“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.

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.

During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, Jane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal—that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a great-great-grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.

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….”