“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

PRIVATE SESSION, SEPTEMBERS 13, 1979
8:40 P.M. THURSDAY

PRELIMINARY NOTES

(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.

Later in these notes I also plan to include, as a partial answer to many who have written us on the subject, material Seth gave on animal consciousness; this information came through just three days ago, in the 878th session for September 10. In the meantime I want to tie together Dreams and the last Seth-Jane book, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Seth completed his work on Mass Events about a month ago [on August 15], and a week later I began finishing my notes for it. This will require at least several months. At the same time I’ll be taking Jane’s dictation for Dreams. Along with my painting and dream recording, both of which I do in the mornings, all of these activities come together in just the kind of busy, creative life I greatly enjoy. As for Jane, she couldn’t be more pleased to be so involved with all she’s doing.

I wrote quite a bit in Mass Events about our publishing activities, just to show for the record how complicated certain aspects of the creative life can be as we juggled sessions, manuscripts, proofreading, and deadlines [to list a few of our endeavors]; we “worked” at any time of the day or night—which didn’t bother us at all. Since a lot of that kind of information was presented in Mass Events, Jane and I don’t intend for much of it in Dreams. Rather, after indicating in this Preface the continuity between the two books, I’ll discuss briefly a few other subjects we feel deeply about. All of them are related to our work with the Seth material and Mass Events, however, and will, I’m sure, be reflected in Dreams. Beyond that, I have little idea of how many notes of Jane’s and mine, or quotations from nonbook sessions, for example, we’ll be adding to this book.

After six months, then, Three Mile Island is still “a closed enigma,” as I wrote in finishing Mass Events—only now the costs for the repair and cleanup of its damaged reactor have been projected as being well over $1 billion instead of the $40 million to $400 million of just a month ago, and into many years of “time” instead of just four. TMI has become the unfortunate symbol of our unprepared experimentation with a nature that contains all sorts of surprises for us; especially when, as Seth maintains, each of those “surprises,” once created, becomes conscious in its own way. [I do believe that this kind of thinking is totally unacceptable to most businessmen, as well as generally to the public they serve, the irony here being that neither businessman or scientist can explain what that fantastic nuclear energy—or any energy, for that matter—really is. In the frontmatter, see the first of the four quotations from Seth; the one taken from a private session given just two months ago: “All energy contains consciousness (underlined). … A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world. “]

I vividly remember that in the last chapter [7] of Mass Events Seth remarked: “The universe is—and you can pick your own terms—a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation, and not, in your usual vocabulary, an objective manifestation.” [See the 855th session for May 21, 1979. I find it amazing that Jane came through with that session only four months ago.]

The feelings Jane and I have for animals almost automatically lead us to associate at least some of the implications of Seth’s statement with another one he’d given earlier in Mass Events. I remember it equally well, and find it fascinating. In Chapter 5, see the 832nd session for January 29, 1979: “Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their ‘civilizations’ are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.”

I often consider those insights when observing both the wild and domesticated animal life, as well as the bird life, around the hill house. Much earlier in these preliminary notes I wrote that we’d had our cat Mitzi spayed almost three weeks ago [on August 27, to be exact], and that her littermate, Billy, is to be neutered early next year. I mentioned the guilt Jane and I feel because we’re depriving the cats of their reproductive roles in life, and because we don’t let them run free in the environment. I also noted that in a session on animal consciousness Jane held just three days ago, Seth had to some extent assuaged our feelings on such questions, and that his information will be of value to others. The session, the 878th, was held on September 10, 1979, and it began at 9:07 P.M. Monday—just five regular sessions after Seth had completed his work on Mass Events, and three before he began Dreams. Earlier that day I’d made a wadded-up paper ball for Mitzi to play with. Using her lightning-quick reflexes, she kept knocking it around the living room and beneath Jane’s rocker as my wife went into trance, then began to speak. Here are session excerpts:)

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.

(10:01. Now Seth discussed a couple of other questions Jane and I had, then ended the session at 10:27 P.M.

Inevitably, Seth’s specific references to cats had reminded me of certain other intriguing passages of his in Mass Events. I found I’d presented them therein as excerpts from nonbook sessions in Chapter 6: See Note 2 for the 840th session. Both of the following quotations from that material contain vast implications—and should these ideas ever become well known, Jane and I feel, they’ll be sure to arouse the deep opposition of a number of vested interests.

From Session 837 for February 28, 1979: “There is no such things as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses.”

From Session 838 for March 5, 1979: “If there is no consciousness ‘tailored’ to be a cat’s or a dog’s, then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either….”)

(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.])

(Jane had been so relaxed, so physically at ease yesterday—as she has been often lately—that we’d passed up our regularly scheduled Wednesday night session. At the same time she’s been extremely inspired and creative recently, working on her own God of Jane and the Introduction for Seth’s Mass Events, turning out many pages of excellent material for those works. Even though she was again very relaxed today, she was also active writing. In fact, after supper she produced two more pages of notes that she “picked up” from Seth on his new book Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment.

We held the session in the living room, as usual. Jane yawned, then laughed as we waited for Seth to come through. “I keep trying to change that title, though….” After a prolonged juggling of titles and themes on her own, she’d finally acquired the book’s title directly from Seth some seven weeks ago, or shortly before July 30, 1979; see the closing note for Session 869 in Chapter 10 of Mass Events. “I just think that ‘value fulfillment’ is a strange phrase to use in a book title,” Jane said. “It’s too unfamiliar—I’m afraid it’ll confuse the reader. I keep thinking of something simpler, like Dreams and Evolution: A Seth Book. And without ‘Evolution’ being in quotes, too. Or how about Dreams, Evolution, and Creativity …?”

Jane had suggested an earlier session, although I hadn’t really thought she’d hold one at all. My only recent concern has been that she not let the sessions go on a regular basis just because I’m working on the notes for Mass Events.

(Pause.) The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a writer—or rather a poet—and an artist before our sessions began. I would like to clear up some important points.

To some extent you had your own niches, recognizable by society even if they were relatively (underlined) unusual. You did not know that there was a deeper, older, or richer tradition—a more ancient heritage—to which you belonged, because you found no hint of it in your society. It seemed at different times since our sessions began that there were disruptive conflicts. For example: Was Ruburt a writer or was he a psychic? Were you an artist, or weren’t you? What about the writing you did—both for our books, and the writing that you sometimes plan to do on your own?

The sessions I give you, in usual (underlined) terms, are a new extension of that creativity—but again, that extension has an ancient heritage. (To me again:) Your own writing, of course, is art. It is also a method of perceiving and understanding creativity. It is a method of learning that redoubles upon itself, and you are uniquely equipped (pause) to discover comprehensions from a standpoint that is most unusual.

He should—meaning predictive, he will. End of session.

(9:16 P.M. And right at the end of the session, Jane’s head flopped down loosely as she quickly returned to the very relaxed state she’d been in before speaking for Seth.)

NOTE: PRIVATE SESSION, SEPTEMBER 13, 1979

1. Those who are familiar with the Seth material know this, so I ask their forbearance while I reproduce for “new” readers Note 3 for Session 679, in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality:

To sum up Seth’s somewhat amused comments in the 12th session for January 2, 1964: “Sex, regardless of all of your fleshy takes, is a psychic phenomenon, merely certain qualities which you call male and female. The qualities are real, however, and permeate other planes as well as your own. They are opposites which are nevertheless complementary, and which merge into one. When I say as I have that the overall entity [or whole self] is neither male or female, and yet refer to [some] entities by definitely male names such as ‘Ruburt’ and ‘Joseph’ [as Seth calls me], I merely mean that in the overall essence, the [given] entity identifies itself more with the so-called male characteristics than with the female.”