“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has been taking time off from God of Jane and If We Live Again to work on the Introduction for Sue Watkins’s Conversation With Seth. Sue took the manuscript for Conversations with her when she went to Florida for the month with her son and parents. If those three members of her family are enjoying a vacation, Sue isn’t—but at least she’s working on her book in warm weather!

I finished typing Monday evening’s session from my notes just in time to get ready for this one. In the meantime Jane called David Yoder at the hospital. To her surprise he sounded weaker than he had the last time she’d spoken to him, and at his request my planned visit tomorrow was put off until Friday afternoon.

Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of “Sayre-environment dreams,” as Seth called them. I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. I’d recently asked Jane if Seth would comment.

We took a break at 9:40. “I’ll tell you,” Jane said as I congratulated her, “I just glanced at those dreams in your notebook. I didn’t take more than five minutes. I’ll be damned.” She laughed, pleased at Seth’s handling of them.

Jane wanted to quickly return to the session. Even though the following material isn’t book dictation per se, I’m presenting it for obvious reasons. Resume at 9:52.)

(10:27 P.M. “Boy, that’s excellent stuff,” I said to Jane as she came out of a good trance and a good delivery. “I sure hope we can use it somehow, somewhere, instead of letting it just sit on a shelf.” So even though I’d inserted the last [nonbook] session into Dreams, I didn’t make any quick decision about doing the same thing with this one.

“I’m wondering about that too,” Jane said. “But the heck with it. Maybe someday we’ll be able to use it in a book, but in the meantime I’m not going to worry about it. Maybe he’ll keep on with it like this, and it’ll end up in a book of its own someday. Who knows?”

Jane said I’d never told her about getting sick on purpose, although I thought I had. I asked her if she’d ever done that. “Sure,” she said. “I know that sometimes I made myself sick to get out of stuff like diagramming sentences and doing multiplication tables, in Catholic grade school. I was terrified of those things—I think it was in the fourth grade. I think I gave myself the mumps once, too.”

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”