“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This morning I showed Jane the portrait in oils that I’m working on. It’s of one of my imaginary male heads, and I began it a week ago, following Seth’s material on art for me in the private session for April 9. [See Note 1 for the last session.] I explained to Jane that even while it’s incomplete, the painting contains improvements that I can already tell will be developed further in the next one. Once I start a work in a certain mode, it becomes somewhat set in that expression; this is inevitable if one is to ever complete the physical painting. Those sensed, additional improvements have to wait for the next effort: A creative tension between the present and the future is set up, then—one that I’ve often felt, an impatience to leap ahead to the next step even while I’m still working out the current one. I asked that Seth comment upon the painting tonight if he cared to.

Without being specific before the session, Jane said she felt “lots of stuff from Seth churning around.” Even though Monday’s session had been for Dreams, she was still nervous about going back to the book after being away from it for well over a month before that—yet she was ready to go.)

(With a laugh: “Good evening, Seth.”)

(“Good night, Seth.”)

(10:01 P.M. “Boy,” Jane said, “I sensed a whole bunch of stuff on dreams, and when I reached that part on reincarnation and dreams, I knew that’s where I was supposed to get. I felt like it was great.” She’d begun to tune into Seth’s material on idiot savants just before the session. “In certain parts of the book, like in the beginning and tonight, I feel like I’ve gone at an accelerated rate, outside time somehow,” she said. “And at a few other times in between, too….”)

1. With a little reflection it becomes obvious, but I think it important to note that Jane’s expression of the Seth material is certainly the result of her direct cognition. Because she has to deliver it linearly in words, which take “time,” she cannot produce her material almost at once, as the mathematical prodigy can his or her answers, but in their own way her communications with Seth are as psychologically clear and direct as the calculator’s objective products are with numbers, or the musician’s are with notes. From the very beginning of the sessions, in late 1963, I appreciated the speed with which Jane delivered the Seth material, and began recording the times involved throughout each session. I now think that spontaneously starting to do that reflected my own intuitive understanding of her direct cognition, long before either one of us knew how to describe it. And when Jane speaks extemporaneously for Seth, her delivery is even more rapid. It was most definitely faster—sometimes spectacularly so—during all of those years she gave sessions in ESP class.

More is involved, of course. I’ve read that mathematical prodigies are in love with their numbers, and rely upon their dependability in an often unsure world. Jane has a deep love for words. Words, however, can be very elusive tools, and vary from language to language, although intrinsically through the Seth material Jane conveys depths of meaning that continue to develop within whatever language others may cast it. This psychological growth, and the many challenges involved, set her work apart from the mental calculator’s numbers or the musician’s notes, which are ever the same: Those friendly columns of figures, for instance, add up to identical sums in any language. In her own direct cognition Jane deals with feelings and ideas that are often quite divorced from any such reliability and acceptance.

Regardless of who or what he is, then, with Jane’s permission Seth adds his material to the information possessed by her reasoning mind—and thus offers it to the reasoning minds of others.