“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth actually began his Preface for this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, with the next, 881st session, which Jane delivered for him 12 days later [on September 25]. I chose to present this private session first because in it Seth offers certain information about Jane and me that I think applies to all of our work with him, through the session and books, and to our own separate creative lives as well. Especially do I like to interpret his material tonight as meaning that Jane is “a psychic or a mystic,” for to me, at least, this means that in this physical life she’s chosen to penetrate as deeply as she can the depths of reality, or consciousness.

Just as though it had been waiting for the right moment last night, a screech owl began to sound its sorrowful descending cry in the black woods on the hill behind our house. The barking of the geese started to fade. At least from my viewpoint, each of nature’s rhythmic signs implied a continuity, an inevitability and security, that I’ve often felt is lacking in our all-too-human affairs—this, even though I wrote in Mass Events that Jane and I are aware, of course, of all the “good things” we humans have constructed in our mass reality. Actually, I thought, our concepts of religion and science aren’t as contradictory as at first they may seem to be. In Mass Events Seth spent considerable time discussing the deeper and very similar meanings behind both of those belief systems—or cults, as he called them—and Jane and I hope he continues to do so in Dreams. Now it even seems to us that in Mass Events Seth began preparing us for Dreams long before Jane and he ever mentioned that work by name.

I’d rather write about the nature that Jane and I live amid here at the hill house, I suppose, but it seems that in the beginning each great secret we uncover in our world is a “natural” one. Nuclear energy was supposed to transform life on our planet—until we began to encounter unexpected challenges with safety, the disposal of radioactive wastes, corrosion, cost, poor workmanship, aging equipment, and many other obstacles. Nuclear energy’s science and technology had always been isolated from most of us. Very gradually its ambience actually became threatening and psychologically “unnatural.” In the case of Three Mile Island, that energy, that consciousness, balanced on the edge of running out of our mundane control.

If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious expression long before it began recording history. This year [1979], Iran has turned into a land in which all Western nations—but particularly the United States—have become anathema. Iran’s religious leaders actually run the country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he fled his country last January. [Now, looking tired and ill, he travels the world with his expensive entourage, looking for a safe place to live after leading 25 years of savage oppression in his homeland.]

(Actually, it’s taken me a long time—a little over three years—to round out these preliminary notes for the session that follows. When I finished them, then, it was nighttime again, September 23, 1982, late, and once again I stepped off the back porch of the hill house for some fresh air. [Mitzi didn’t watch me this time.] Much has taken place in Jane’s and my lives since 1979, as it has for everyone else, but here in the light of the corner streetlight the scene outside our place was just as magical and mysterious as ever. That’s what we love about it. In the warm evening the silent road still ran uphill past the house and into the woods. The cicadas and the katydids still sounded their hypnotic rhythms, I’ve heard geese often lately, moving south in noisy waves, and we’ve had deer in our driveway several times. I looked for rabbits or ‘coon or deer now, but didn’t see any of those creatures.

Now here is the private session listed at the beginning of these advance notes—the one I chose to present just before Seth’s actual Preface for Dreams. The opening notes that follow are pretty much as I wrote them before Jane began delivering the session on Thursday evening at 8:40, September 13, 1979. [That night, however, I could do no more than barely indicate the “extra” material I’ve just finished giving, although even then I knew much of what I wanted to cover.])