“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

By the fourth week in July, a few days after finishing God of Jane, Jane was reading over the 17 chapters she’d done on her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time.³ She made notes for Seven Three, as she called it. Then she wrote in her journal on the 24th: “I was looking over Seven Three for the first time in 14 months when sub rights called about the movie contract for the first Seven—so that’s no coincidence! May finish the third Seven next. Pleased with what I’ve read so far!”

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.

That first, July 23rd entry at Three Mile Island took place on day 263 of the seizing of the American hostages in Iran. See Note 1 for Session 919, in Chapter 7 of Dreams, wherein I reviewed not only Iran’s concern over the Russian invasion of its eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, in late December 1979, but also Iran’s border clashes with its western neighbor, Iraq, during the past year. Finally, on September 23 [day 325 of the hostage situation], the inevitable happened in the very unstable Middle East: Amid that explosive mixture of secular and religious national consciousnesses “at work” there, Iraq launched an outright invasion of Iran. Quickly Iraq began to gobble up large portions of Iranian territory. The whole Western world became alarmed, for economic reasons as well as others.

The communications themselves are often a kind of psychological or symbolic code, such as might indeed be used in military intelligence. If the messages were to be clearly deciphered and understood, then of course the game would be over, for the one to understand the message would be the united self who [had] felt the need of such camouflaged self-troops (hyphen) to begin with.

1. I don’t mean to imply that it was particularly easy to assemble these notes. It took me days. Sometimes over the years, in my frustration at being unable to find a certain line or passage in a session, or in something Jane or I have written, I’ve ended up thinking that I merely imagined its being: “It doesn’t really exist at all,” I’ve told myself, “so why am I wasting my time looking for it?” Yet once I start hunting, it’s difficult to stop until I’ve exhausted all reasonable chances of finding what I want. Even a thorough indexing of every paper we have in the house, including each page of the Seth material, often wouldn’t locate the kinds of references I need. To suit me, I’ve told Jane more than once, the index would have to be practically as long as our lifework itself. I’ve gone through those episodes a number of times. (So have others, according to their letters, even though the books are indexed.)

5. Seth hardly flattered us in this first session. He also gave us a clue as to how Jane delivers certain sessions for him. To begin with, however, his magical-approach information reminded me at once of the two thoughts Jane had picked up from him back on May 12, the day she held the 915th session for Chapter 8. I’m stressing these points because I think they’re important: “Alone, reason finally becomes unreasonable. Alone, imagination finally becomes less imaginative over time.” Nine days later, Seth finally gave a little information relevant to Jane’s insights; see the 917th session after 9:23.

“You have not really, either of you, been ready to drastically alter your orientations, but you are approaching that threshold. As Ruburt’s notes also mention, the ‘magical approach’ means that you actually change your methods of dealing with problems, achieving goals, and satisfying means. You change over to the methods of the natural person. They are indeed, then, a part of your private experience. They are not esoteric methods, but you must be convinced that they are the natural methods by which man is meant to handle his problems and approach his challenges.

(I was curious as to why Seth had devoted two other private sessions in late September to different subjects. When I asked Jane about this tonight, at first she rather matter-of-factly said that she didn’t know. Then: “Well, I don’t tell you everything, but for some time now I’ve known that Seth gives what I call fill-in sessions. I’ve labeled them that way in my mind. They cover floating material—stuff he could give any time. They aren’t book sessions or really personal ones. They keep the sessions going over periods of time—usually by discussing past material—connecting it to the present, while not necessarily adding new stuff. And not specifically given on one subject. Originally I think the Christ sessions got started that way.”