“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Our lives do indeed seem to revolve around book projects and events! First, let me update the creative activities Jane was involved in while Seth and she were finishing Mass Events.

Emir is Jane’s children’s book—or the one for “readers of all ages,” as she puts it. At the same time, Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, is trying to find out whether the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks has been published. He thinks it has. As soon as Prentice-Hall receives its shipment of books from the Netherlands, Tam will forward the copies due us. The German-language edition of Seth Speaks was published in Switzerland four months ago [in May], and just three weeks ago we received our first fan letter from that country. The author wrote in English, and her appreciation of the work Jane and I are trying to do is amazingly similar to certain letters we receive from readers here at home. Even if that initial response was slow in coming [partly because of the language barrier, we think], we were glad to get it, for it indicated a commonality of interest in human potential, regardless of nationality. We expect the same kind of response from those who will seek out the Dutch Seth Speaks. We know the mail from European readers will very gradually increase, just as it did after Jane published The Seth Material in the United States in 1970.)

(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We’re having the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the hill in back of the house echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so that Mitzi couldn’t get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We’d had Mitzi spayed three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.

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.]

Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic orientation is directly opposed to the secular or worldly view of government espoused in Western lands. Horrendous as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. Iran is an entire country, whereas Jonestown was one fragile settlement confined within the jungles of an alien land. Iran can “infect” other nations or peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do so. Nuclear power can do the same thing with a new scientific force that can be even more devastating if not carefully “controlled” [in our terms]. To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and literally take on lives of their own. And really, I thought, it could have hardly been an accident on consciousness’s part that as the events at tiny Jonestown receded from world attention, the revolution in Iran began to dramatically increase. To me the religious correlations are obvious.

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.

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:)

(Pause.) It is somewhat fashionable to see man as always nature’s despoiler, as the destructive member of nature’s family, or even to consider him apart from nature, who was given nature as his living grounds.

(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.

Even though she values the idea of independence as much as I do, the idea of such a life doesn’t appeal to Jane at all. Not that she didn’t take to camping, for instance, when I introduced her to it after we married in 1954. She grew up in a quite different physical and psychological environment, however, and the outdoor, athletic life was not a part of that ambience. But she more than proved her own intuitive grasp of nature, and of my own desires, by producing for me as a Christmas present [© 1977] her excellent book, The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation….

(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.

“I think I’m about ready….” After she went so easily into trance, Jane’s delivery was very active and energetic—in most definite contrast to the near-bleary-eyed state she’d been in before Seth began speaking. This is a transformation that I’ve seen happen often: that familiar but always exciting and mysterious influx of energy and/or consciousness.)

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?

Ruburt was correct in his introductory notes (for Mass Events) today—about the poet’s long-forgotten abilities, and his role. Ruburt has been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term. For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain as methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.

(8:53.) Early artists hoped to understand the very nature of creativity itself as they tried to mimic earth’s forms. Poetry and painting were both functional in ways that I will describe in our next book (humorously, elaborately casual), and “esthetic,” but poetry and painting have always involved primarily man’s attempt to understand himself and his world. The original functions of art—meaning poetry and painting here specifically—have been largely forgotten. The true artist in those terms was always primarily—in your terms again—a psychic or a mystic.

His specific art (pause) was both his method of understanding his own creativity and a way of exploring the vast creativity of the universe—and also served as a container or showcase that displayed his knowledge as best he could.