“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On December 27, the night of our anniversary, Jane held an unplanned session for young married friends of ours. Although she seldom does this anymore because of the work load involved, such spontaneous expressions of her creativity help my wife as well as the others involved. I taped the session on the recorder I’d given Jane for Christmas; our friends are to send us a transcript of the tape.

Seth didn’t come through last Monday evening, New Year’s Eve. Instead, Jane and I gave a party for a change. The next day we were ready to get back to our writing and painting, but first I cleared the house of holiday paraphernalia—including our beautiful Christmas tree. I carefully propped up the tree, a balsam fir, in the woods at the back of the hill house. I told myself that next summer the tree’s skeleton would remind me of the days that had passed since 1980 began, in our terms; I knew I’d be grateful for having physically experienced every one of them. [And as an artist, I’d be as much intrigued by the tree’s naked structure as I had been when it bore its dense greenery.]

Over the weekend we’d signed the contracts with our publisher, Prentice-Hall, for Mass Events and God of Jane, and I mailed them this morning. We’re progressing well on both projects. In their unique ways, I told Jane, my notes for Mass Events are the most challenging writing I’ve done. We’re getting up at 6:00 again, so that we can get in a good morning’s “work” before lunchtime.)

(9:52 P.M. Jane said she’d been pretty far out during the session—then added later while we talked that she was picking up from Seth information on the beginning of our own world, species and civilizations that he intended to give in the next session. Seth, then, was capable of coming through with that material right now. Only Jane’s and my own conventions of time and habit, even concerning a phenomenon as unusual as the sessions, stopped him from doing so. Inevitably, the session Jane delivers for Seth next Monday evening will be somewhat different from the one she could produce tonight. There are many interesting implications here.)

1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I’d taken early in this life—one that perhaps I’d felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground I’d been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania. (Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, New York, where Jane and I live now.) Even though it was wintertime, the tree carried a sparse cover of leaves. Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree. My interpretation is that I saw the tree as the tree of life even then, and that I’d chosen to remain close to the world of nature and art instead of immersing myself in the safer industrial one. Jane was inspired by the dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.