“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Saturday night, Jane and I presided over a “class” reminiscent of the weekly ESP classes we used to hold in our downtown apartments before we moved to the hill house, just outside Elmira, in 1975. A large group of former students attended from New York City, as well as some from the local area. The evening was a great success. Since each person knew everyone else so well, the verbal exchanges were many and often blindingly rapid. They were also hilarious: I laughed so often and so hard that my stomach ended up hurting. My voice was gone by the end of the meeting [and the next day it was still very hoarse]. Seth came through again and again, as he’d often done in class, and Jane thoroughly enjoyed herself. We’re to get transcripts of the several tapes made.

This evening it was obvious that Jane really wanted to have the session, because she told me she was ready for it early. For a change we decided to do our thing in her writing room, or den, at the back of the house. She started out speaking for Seth very quietly, but her delivery soon became much more intent—then often louder and impassioned: Jane used many more gestures than usual, staring wide-eyed at me, leaning forward again and again in her rocker, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She was turned on in trance, wound up, her pace considerably faster than it’s been lately.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(10:23. Seth’s call for a break was abrupt. “Is one of the cats out?” Jane asked right away, looking around. Billy, our eight-month-old tiger cat, was sleeping on a chair near us. A couple of minutes ago he’d started making some odd high-pitched sounds I hadn’t heard him produce before. I’d wondered if those noises might bother Jane in trance—and they had. I didn’t know where Billy’s littermate Mitzi was, though. I found her locked out on the screened-in front porch.

But I had to admit that I was also surprised. Seth had come through so rapidly and emphatically that while taking notes I’d hardly had time to think about questions. What’s he trying to do, I asked Jane—combine something like science’s theoretical “big-bang” origin of the universe, all of those billions of years ago, with creationism’s theory of a recent spontaneous, divine creation of that same universe? Has our earth and all of its creatures “evolved,” or not? Could you have simultaneous evolution? [Here we go again, I speculated, back to struggling with that contradictory notion of “simultaneous time.”] How does Seth’s instantaneous “beginning processes that formed the universe”—with no time involved—square with fossils in the earth? Isn’t he saying that the universe grew/evolved through a series of dream states?

So how do Seth’s own ideas of probable universes and probable earths fit in with his material tonight—as I’m sure they do? I quickly saw that my questions could go on and on. Seth’s book is young, I told myself. Wait. Wait….

1. Seth was evidently experimenting here, for right away he went back to using “it,” instead of “he,” when referring to All That Is. “It” may not be entirely satisfactory either, but Jane and I didn’t question Seth about it: We prefer that designation because it encompasses any kind of sexual orientation and/or function within All That Is. (When Seth used “he” while talking about All That Is a couple of times later in the session, I substituted “it” in my notes and let it go at that.)

2. Seth first discussed the “sleepwalkers” in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality—see Session 708 for September 30, 1974. Here’s a much-condensed version of what he told us that night after break ended at 9:56:

In “Unknown” Reality, then, Seth’s material on the sleepwalkers heralded one of the main themes of Dreams, which he began five years later. Dreams was unsuspected by us then, of course; so what books to come will have their genesis in this one?

(I’ll add that Jane and I have received several thousand letters since the publication of Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. As best I can remember, however, not a single writer has mentioned the sleepwalkers—one of Seth’s most intriguing concepts.)

From my reading of Seth’s ideas of “in the beginning,” however, I’m sure he couldn’t agree with either the big-bang or inflationary models of the creation of the universe, even though his material may be evocative of portions of both theories. In physics, we’re asked to believe that this “extremely dense state” which began to expand was in actuality many billions of times smaller than a proton. (Protons are subatomic components of the nuclei of atoms.) Matter is a form of energy. Even so, I have trouble conceptualizing the idea that all matter in our universe, out to the farthest-away galaxy of billions of stars, grew from this unimaginably small and dense, unimaginably hot “original” state or area of being. I can see how such a concept can be postulated mathematically—but could it ever have really happened in ordinary terms?