“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Just before she took a nap this noon, Jane received a letter from a man who explained that he’d married a woman with genetic deformities of her hands. A daughter just born to the couple carries the same “flaws.” The writer has obviously learned much from reading the Seth material, and revealed insight as to why he and his lady had chosen to marry to begin with. Yet he still expressed sorrow, and asked: “Why?” He’s troubled by the challenges of one who has to live with a so-called deformed wife—and now a child—each day. Jane plans to inform him that he and his family are doing much better than they know.

Those “properties” are the faculties of the imagination, creativity, telepathy, clairvoyance, and dreaming, as well as the functions of logic and reason. You know that you dream. You know that you think. Those are direct experiences. (Pause.) Anytime you use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, you are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more “convincing” and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. Although instruments can indeed be most advantageous in many ways, they still present you with secondary rather than primary tools of investigation—and they distort the nature of reality far more than the subjective attributes of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions do.

After we had published Seth’s “Unknown” Reality in two volumes back in 1977 and 1979, Jane and I decided that we wanted to keep his books shorter, and to issue them more frequently. Never again would we go the way of two volumes, we thought—yet here we are, doing it once more!

When I began putting together Seth’s dictation for Dreams, and adding Jane’s and my own notes, plus excerpts from other relevant sessions, it soon became obvious that the entire work was going to be too long for one volume. There would be publishing difficulties having to do with sheer bulk—with the cost of typesetting, with binding such a thick book, with marketing and price, and so forth. So with the help of our editor, Tam Mossman, and others at Prentice-Hall, the decision was made to publish Dreams in two volumes. At first I was sorry for the reader’s sake to think of Dreams being interrupted, yet glad for myself, for in addition to presenting Seth’s book dictation I was given the space in which to develop those other personal and secular themes of Seth’s, Jane’s, and my own that I think add even more dimensions of meaning to Dreams.