“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The first session in the Preface for Volume 1 of Dreams is a private one that Jane delivered on September 13, 1979. In the Preliminary Notes for the session I wrote that Seth had finished dictating Mass Events a month ago [in the 873rd session for August 15, to be exact], and that a week later I began finishing my own notes for the book. I completed those notes yesterday afternoon—and on that score suddenly found myself free after nine months of concentrated labor. [And wouldn’t you know it, I told Jane: My last paragraph for Mass Events is about the biannual migratory flights of the geese.]

I estimate that it’ll take me five or six weeks to type the final manuscript of the book for our publisher. Then I’ll need another week to go over the manuscript, with colored pens marking instructions of each page as to what copy we want set in roman [upright] type, and in italics; while doing that I’ll also check spelling, punctuation, references, dates, times—all of those mundane details so necessary in helping our publisher produce a finished, good-looking book for the marketplace.¹

Last night, as I began typing Monday’s 915th session, I asked Jane why Seth hadn’t just called his “invisible particles” CU’s, or units of consciousness, as he’d done earlier in Dreams,² and as he’d always done in his other books. The question upset her, especially when I added that I was afraid Seth was repeating old material under a new term. In order to help Jane feel better, I speculated that he must have had his reasons for doing this, and that of course a certain amount of repetition is necessary in each book in a series: The restatements not only furnish a foundation for new material, but enable each book to be complete in itself. After all, I said, I try to achieve those same goals with the notes.³

As you read those passages the question itself—“Are these after all the units of consciousness referred to earlier?”—should have triggered your intellect and your intuition to work together, even if only slightly, in another way. In other words, of course, I hope to inspire both your imagination and your intelligence in this chapter and in this section of the book, devoted to such subject matter.

3. In a note like this I can only touch upon the theme of repetition. All of Jane’s books, as well as my own notes for her Seth books, obviously contain repetitious material, and/or material based upon variations of certain basic concepts. It’s inevitable and necessary that they do. Individually and en masse, and to the extent that our human systems of perception make it possible, our species has created a world and universe built upon a very limited, repetitious creation and interpretation of internal and external data. We could hardly survive without our particular communicative repetition, nor could any other species without its own.

I’ve often thought that the repetition in the Seth books, say, is nothing compared to the repeated barrages of suggestion—much of it negative—that our species has chosen to subject itself to daily. I constantly search for balances between the positive and the negative. Indeed, however, Jane and I think that in ordinary terms, and for many reasons, our species long ago began creating a great deal of negative thinking and action—so much so that those qualities came to range throughout all facets of our world culture. As far as I know, we humans are the only ones to indulge in such behavior. I can’t imagine animals doing so, for instance—they have no need to!