“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I’ve had a rough day,” she said as we sat for the session. Actually, she was twice irritated. First had come her reactions to a group of upsetting letters she’d received this noon: One is a 20-page missive from a mental patient who wants returned to him all of the notes, objects, manuscripts, and books of poetry he’s sent her over the years: another is from a woman who informed us that she’s writing a book dictated by Seth: a third is a long letter from a man who’s claiming us as his counterparts, for reasons we can’t agree with. There are others. In these cases, it seems impossible that we’ll ever be able to communicate effectively with the individuals involved, although we’re sincerely trying to understand why each of them contacted us.

And: “I’m pissed off,” Jane said now by way of further irritation. She referred to a “psychic fair” she’d accidentally tuned in to on television, while waiting for me to come into the living room for the session. I saw the last few minutes of the program: At a large open-air site, a medium, evidently speaking for “a great council” sitting on one of the outer planets like Saturn or Uranus, was delivering a ringing, generalized message to us earthlings. The several hundred people present applauded when the medium finished. “If we’d had any inkling of what we were getting into with the Seth material, I’d never have done it,” Jane said. She meant that she wouldn’t have become associated with “the cheap psychic field,” not that she’d have given up working with the Seth material. I had to laugh, as I remarked that we hadn’t sought out such associations; others had made them for us. I asked her just how one could go about speaking for a personality like Seth, yet remain aloof from all of the psychic playing going on around us. I said I think we’re doing reasonably well as it is.¹

(Sometimes I become a bit puzzled as I prepare Seth’s material for publication. My first thought was to recast his subjunctive mood in the next paragraph entirely in the present tense. My second thought was to leave the paragraph as it is—but to add the two bracketed inserts for greater clarity. I do not like to change Seth’s information, and almost always avoid doing so.)

Now, the overall purpose supposedly is the utilization of energy—a humanitarian project meant to bring light and warmth to millions of homes. But that intent was sabotaged because the philosophy behind it denied the validity of the very subjective values that give man his reason for living. Because those values were forgotten, life was threatened.

There are grass-roots organizations—cults, groups of every persuasion—growing up in your country as small groups of people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning. These groups represent (long pause) the beginnings of new journeys quite as important to the species as any sea voyage ever was as man searched for new lands.

Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.

1. Jane’s particular mood today, and my own remarks, shouldn’t be taken to mean that we don’t understand why people attend psychic fairs, for example. I think that each person at that gathering shown on television was looking for news about man’s origin and nature—even if, in our opinions, it’s too simplistic to postulate the existence of a great council on one of the far planets of our solar system. To us, that concept is an exteriorized distortion of the “great council” that each one of us carries within ourselves. But there are many ramifications here, and it’s obvious that studying the Seth material is hardly the only way to explore reality. Human beings are far too diverse to be satisfied by any one system of thought, or even by any related group of them.