“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.

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.

(9:25. With many pauses, but all intently:) Ruburt has had particular difficulty, however, with “the theory of reincarnation,”²² because as it is usually described, it seemed that people used it to blame as the source of current misfortune, or as an excuse for personal behavior whose nature they did not otherwise understand, and it has been so maligned. Its reality, however, serves to generate activity throughout time’s framework as you understand it, to unite the species, to reinforce structures of knowledge, to transmit information, and perhaps most of all to reinforce relationships involving love, brotherhood, and cooperation between generations of men and women that would otherwise be quite separate and apart from each other.