“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.

Through it all each one of us felt a penetrating nostalgia for those vanished classes, for they’d been truly unique; I don’t think it would be possible to recapture their particular, innocent, lasting sense of excitement and exploration. As might be expected, I appreciate Jane’s accomplishments in them much more now than I did during the nearly seven years they were underway.

Almost three weeks ago I wrote in the Preface for Dreams that we were waiting to receive the first published copies of Jane’s Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers. Today the books arrived. Eleanor Friede, Jane’s editor at Delacorte Press, has done a fine job of supervising the illustration and production of a handsome little volume. All of us hope Emir does well in the marketplace.

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.)

(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.

(“I don’t want to lose it,” Jane said. She went quickly back into trance. Purring and rubbing, Mitzi began to climb all over me as I tried to take notes. Resume at 10:30.)

(Jane paused, eyes closed. Mitzi was still loving me up. Then:)

“I’ll tell you,” Jane said, “I was getting more. It was fun to do, and I knew what was coming, but going back like that I couldn’t get it.”

I told Jane the session is brilliant, the best she’s ever given. I told her it raised many questions, but that I didn’t think anyone, at any time, had dealt better with the “origin” of our universe, our world, our history.

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?

I told Jane that as far as I know the unimaginable explosion of the primordial superdense state, or entity, that resulted in the formation of our universe had been a straightforward event: Once begun, it kept going. There hadn’t been any fluctuations or on-off states balancing between the physical and nonphysical, for example. Science currently postulates this theory as its “standard model” for the creation of the universe.³

And Mitzi, her affectionate display long finished, had jumped down from my lap and disappeared as Jane and I talked.)

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.)

(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.)

3. Theoretical physicists have charted (assuming that the big-bang origin of the universe was a hot event) how the first explosion may have “evolved” from one with a temperature well in excess of 100,000 million degrees Kelvin into a cooler one of “only” a few thousand degrees Kelvin around 500,000 years later, so that atoms could begin to form. Jane has heard of this standard model, of course, but knows little about its supposed details.