“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.

The reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and suitable for physical existence, and for the utilization of free will, which is very dependent upon perception of clearly distinguishable actions. In the larger framework of existence, however, it is simply one of innumerable methods of organizing data. A psychological filing system, if you prefer.

Your dreaming self possesses pyschological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. You must, again, realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity—an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own. You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. (Long pause.) I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware.

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.