“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The head of the Subsidiary Rights department at Prentice-Hall had informed Jane that four copies of the film option contract were in the mail.⁴ By the first of August we’d had our attorney check, sign, and notarize the contracts, Jane and I had signed them, and I’d returned them to our publisher. It has been an extremely slow-moving project, but The Education of Oversoul Seven may yet be a movie.

Early in September Tam mailed back to us, for our approval, the copy-edited 484-page manuscript for Mass Events. An independent reader had gone over our labors line by line, checking for everything from grammar and contradictions to philosophy, “flagging” questions for us by noting them on slips of pink paper taped to the appropriate manuscript pages. Along with our other projects—including answering a steady flow of letters—Jane and I spent the month going over Mass Events, accepting some suggestions but rejecting many others. On the 13th we received from Sue Watkins our first copy of Volume 1 of Conversations With Seth, Sue’s excellent account of the ESP classes Jane used to hold in one of the two apartments we rented in downtown Elmira, before we moved to the hill house outside of town in 1975. Sue was now working on the last two chapters of the second and last volume of Conversations. Early in October I returned Mass Events to our publisher once more; it was ready to be set in type. Jane kept at her poetry and essays right into that first week in October, while her physical improvements continued to show in a modest way. Her walking especially was better, and I was able to take her on an occasional drive in the beautiful country.

“Seth, of course, not only dictates his material—the session—but must keep the whole session in mind while doing so, so that each sentence as he delivers it makes sense compared to its predecessors and those to follow. Quite a feat on his part, and Jane’s, when one stops to think about it. How is this possible? Seth has no script to go by, nor can he refer during the session to my own notes to check up on what he’s already said.

“You never asked me.” Jane’s reply had a familiar sound. Checking later, I learned that she’d given me the same answer about Seth’s material on Jonestown. We used that information in Mass Events. [When that book is published, see Note 3 for Session 835, dated February 7, 1979.]