“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Four months ago I wrote in Note 1 for Session 885 that through a series of misunderstandings the people at Ankh-Hermes, a publishing company in Holland, had violated their contract with Prentice-Hall by issuing a condensed translation of Seth Speaks. Our editor at Prentice-Hall, Tam Mossman, insisted that Ankh-Hermes publish another, full-length edition of Jane’s book in the Dutch language. Now Tam has just forwarded to us correspondence showing that Ankh-Hermes will do this—the new publishing date for Seth Spreekt is still uncertain, however.

Tonight, Seth suggested that “portions of this session can be appended to the book,” meaning Dreams, but I found it easier to offer most of his generalized material verbatim while eliminating his information on one of my dreams.)

(9:53.) Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes—that it has a face-saving quality in your society—so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

After discussing another dream of mine, Seth said good night at 10:11 P.M. “I felt so relaxed before the session I was like a dishrag,” Jane said with a laugh. I told her the session was excellent, and that I’ll be adding relevant parts of it to my dream notebook.)

1. Shades of the great ages given for those patriarchs in the Bible! That was my first thought when Seth told us that in ancient times certain people had “lived for several centuries.” My second thought was to cut his statement out of this record entirely, so that Jane and I wouldn’t have to contend with it at all. Jane wasn’t upset by Seth’s remark, and I could appreciate the humorous aspects of my own initial reactions—yet in all of the years he’s been giving us material, Seth has never before made a reference to what seems like impossible longevities.

I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

Both of us thought that the long-lived individuals postulated by Seth had existed outside of the Biblical framework, however, and in truth far earlier historically. “Seth saying that makes perfect sense to me. It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said when I asked her what she thought of Seth’s material. “You weren’t encouraged to read the Bible even in Catholic grade school,” she added. “We just didn’t deal with it that much to worry about it. I never even read it through….”

My questions about those ancient great ages led Seth to volunteer some more information in a couple of private sessions.

Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”

Seth first discussed the Speakers, and their oral traditions, in Session 558 for November 5, 1970. See the Appendix of Seth Speaks.