“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:03 A.M. Last 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.

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even in the most private-type sessions Seth always wound his material into more public areas, so that we have reams of unpublished (and very controversial) material dealing with the connections between one’s illness and other members of the family, community relationships, and with the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.

(Long pause at 9:21.) 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.

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.”