“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Five scheduled session dates have passed since we held the 884th session three weeks ago; we missed four of those, but did hold a private, or deleted, session on October 10. We’ve been busy. Jane has been working hard on her God of Jane. He’s also written a number of poems. [Some of them are on reincarnation, and I plan to present them when Seth gets into that subject in Dreams.] On October 7, a Sunday, Jane saw for the first time the work Sue Watkins has done on Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about the ESP classes Jane used to hold. The project is turning out to be much longer than Sue had thought it would be, and she still has a few chapters to go. The two women spent the day going over the manuscript, and I had a chance to read some of it also. Later Sue laughingly admitted that she’d been nervous at first, imagining all kinds of adverse reactions either Jane or I might have—but she’s doing a fine job. She has complete freedom to do Conversations in her own way. The next day Jane began making notes for the introduction she’s to write for the book.

Four days after Sue’s visit we received an enthusiastic letter from an independent motion-picture producer and director in Hollywood, informing us that he’s finally succeeding in his quest for an option to the film rights to Jane’s novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven. This event marks the latest step in a rather complicated affair that began 18 months ago. It means only that our friends in Hollywood and in the subsidiary rights department at Prentice-Hall have agreed upon the terms of the option; a contract has yet to be signed by all of us. We’ve never asked Seth to comment upon either this project itself or anyone involved with it—nor has he volunteered such information, even in private sessions.

During this session hiatus I’ve been spending much time upon a series of letters to the publishers of Seth Speaks in Switzerland and in the Netherlands, as well as to those in charge at Prentice-Hall.¹ Last Saturday night we had a very interesting meeting with a psychologist from New York City. Our visitor taped Seth’s copious material, and is to send us a transcript of it.

Jane surprised me at the last moment by asking if I wanted the session; I’d thought she was going to pass it up because of her general discontent with herself. Seth didn’t call this one book dictation, but it certainly applies to Dreams. And in his opening delivery he referred to the creative freedoms that—seemingly in spite of her conscious fussing—Jane had allowed herself today.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(“Thank you, Seth. The same to you.”)

Our visiting psychologist left us a couple sets of the tests Seth referred to. Jane had resisted filling them out during our meeting with him, and has little intention of doing so now. Even our guest said the tests were very experimental; I believe that actually a colleague of his had devised them in large part. I thought they’d been [perhaps unwittingly] oriented in certain negative directions—that is, the one taking the test has to choose from a series of more or less negative possibilities, listing specific choices in an order that depends upon his or her personal belief systems—I think.

Obviously, Seth didn’t follow through on the statement he’d made near the end of the last book session, which we held much earlier this month: “Remind me, for our next session, to wind in a discussion of those subjective entities as they learned how to translate themselves into physical individuals.” However, I didn’t ask him for the material tonight, either. Jane hasn’t mentioned it. Such omissions can easily result when the session routine is interrupted—we simply may not keep a particular session that closely in mind as we become involved in other matters during a break. The information in question will be most interesting when Seth does come through with it.)

1. Some of my letters were triggered on October 9 (this month), when Jane and I received our first copies of Seth Spreekt, the Dutch-language edition of Seth Speaks. We saw at once that the people at Ankh-Hermes, the publishing company in the Netherlands, had cut the book considerably. As I wrote in the notes for the private session we held the next evening: “Our first reactions were ones of such stunned surprise that we didn’t even get mad.”

In effect, Ankh-Hermes has published not only a translation but a condensation. Considering the eagerness with which we’ve looked forward to having the Seth material published in other languages, and the long waiting periods involved, this situation is frustrating indeed. Many of my notes, some of which contain excerpts of Seth material, have been eliminated. So have large portions of a number of the sessions themselves. The Appendix in Seth Spreekt is only 11 pages long, chopped down from 67 pages.

“My own position cannot be as immediate as your own,” Seth said on October 10. “I respect your emotional reactions, whatever they are, and your right to them. (Loudly and amused:) Seth, it seems, speaks a bit more briefly in Dutch than he does in English—but the material is there, and if the Dutch have cut it, or your notes, it is, in the most basic of terms, now, their loss. Agreements of a legal order should, however, always be honored, and each society has been built upon that precept….”

Our editor, Tam Mossman, has verified for us that the contract between Prentice-Hall and Ankh-Hermes contains a clause prohibiting cutting, unless Jane’s and my permission is given. Already those at Ankh-Hermes have been asked to withdraw from sale their shortened version of Seth Spreekt, and to publish a full-length one instead—a very expensive proposition indeed. Jane and I regret this, now that our first anger has passed. We’re caught between the economic realities of the situation as far as Ankh-Hermes is concerned, and our own intense desires that translations of the Seth books match the original versions as closely as possible. We fully agree with Seth that changes and distortions are inevitable as the Seth material is moved from English into other languages; we just want those alterations kept to a minimum. It appears that language difficulties involving publishers and agents led to the whole mix-up to begin with. Tam has begun work on a contractual amendment designed to prevent more such confusions. And all concerned must wait at least another year before a full-length version of Seth Speaks will be published in the Dutch language.

Aside from anything Seth has said or ever may say about other probable realities, or even about human origins here on earth, I think it most risky at this stage in history for anyone—scientist or not—to dogmatically state that life has no meaning, or is a farce, or that attributes of our reality of which we can only mentally conceive at this time do not really exist. Discoveries in the “future” are quite apt to prove such limited viewpoints wrong. The history of science itself contains many examples of theories and “facts” gone awry. Moreover, why would our species want to depend upon as fragile a conception as epiphenomenalism through which to comprehend our reality? Or better yet, why does it in large part? Truly, our individual and collective ignorance of just our own probable reality is most profound at this time in our linear history (in those terms). Jane and I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately, as a result of mankind’s restless search for meaning, we didn’t end up returning in a new official way to our ancient concepts of spirit within everything, animate and inanimate. Such an updated animistic/vitalistic view would take into account discoveries ranging from subnuclear events to the largest imaginable astronomical processes in our observable universe. Human beings do know their own worth, as Seth stated in this session.

Jane herself commented on these questions in her own way recently (as Seth indicated a bit earlier this evening). Her notes will end up in one of the later chapters of God of Jane, which she’s still roughing out:

6. Seth’s passage reminded both of us of “If Toes Had Eyes,” a poem Jane wrote some four months ago, which she’s using in an earlier chapter of God of Jane. Here’s the first verse: