“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.

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.)

A few notes. When Ruburt forgot to worry because “he wasn’t working,” his natural playful creativity bubbled to the surface, and today he wrote poetry. Poetry, however, did not fit into his current ideas about work, and so that excellent creativity was hardly counted at all.

(9:33.) There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man’s consciousness by which he ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity within him is never fooled.

With all due respect, your friend [the psychologist] is, with the best of intentions, barking up the wrong psychological tree. He is very enthusiastic about his value tests, and his enthusiasm is what is important. The nature of the subjective mind, however, will never open itself to such tests, which represent, more than anything else, a kind of mechanical psychology, as if you could break down human values to a kind of logical alphabet of psychic atoms and molecules. A good try (with humor), but representative of psychology’s best attempt to make sense of a poor hypothesis.

As for Ruburt, he became overconcerned about work because of the contracts (for Mass Events and God of Jane, which we have yet to sign with Prentice-Hall), and the foreign hassles. It would be nice if you took it for granted that all of those issues were also being creatively worked out to your advantage. He is still somewhat afraid of relaxing. It makes him feel guilty. His body is responding, however, so let him remember that creativity is playful, and that it always surfaces when he allows his mind to drop its worries.

(9:57 P.M. “He was right there,” Jane said with a smile. “That’s nice.”

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.)

“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….”