“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

SESSION 905, MARCH 3, 1980
9:27 P.M. MONDAY

This little session is almost book dictation. I’m also presenting it because it shows how an event on one day of our lives—a television program—influenced Jane’s delivery of one session of the Seth material. Other factors are involved, of course, as they always must be, and I refer to one of those at the end of the session.

Jane was very relaxed after supper. When I got out to the living room to wait for the session, I found her watching one of those fascinating, multiple-subject science programs on the educational channel: Various experts were discussing topics like childbirth and sound, Kirlian photography, astronomy, particle physics, and so forth. After the program ended at 9:00 I explained to Jane out of my own limited knowledge how particle accelerators—“atom smashers”—work. She partially grasped what I told her. I suggested quickly showing her an article I’d recently filed on the subject, but she didn’t want to see it.

“I don’t think I should have watched that program,” she said. “It’s driven everything else out of my mind. I don’t feel Seth around or anything.” And: “I don’t know whether I can have a session or not.” I asked her to go back into her relaxed state. “Well, I vaguely feel him around,” she finally said at 9:19.

“No, it’s just that before that program I felt he had a lot of complicated material to give, and I couldn’t get it afterward,” Jane replied. We continued to wait. At 9:23: “Now I can tell he’s got a new chapter heading…. I hope he comes through with something. I feel awfully funny. Actually, I feel like I’m in a trance,” Jane said with unwitting humor, “but not the right one….” And it developed that she never had had a session quite like this one.)

End of session.

(9:42 P.M. Seth’s references to my facial changes while sleeping touched upon a subject Jane and I had meant to ask him about several times; she’d referred to it again today. My eye improvements had been “officially” verified by our optometrist, John Smith, on February 18. [See Note 1 for Session 901.] A few nights before that, Jane had awakened and turned on her table light, sitting up in bed to have a cigarette as she sometimes does. She’d noticed my expression as I lay sleeping on my back: “One of bliss, almost, though I don’t like the word, and it’s not the right one anyhow,” she told me the next morning. “But I’ve seen you sleeping before, and I knew the difference.

“It was almost as if you were being reborn,” she laughed after tonight’s session. “When the Barbers were here the other night with their baby, I saw something like the same thing on the baby’s face—only yours was like the adult knowing version of that—you know what I mean?”

I now reminded Jane that John Smith had knocked on our back door at suppertime tonight. She exclaimed in surprise: She’d consciously forgotten that event, for she hadn’t seen John as I briefly talked with him on the back porch. He’d stopped by on his way home to give me my old lenses, since he’d forgotten to do so at his office four days ago, when I’d had them replaced in my favorite old frames by the new, weaker lenses. I told Jane I felt that regardless of John’s evocative visit Seth would have mentioned my eye phenomena tonight, given his subject matter for the session. And yet, I added, because of the very nature of the Seth material, I’m also bound to think that beneath that simplified explanation there are “deeper” connections—in which the television program, her reactions to it, John’s appearance, and tonight’s session are all related. Jane agreed.)

NOTE: SESSION 905

For that matter, one can ask the same questions about our supposed reincarnational heritage: Just how much free will does that concept leave us? Are we as fated to dance to unknown and unrealized nonphysical reincarnational events, tendencies, and goals, as we are to the physical, genetic ones—that is, do the two operate together? How immutable, or resistant to change, are those two endowments, and what parts of either one can we turn off if we choose to? Will the dissection of a gene, down even to its atomic components, ever yield reincarnational clues? In Mass Events Seth told us: “Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around, and the about-to-be-born infant is the agency that adds new material through the chromosomal structure.” In Chapter 4, see Session 827 for March 13, 1978.