“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause at 9:35.) 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, Tam 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.

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 does 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….