happier, and that her husband would change his mind and be as loving toward her as other people's husbands were toward their wives. But the result was exactly the opposite of what she wanted. Not only did her husband not love her, he actually became even worse. Especially after she began studying these spiritual materials, the couple had less and less common ground, and in the end they divorced. She was in great pain. She had originally wanted her husband to change his mind, but instead she lost her husband. However, after being depressed for a while, she met another man, and it was love at first sight. In every respect, this man was the ideal man she had most wanted. The two of them got married very quickly, and only after getting married did she discover that life could actually be this happy. This was something she had never expected at all.

What Rob said in that passage is exactly the meaning I have been expanding on here: the things in the magical approach do not necessarily operate in a way that your conscious mind can understand. You only need to put forward what you want. As for how it is realized, that is not something you need to worry about. What it may show you at first is not necessarily the result that your conscious mind recognizes.

Rob said:

I hope the focus, you may begin to bring about something that is not what you think you are pursuing in this experience... Yet when you later reconstruct it, the process of natural magic brings you concepts and evidence that are even more complex than what you had imagined.

What she means by "focus" is the thing you want to realize. It may disappear into Framework 2, Framework 3, or Framework 4. Our present life can be called Framework 1, and Framework 2 is the place where all possibilities exist. When you want to realize something in Framework 1, you make a choice in Framework 2, and then it can manifest in Framework 1. Framework 3 is another layer above Framework 2, and Framework 4 exists in the same way. So when the process of its realization is reflected back into Framework 1, it may be completely different from what you recognize and understand. But when you look back on the matter afterward, you will see that the original result was actually more complex than what you had imagined.

Positive and Not-So-Positive Experiences Are Both Within Value Fulfillment

Laurel said again:

The complexity of life and reality includes both positive and not-so-positive experiences within value fulfillment.

Let me expand on this a bit. Do not think that once you have studied spiritual things, your life will from then on be forever happy and blissful, healthy and joyful, peaceful and delightful. If you think that is the purpose of studying spirituality, then you have gone in the wrong direction. Studying spirituality is about letting you face everything in life with equanimity, and within that there is good and bad. You can imagine the good things you want, but you cannot say that because I have studied The Magical Approach, studied the Seth material, practiced Buddhism, practiced immortality, studied the Dao, my life should forever be full of only good things. The moment something bad happens, you begin to doubt this world and doubt whether what I have studied is correct. That is a problem with your own understanding. No one guarantees that studying these things will bring out only positive things. It only tells you that these things are all natural, and you should face them with a natural, calm state of mind. You can apply everything in The Magical Approach, apply The Nature of Personal Reality, and even other spiritual study materials, to make beneficial, positive changes in your life, but that does not mean that from then on there will be no more bad things in life. What Laurel said in this passage means exactly this. She said:

The magical approach can help with both.

When you are having positive and not-so-positive experiences, the magical approach can help you in both cases. She said she was very interested in hearing everyone's research on the magical approach, that is, how to apply it in daily life. She said:

It has been an honor to serve as a research and editorial assistant for this work. I have absolute confidence that Seth, Jane Roberts, and Rob will understand how wholeheartedly I say this.

This is an article by Laurel, from her perspective, looking at Jane and at the relationship and conflict between science and the magical approach. This article is very convenient for everyone to directly face the challenges from science in real life.

Afterword: Why This Book Waited Ten Years After Jane's Death

Let us finally go through the afterword Rob wrote, briefly. This afterword is not difficult; it is just a statement, but it contains a lot of information useful to us, and I suggest everyone take the time to read the original text carefully when you have a chance.

Rob wrote this book The Magical Approach in 1980, dictated by Seth through his wife Jane in a trance state. But because of Jane's illness, and the pressure of producing other books, this book could not be published quickly. Jane died in 1984 at the age of fifty-five³. By then Rob was already sixty-five⁴. Looking back from the framework of simultaneous time, he was amazed to discover that by the time this book was published by Amber-Allen's New World Library, ten years had passed in the blink of an eye.

Why the long delay? The editor and publisher of the new editions of Jane's books, Janet Mills, suggested he write a short piece explaining the situation, because over the years many people had asked about this book, and he was very grateful for every concerned inquiry.

Rob said in the piece that he knew what had happened, yet on a conscious level he could never understand all the psychological factors involved. The day after Jane died, he went back to work — this fits normal human psychology: when someone you love most dearly dies, you do not immediately feel that extreme grief; rather, there is a kind of numbness. The day after Jane died, Rob returned home and began writing, continuing the previous work of transcribing manuscripts, typing, and editing. He completed the two Seth books Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment and The Way Toward Health, to meet publication deadlines that were long overdue. In order to preserve the collection of Jane's and his works in the archives of the Yale University Library, Jane and Rob's good friend Debbie Harris began making photocopies of all the Seth sessions and the notes from Jane's ESP classes.

Although Rob tried his best to keep himself busy and show a smiling face to the world, inside he was numb. For a year, he cried several times a day, longing for his wife. According to what Seth said, even though time is simultaneous, he still needed time to walk the long road of recovery.

Jane, Rob, and Laurel Lee Davies had been corresponding for several years. Five months after Jane's death, Rob called her for the first time. Laurel worked as an administrative assistant at an arts and humanities center in Los Angeles. As their phone time rapidly accumulated, Laurel and he understood through dreams that they had shared a reincarnational relationship. In August 1985, Laurel moved to Elmira and worked with Rob in many ways. She helped continue Debbie Harris's massive project — photocopying thousands of pages of Jane's and Rob's works for the Yale Library archives — and also answered mail and organized mailing lists. She helped Rob proofread Seth's Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness for Still Point Press, and later helped Amber-Allen Press proofread the new editions of Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality. She did research for the material of Jane's The Magical Approach, which was the book she most dreamed of being involved with.

Laurel has by now been Seth's "metaphysical apprentice" for fourteen years. Rob said that even with their differences, their mutually supportive yet complex relationship would continue. Yet even so, as the years passed, he began to see more clearly: to recover from Jane's death would take the rest of his life. Perhaps one day he would write something about the details of Jane's and his life, but not now.

Except for a few close friends like Sue and Tam Mossman, Rob rarely saw people. Tam helped him greatly in many ways. In the spring of 1985, Tam began publishing a very interesting quarterly, Parapsychology: The Discarnate Wisdom⁵, which contained Seth material in many issues. And Rob returned to painting — he had given up painting during the last two years of Jane's life — and he painted the way he saw her in his dreams. Aside from his reaction to the event of Jane's passing, he wrote down "grieving notes," which can be seen in The Way Toward Health. He said he wrote nothing else; some of the grieving notes were a deliberate form of therapy.

When sales gradually declined — by the time he wrote this piece twenty years had passed — the sales of the books published in the seventies began to decline, and beloved books went out of print one by one, because the publishers no longer reprinted them. Rob thought the readers' letters would also dwindle; to some extent they did decrease, but to his pleasant surprise, they continued to arrive at a slower but steady pace. He tried hard to answer every letter, and still does so now, although at the time of writing this he had fallen far behind.

In the years after Jane's death, Rob and trusted old friends Richard Kendall and Susan DeLise researched possible publishing opportunities. Richard had been a member of Jane's ESP class in the seventies, and after Jane's death he helped greatly in resolving some old and problematic publishing disputes. Rob often wondered whether trying to publish Seth books, both new and old, was of any use at all — if sales of the old books kept falling, what was the point of reprinting? Perhaps people had grown tired of the Seth material, but no matter how much value the effort had, at least Jane and he had done their best.

In 1990, Rob began working with a literary agent, Anne Marie O'Farrell. She was married to Rick Stack — a writer, publisher, and speaker involved in psychic matters, who was also a member of the ESP class. Without Anne's persistent help, Rob doubted whether he would still have continued publishing books. She found Janet Mills and Amber-Allen, two women who were also extremely enthusiastic about keeping Jane's books in circulation. After republishing Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality, Janet told Rob that she wanted to publish all the books at once, immediately, without waiting any longer — people had already asked her to do so — because as time passed, the books published in the seventies were now a generation old, and readers in the nineties seemed never to have seen this body of material, and were asking for it all to be republished.

In 1993, Rob saw three things he had been involved in at different times all reach their culmination. One was that Linda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski of the International Seth Network published the Seth-centered magazine Reality Change⁶. This magazine had begun in June 1980 as a two-page mimeographed newsletter issued by Maude Cardwell, and eventually became a formal magazine. Also, Richard Roberts published The Seth Reader⁷, containing condensations of six Seth books — because the Seth books were too vast and too complex. And Bob Terrio's production company released a videotape, The Seth Phenomenon⁸, in which Rob discussed Jane's and his work.

Rob said that he had not yet finished copying all of Jane's and his manuscripts for the Yale University Library. This long-range effort did not need to have an obvious result, because he knew from experience that there was always more that could be added. Rick Stack and Rob had been discussing for quite a while a very interesting project: Rick would privately print the complete first five hundred and ten sessions that Jane had held before the 1970 publication of The Seth Material⁹. This was a massive project — from 1963 to 1970¹⁰, before Seth Speaks, the five hundred and ten sessions Seth had given them. This set of books would be called The Early Sessions, and at first would be sold only to subscribers, not publicly published. But later this development changed again; the book was publicly published, and it caused a great response. From my understanding, and including the understanding of others, its importance within the entire system of the Seth material even surpasses the later eight books. Although the early sessions are early, the depth and breadth of the content they contain covers all the things in the later books. When it was formally published later, it became nine books.

In the two volumes of Conversations with Seth, it was described that Sue Watkins from Jane's ESP class had recently begun gathering material for Conversations with Jane Roberts: A Multidimensional Memoir; she was writing Jane's memoir.

Rob said that, very fortunately, the help of all the people he mentioned and others enabled him to fulfill the promise he had made to Jane ten years earlier, when she was dying. When Jane died, she made only one request of Rob: to publish everything she had spoken for Seth over all those years, including her own diaries and books. Rob agreed at the time, but later found that it was only after ten years that it all gradually came to be realized.

Rob wrote:

I know now that my wife is in me, just as "where she is" — in that place where Jane is after death — I am also in her, in the same way, just as we always shared each other throughout our nearly twenty-nine years of marriage.

Those twenty-nine years of simultaneous time passed with incredible depth and speed. Life goes on, only differently. Although Rob's feelings were his own and very unique, they were at the same time intimately connected with the feelings of every other person. Since no one can live in true isolation, this must necessarily be so. In this probability in which we do not know we are doing so, yet all create together, Rob said:

Each of us is an immortal part, an endless spark of perception, beauty, and emotion, and sometimes also a spark of contradiction and denial.

His last few lines are written very beautifully. I look upon every person with awe, within this reality, expressing as best we can our understanding of this wondrous magical creativity. How to express it? By creating. Only in creating can you realize the expression of this magical creativity.

Conclusion

At this point, we have covered the entire appendix and afterword in one go. There is nothing difficult in this material; it is simply a straightforward account of events. With this, we have now completed our introduction to the entire book The Magical Approach.

As for how the magical approach is actually applied and used in daily life, I think everyone who has finished reading will have their own feelings and thoughts. You can also record your feelings and thoughts, or the magical things that happen when you actually apply the magical approach in your life -- even if they are very small and simple -- and share them with everyone. I also hope to bring your sharing to more people. You can share these magical experiences with more people in the comments, or in private communication with me.

注释与核实

1. Alaska is actually in the northwestern part of North America, not the northern part of Canada. ↩

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩

3. Source: Wikipedia, "Jane Roberts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Roberts) ↩

4. This claim could not be verified. ↩

5. Source: Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, "Jane Roberts papers: Metapsychology: the Journal of Discarnate Intelligence" (https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/1478158) ↩

6. Source: Archives at Yale, "Reality Change: the Global Seth Journal" (https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/1478358) ↩

7. Source: Jane Roberts and Robert Butts, edited by Richard Roberts, "A Seth Reader" (1993) (https://www.amazon.com/Seth-Reader-Jane-Roberts/dp/0942380150) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. Source: New Awareness Network (Seth Center), "The Early Sessions" (https://sethcenter.com/the-early-sessions/) ↩

10. Source: Wikipedia, "Bibliography of Jane Roberts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Jane_Roberts) ↩