“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane, then, wrote those two poems 16 days before she dictated the last session for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche on April 4, 1977; one month before she began dictating Mass Events on April 18, 1977; two years and two months before she began God of Jane on May 6, 1979; two years and six months before she began dictating the Preface for Dreams on September 25, 1979; two years and eight months before she came up with the idea for If We Live Again on November 15, 1979; three years and five months before she began dictating Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality in Dreams on August 6, 1980; four years before she began dictating Seth’s sinful-self material in that book on March 11, 1981; four years and three months before she began coming through with her own sinful-self information on June 17, 1981; and four years and five months before, on August 26, 1981, she wrote the poem in Note 6 for Session 936 of Dreams: “Something in me / ebbs and tides, / as if I let myself / for a while / be washed away / out to sea / while leaving / some spidery shell / upon the shore /….”

[...] Her “undeviating direction,” expressed in Poem One below, is directly related to the material about her that I quoted from Seth in Note 6 for Session 931, in Chapter 9 of Dreams: “Nothing, however, would have kept him at the sessions for this amount of time unless he wanted them.” (The session I cited had been held in February 1980, when Jane had been speaking for Seth for more than 17 years.)

(Seth at 10:28:) “You have been of excellent help to Ruburt lately. So far in our discussion of his own situation, we have not for good reason touched upon certain material because he was not ready for it.

[...] Once again Jane used many very long pauses as she spoke for Seth. I think that through Seth tonight she beautifully discusses several of her key insights into the nature of reality—and I don’t think it has ever been done any better.)

[...] 11:13 P.M. Jane said she remembered Seth saying that both of us had been Speakers. [...] Then she had felt Seth return with the mention of the millions as an answer, blunting any particular uniqueness in the fact that both of us had been Speakers and were now producing the Seth material.

(After the session I wondered if the Seth material itself could be a distorted version of the Speakers’ messages. [...] Actually, she felt, the Speakers’ material was “probably more poetical.”)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] Some of these are physically materialized, others are actualized in probable systems. [...]

[...] Jane and I wondered what role Billy’s illness might play in our affair with David—surely a way of thinking that would have been quite alien to us before the advent of the Seth material.

Jane knew, however, that provided she held the session Seth’s material would be dictation for Dreams. [...]

[...] “That was my fault, though—that was charged material, he would have said more. [...] Then I said to myself, ‘Seth, just go into it, that’s all.’ So why didn’t he say the cat’s going to be all right?”

“I wouldn’t mind getting something from Seth on why Billy got sick,” I said to Jane after supper. [...]

[...] This is indeed still the Seth material.

(“Good night, Seth. [...] Jane left trance easily, saying Seth left an emotional feeling behind him. [...] Jane had forgotten Seth’s data but remembered it when I mentioned it.)

Seth gave him the information in a dream. He was afraid of Seth but not of the information.

He is forced in one way to reach further into inner reality, for I do not come as immediately to you as Seth as you knew him did. [...] Seth is always there between us to help in this procedure.

(It might be added here that on my daily trip downtown, taking Jane to work at the gallery, I mailed the first 38 sessions of the Seth material to the American Society for Psychical Research. [...]

(Seth made this session very brief, since Jane and I were quite tired by the time it began. [...]

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

I had planned to go into some material concerning this particular portrait, as a camouflage construction, but here for now I will merely mention this in passing and go into it at our next session.

[...] We discussed with Jim Tennant our reasons for our very cautious approach to and with the Seth material, stressing our feeling that it was best to be on the very conservative side as far as claims, etc., went. We invited him to attend future sessions; and it was becoming more and more apparent that we would have to make some kind of arrangement for others to be able to read the material, without letting it out of our hands. [...]

[...] Beneath personal subconscious material you will find data, free, dealing with racial memories which will be of great benefit to psychologists and sociologists. Beneath this you will find material that is concerned with the beginnings of the species as a whole; and beneath this, and connected to it by the emotions, you will come to the boundaries of the inner self.

[...] The material must be read. The experiments in the material must be tried.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

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. [...] 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.

Jane hadn’t dictated this material while in a trance or a dissociated state, as she does when producing her Seth material. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

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. [...]

(In the opening notes for the 711th session, I referred to Seth’s deliveries in ESP class on the previous evening, October 8, 1974. When Jane and I received the transcript of his material at next week’s class, we saw that it ran to five single-spaced typewritten pages. Seth talked about many things, but his remarks here, as I’ve put them together, mainly concerned a subject he’d first discussed with members of class just a week ago [on October 1]¹ — the “city” they could start building in their individual and collective dream states:)

2. Seth didn’t quote Jane’s little poem exactly from 26 years ago, but paraphrased it. [...] Once again in an early work we see clear signs of the Seth material to come (in 1963). [...]

[...] When Ruburt (as Seth calls Jane) was a young girl he wrote a poem in which he declares:

(In that class session Seth had much more to say about the dream city. [...]

Our program of discussing Seth’s material, as well as our own ideas—which included our taping suggestions for Jane to listen to daily—had come out of those sessions for December 1 and 3. Obviously, we were trying to encourage Framework 2 activity. [...] “Rob and Seth started us on a new program and though we’ve hardly begun, I do feel some relieved more peaceful,” she typed in part on the morning of the 5th as she sat at her new low table, “yesterday i felt the place clicking about me. [...]

[...] We talked about starting up another daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s ideas. It’s not that we disagree with him, really, or find his material unacceptable. [...] I told her that Seth had said nothing at all about what I regard as the central conflict: the one between her sinful self, so-called, and her spontaneous self. [...]

3. After the personal session of December 1 (see Note 1), I’d suggested to Jane that we initiate a daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s material. In keeping with that idea, two nights later Seth recommended that we begin studying the sessions on the magical approach to life and on the sinful self. [...]

[...] Once again Seth offered us material relative to our daily program—but that’s not the only reason I decided to present the full session in Note 7.

(Going back to the end of our stay-at-home vacation, on June 25 Seth-Jane began delivering a series of 10 sessions that we held on Monday and Saturday evenings for a change, instead of following our usual Monday-Wednesday routine. [...] Some of that material is intensely personal, and some only generally so. [...] What if they’re related in oblique ways, yet Seth doesn’t call them book dictation? I may not realize I should ask him about this at the time, or only later begin to speculate about using certain material. We know that Seth will specify a given number of sessions for this book, for instance, yet we keep the freedom to consider adding other material.

1. Sue Watkins has been mentioned, and at times quoted, in a number of Jane’s books: The Seth Material, Seth Speaks, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, and both volumes of “Unknown” Reality. [...]

[...] Strictly speaking, it isn’t dictation for Mass Events, but Jane and I are presenting portions of it here because Seth discussed events and memory with a different emphasis, and touched upon aspects of reincarnation² — all subjects that spring out of that ineffable, really undefinable quality he calls simultaneous time. I ask the reader to always keep in mind that no matter what subject he’s discussing, or from what viewpoint, Seth’s kind of “time” underlies all that our present physical senses translate into linear, concrete experience and history. For clarification, I also keep this in mind: Seth isn’t physical, as he defines himself, and that “energy personality essence” seemingly isn’t all that focused on the passage of time — as we are — yet way back in the 14th session for January 8, 1964, he told us that time “is therefore still a reality of some kind to me.” [...]

[...] This made us feel good indeed, for it signaled the first publication of a Seth book in three years [since Personal Reality came out in 1974]. [...]

(Yesterday we received from Prentice-Hall the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks [Seth Spreekt], published by Ankh-Hermes. We saw at once that the book had been rather drastically cut—not only my own notes, which contain excerpts from Seth material at times—but Seth’s material itself. This is particularly obvious in the appendix, where only a few pages are left of all of that material. [...]

[...] (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. [...]

(Day before yesterday we received from Tam a copy of his memo to J. Nelson, P. Grenquist, and A. Freemyer; he’s checked the Dutch contract for Seth Speaks, and learned that it contained a clause prohibiting cutting. [...] At the same time I’ll be checking what portions of Seth Speaks were cut, and listing them. [...]

(We didn’t ask that Seth discuss the Prentice-Hall affair this evening, but....)

[...] The photographs will be used in Jane’s book on the Seth Material.)

[...] He makes a good point, saying that the normal ego cannot know unconscious material directly. He does not realize, however, nor do your other psychologists, what I have told you often—that there is an inner ego; and it is this inner ego that organizes what Jung would call unconscious material.

[...] We hadn’t asked Seth to comment.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] They were very interested in talking about Jane’s book, The Seth Material. They also gave me several questions for Seth to answer in his own book, if he chose to do so. [...]

[...] M.H. asked, then: “Are these faster-than-light particles the same as, or like, the electromagnetic energy or EE units Seth discusses in the Appendix of The Seth Material?”)

[...] This was the end of the material on Seth’s book for the evening. [...]

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

3. A note added five months later: For some of Seth’s early remarks about time, see the excerpts from the 14th session (for January 8, 1964) in Chapter 4 of The Seth Material. I quoted a few lines from the same session midway through the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality (as well as after the 724th session in Volume 2), and considered some thoughts about our attempts to grasp Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. The notes introducing this first volume also contain other applicable material having to do with Jane’s trance production times for the Seth books.

The inner senses, as described by Seth, are listed in Chapter 19 of The Seth Material.

[...] With hardly a pause, Seth-Jane switched over to some material for me; the session ended at 11:16 P.M. Jane’s trances had been excellent throughout the evening.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(A note pertaining to the material given just before break: In Chapter Nineteen Seth deals with reincarnation in a general sense, but he’s said little in this book about his psychic “connections” with Jane and me. There are references to such ties scattered through The Seth Material and Seth Speaks [see the 595th session in the Appendix of the latter] and we have a modest amount of unpublished information. [...]

[...] It was born out of her writings on Adventures in Consciousness, as mentioned in Chapter Twenty-one of Seth Speaks, and incorporates that material.)

[...] “You know,” she said, “I thought this book was going to go longer, but I’ve got the funny nostalgic feeling that Seth’s going to end it real soon. [...] I felt the same way about Seth Speaks; the end always shocks me.” I told her that I thought Seth would close out the book tonight. [...]

[...] She was both surprised — as she remarked several times — and a bit disconsolate now that Seth’s part of the long project was through. [...] She had no feeling any more that Seth would do an Appendix, as we’d speculated about occasionally.

(When I read this session to her, I was struck again by Seth’s use of the word “blindness,” and Jane admitted that she’d been worrying about losing her sight because of her eye difficulty. [...] I’d been surprised today when Seth had said that things were going ahead full steam.

(“Good afternoon, Seth.”)

The material given for Day 1 should definitely be reviewed today.

[...] I noted that it was now conceded by both Jane and Seth that she did have a cold, as I’d asked her yesterday.

[...] Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice Hall, called this morning to say that the first copies of her book, The Seth Material, have arrived at Prentice Hall from the printer. [...]

[...] As Seth, Jane pointed to my portrait of Seth; it hung on the wall behind me, so that she faced it as she sat in her rocker.)

(This in turn led me to wonder if tonight’s session contradicted one held several years ago, in which Seth stated that I had lived to an old age in the Denmark life. [...] Seth goes into more detail on this in the 595th session, in the Appendix.

(In Chapter Eight, Seth had said this was my way of trying to see models for my paintings. [...]

[...] But these sessions, dealing with Jane’s improvements, validate the Seth material as it’s come to us over the years. [...] [Others, I’ve often speculated, couldn’t realize the depth of Jane’s challenges.] As we talked, Jane laughed and said she picked up from Seth that “the best books are yet to come.”)

A note added 14 years after Jane/Seth delivered the magical-approach material: Miss Bowman died in 1994, at the age of 96. [...]

[...] Right now I don’t feel Seth around, though, but we’ll see … My spine’s got all kinds of feelings in it that I’m not used to, but they’re good ones. How does Seth sit? [...]

(“Thanks, Seth,” I said mentally to those kind words. [...]

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? [...] Seth’s book is young, I told myself. [...]

In “Unknown” Reality, then, Seth’s material on the sleepwalkers heralded one of the main themes of Dreams, which he began five years later. [...]

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. [...]

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 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.)

(I told Jane that Seth’s material on childhood inoculations leading to later diseases might be vulnerable to statistics. [...] I told Jane that the material made me speculate about Joe Bumbalo: He’s had many operations in his life, and has been shot full of drugs often. [...]

[...] Before he did Seth Speaks, she was scared Seth couldn’t write a book. [...]

[...] Here is a summary of the free-association material we discussed yesterday, April 24:

(“Good afternoon, Seth.”)