“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Right now our friend Sue Watkins, who lives better than an hour’s drive upstate, is well past the 15th chapter of Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about the ESP classes Jane held from September 1967 to February 1975. Prentice-Hall will publish it. Jane hasn’t seen Conversations yet. Next month she’ll get together with Sue to go over it, then start writing the Introduction for the book soon afterward.

As I moved down the driveway I was thinking of what I wanted to cover next in these notes. The night was warm, heavily overcast, and mysterious: The streetlight down at the corner of our lot cast long shadows up the road running past the house and into the woods. The rhythmic, almost harsh sounds of the insects were strongly reminiscent of the long camping seasons my father had treated his family to many years ago. [I remembered holding an amazingly delicate, green-colored katydid in my hand as a child. My father had taken my brother and me into the woods one night, at first tracking one of the insects by its sound, until finally he’d been able to illuminate with his flashlight the katydid as it perched on a branch at just the right height for us.]

You have forgotten, conveniently, how much you learned from all of the animals, as I have mentioned in past sessions. You learned a good deal of medicine from watching animal behavior: You learned what plants to avoid, and which to cultivate. You learned how to rid yourself of lice by going into the water. You learned social behavior by watching the animals. At one time you could identify with animals, and they with you to a remarkable degree. They have been your teachers, though they did not choose your path. Obviously, you could not have gone your way [as a species] had it not been for the animals.

(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.