“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I have difficulty believing it even when I write it—but eight months have passed since Jane held her last session for Dreams, the 928th, on November 12, 1980. The time has passed so quickly, it has been so filled with all kinds of personal, professional, and worldly events for us, that its motion is hard to visualize. During this period Jane gave two regular nonbook sessions [on November 26, 1980, and on January 5, 1981], plus 48 private sessions, so we’ve been busy! Out of that private total, Seth devoted 25 sessions, either completely or in part, to her “sinful-self” material. Jane delivered the introductory session on that subject on March 11 of this year, and I’ll be quoting from it in a note. The next 24 sessions on the sinful-self material came through in a concentrated block from April 14 to July 13. I also plan to excerpt several of those sessions for notes, and to quote a number of times from Jane’s personal journals for 1980 and 1981. In other words, these opening notes for the 931st session are going to be long ones.

Two weeks later, on March 3, Jane and I really received a surprise through a friend who lives on the California coast: news of a Spanish-language translation of Jane’s first book, How to Develop Your ESP Power. The edition was printed in Mexico and is on sale in that country and on our West Coast. Our friend has a Mexican friend who showed him a copy of the book. Jane and I didn’t know what to think, since the American publisher of ESP Power, Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc., hadn’t advised us that a translation into Spanish had been authorized. The almost wordless quality of our surprise reminded me of our feelings of a year and a half ago, when we’d learned that the Dutch firm, Ankh-Hermes, had published an abridged edition of Seth Speaks in that language, without our permission.⁷

Those first days in March were mentally crowded ones for Jane. During the early morning hours of the 6th she had a very vivid and joyful reincarnational dream involving herself, and a dream in which she returned to her own past in this life. “I rarely have reincarnation-type dreams, but awakened around 2:00 A.M. with this and the following dream,” she wrote the next day. The first one gave her information about a life she’d lived as a nun in the former province of Normandy, France, in the 16th century. The second dream concerned her strong reaction to the death of her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo: “Little Daddy,” as Jane had affectionately called him, died in 1948 in the family’s hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York.

Jane’s connections and challenges with religion across lifetimes are obvious among her dream of being a nun, the “nightmarish experience”⁸ she had two nights later, and the subject matter of the private session she gave on the evening of March 11. In that session Seth used her nightmare as the basis for a discussion of her life as a nun, mentioned her grandfather, and began the “sinful-self” material I referred to at the beginning of the notes for this 931st session. His information on the sinful self opened up a very important development in Jane’s [and my own] search for an understanding of her symptoms, and I’m presenting excerpts from that session in Note 9. [Before long, I realized that I could use notes to carry portions of several more sessions on the sinful self.]

The day after that session for March 11 was held we received a jolt: Eleanor Friede, Jane’s editor at Delacorte Press, informed us that Jane’s book, Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers, was being remaindered—taken off the market because in the publisher’s view it wasn’t selling enough copies. Eleanor’s protests at the action had done no good. We were given the chance to buy as many copies as we wanted to, at a very low price per book. We’d known that Emir hadn’t been setting any records since its publication in September 1979, but we’d also thought the book’s sales were respectable enough that the people at Delacorte Press would keep it in print until it became better known. Perhaps our shock came about because we’d become spoiled without realizing it, but of Jane’s 14 books Emir¹⁰ is the first one to be withdrawn—and, ironically, the last one she’d had published. That status would soon change, however, when Mass Events and God of Jane reached the marketplace.

On Monday, March 30, 1981, Jane happily finished typing her manuscript for If We Live Again—and in our nation’s capital that same afternoon our President was wounded in an assassination attempt. We watched television replays of the shooting over and over again during the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, as for the second time within a generation the overall consciousness of the United States struggled, through our leaders, to meet one of the great challenges to our democratic way of life.

On April 12 the space shuttle Columbia was launched into orbit around the earth, and I thought that Jane was complementing that obvious exploration of outside space by exploring inner space with the only vehicle she had available—her own mind. That same day, Seth agreed that her new book idea was a good one. Somewhere in here we received from our friend in California the photocopies I’d asked him to obtain, of the frontmatter for the Spanish-language edition of ESP Power. So the book was out in Spanish, we saw—but we were so preoccupied with Jane’s symptoms and related matters that we let the photocopies lie on a shelf. During this time, we had been often rereading Seth’s information on the sinful self as he’d given it on March 11. [See Note 9 for this session.] That material had deeply touched us. The result was that on April 14, the day Columbia landed, Seth initiated a long series of sessions on both Jane’s own sinful self, and that quality in general. The very next evening Jane allowed him to come through with some extremely important material.¹³

“Sunday morning, March 8, 1981.

9. Seth, in the private session for Wednesday evening, March 11, 1981:

19. For material on Jane’s previous reincarnation-type dream experience, see the excerpts in Note 9 from the private session for March 11, 1981. Here’s what she rapidly typed today for her journal: