“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.

During her nap, Jane had a little out-of-body experience that she described to me as soon as she got up. Then this afternoon she picked up from Seth that in a new chapter he’d explain how physical deformities are, among other things, manifestations of the great range of abilities encompassed within our species’ genetic pool, and that we retain such flexibility in case wide changes are ever needed. She added that our genetic requirements are also linked to our reincarnational patterns. The attributes that can result in the supposedly handicapped, then, are needed to keep our species adaptable in many, and often unexpected, ways. Jane had more to say, but I didn’t write it down at the time. She thought Seth might comment tonight upon the correspondent’s situation.

We held the session in the living room, as usual. Jane was very relaxed as she sat in her rocker. “I’m having it just because I want to,” she said, “But I don’t know how far I’ll get. I’m really out of it….” In back of her and off to her right, our cats, Billy and Mitzi, were crouching in the light cast on the rug by one of our homemade lamps from its position on a low bookcase: An insect, seemingly mesmerized by the illumination, was flying round and round inside the bright cone of the lampshade. The cats had been fascinated by this phenomenon for several minutes; just as Jane went into trance they lost patience and started to leap up at the insect. And although she began the session slowly, Jane proceeded right along with it.)

(I had to spoil the cats’ fun: I had to get up and turn off the lamp before they pulled it off the bookcase. Jane waited in trance.)

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.

(Seth used Session 909 as a bridge between chapters 6 and 7 in Dreams. This means that now the session also serves as a connective—a very effective lure, say—between volumes 1 and 2. Indeed, in retrospect it also seems as though Seth, that “energy personality essence,” planned it that way! And Jane and I look forward with intense interest to the final version of Dreams, for as always this work will be as revealing and educational for us as it will be for anybody else. I thank each reader for his or her patience in accepting the publication of Dreams in two volumes. Robert F. Butts.)