“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A fourth entry had been made at Three Mile Island in November, and a fifth, with a 14-man crew, was projected for December 11. We followed the news accounts of the negotiations between the United States and Iran for the release of the hostages, and of the war between Iran and Iraq. Since Jane couldn’t leave the house by herself, let alone go holiday shopping, she had a close friend buy the Christmas presents she had in mind for me. My wife did her own wrapping, though, working at it in her writing room after warning me to stay away until she was through. [With eyes averted, I had to carry my own presents to a closet, where I deposited them until Christmas Eve.] Then late in December the page proofs for Mass Events arrived for our checking. This is the last major stage we’re concerned with before a book is printed, other than okaying routine components like frontmatter proofs—meaning the table of contents, dedications, quotations from Seth and Jane, and so forth—and the index.

Jane did feel considerably better by the time the page proofs for God of Jane reached us in mid-January. We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. We found the workings of our national consciousness to be both mightily creative and terribly frustrating in numerous ways. I thought the simple services in which our President and Vice-President were sworn into office were extremely moving: Unable to speak because of my emotion, I sat beside Jane on the couch while we watched the ceremonies on television, and had soup and crackers for lunch. At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

That June 15th session was Seth’s 20th on Jane’s sinful self, and the concept in general. Yet, as if they weren’t enough, on the 17th that trigger was released: Jane suddenly began writing down material directly from her own sinful self. It seemed that that self had been at last goaded into rising to its own defense; for five days she wrote in periods of excited strain as it gave forth its contentions and defenses through 36 handwritten pages. Jane also began work on several poems to accompany her prose, and had several relevant dreams.

Once again, we had no guidelines on how to use Jane’s material, except to trust that we’d do the best we could. Achieving results could take a while. “If you do that book on the magical approach,” I asked her, “are you going to use all this stuff on the sinful self, or what?” Jane didn’t know. She did know that she’d been considering an outline for a book on the magical approach. In the meantime, the plan that spontaneously came to me on that last day of her own effort, on June 22, was to present a page or two of her sinful-self material here, then repeat it, along with other excerpts, in the Introduction I’ve already mentioned that I must write for Dreams.¹⁷

“Yesterday while checking the page proofs for Mass Events I got the feeling that that book really bothered me, served as a focal point. My eye troubles started the same spring that Seth started dictating it [in 1977]; I was doing [my world-view book on William] James; and those people were picketing Prentice-Hall’s offices in New York City because of the Seth material. The fact had escaped me earlier that Mass Events represented Seth’s and my direct attack on official dictums—or so it seemed to me. Before, we sort of did it by inference.

7. In Chapter 2 of Dreams, in Volume 1, see my account of the Ankh-Hermes affair, as given in Note 1 for Session 885. We didn’t know whether ESP Power had been published without our American publisher’s consent—but there we were, confronted by another puzzling development involving a foreign-language edition of one of Jane’s books. At once I wrote to our California friend, asking him to obtain from his friend photocopies of three pages in the frontmatter of ESP Power: the title page, the table of contents, and the page that nobody reads, containing the information on copyright, permission for translation, and the name of the Mexican publishing firm.

22. Although Jane has had “particular difficulty” with the theory of reincarnation, both through Seth and in her poetry she’s always kept psychic windows open through which she can view and express reincarnational ideas and emotions. Poetically, this will be obvious when If We Live Again is published late this year. (Probably in December. We expect to receive from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for the book, for our review, any day now.) In her poetry the young Jane was using ideas akin to reincarnation before she even knew the word—subject matter that was strongly disapproved of by the Catholic priests who visited Jane and her bedridden mother at home.