“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(9:14.) Such a time version suggests an occurrence in time, of course, and yet the event may leave only a ghostly track, so to speak, being hardly manifest, while in another life the time version may be of considerable prominence—while in your own experience it represents a fairly trivial incident of an ordinary afternoon.

“Finish checking copy-edited manuscript of God of Jane this afternoon. Feel this important…. As I finish, I realize how much physical activity and energy is required for even that seemingly sedentary task, for I’ve been uncomfortable, sitting, switching my weight, body soreish, eyes not seeing properly and so forth…. But in some newish way I seemed to understand how much seemingly mental work is dependent upon physical vigor, flexibility and so forth; and then rather strongly—emotionally it came to me that I’d thought it my duty to clamp down physically, to cut down mobility in order to … have mobility as a writer; that is, to sit down, cut down on impulses, distractions, to make sure I’d ‘do my work,’ pursue my goal undeviatingly; that new [book] contracts instantly led me to that kind of behavior and that I really see that such behavior carried to its extremes would end up smothering my writing, defeating the purposes it (seemingly) meant to protect. But I did fear that impulses and body motion were … distractions to work…. Now I see how much impulses are conducive … to just typing, for God’s sake; imagine typing and seeing with ease, just thinking about what I’m thinking about, instead of trying to get my fingers on the proper keys. I feel as if I’m on to something here … feel some relaxation. If this is the case, the entire process could be changed around quite quickly, of course, toward mobility. I’m not writing here tonight about the reasons behind such behavior—many ideas—but did want to get something down now….”